How Can the Religious Experience of the Past Be Recovered? The Examples of Puritanism and Pietism

Abstract

academic, is scientific, study. The historical branches of religious studies thereby face the challenge of scientifically recovering the religion of the past, of exploring and explaining the religiosity of human beings to whom direct inquiries can no longer be made. The historian of Christianity, for example, wants to know what it was like to live religiously in twelfth-century France, in fourth-century Rome, or in seventeenth-century New England. Imaginatively examining whatever artifacts he can find, he tries to create the richest possible account of what earlier men and women thought religiously, how they acted religiously, what they felt religiously. If he cannot literally bring them to life, he certainly tries to do so metaphorically; his own criteria of success demand his creation be as accurate, as multi-faceted, as recognizably human as the evidence allows. In my estimation, academic historians of Christianity have been more successful at recovering the thought and actions (especially institutional and liturgical) of past Christians than at recovering their religious experience. This situation is understandable feelings, especially religious feelings, are difficult to subject to academic analysis but it is nonetheless regrettable.' One need not share with William James the assumption that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products2 to recognize the particular importance of personal experience in the religious life. Certainly experience is inherently subjective, certainly it usually borders on the ineffable. Yet time and again religious men and women have insisted without firsthand experience their faith would be sterile and meaningless, and one can only accept their testimony. The historian who neglects religious experience because he feels uncomfortable with it is neglecting the very academic standards he seeks to protect.