The Application of the Religio-Psychological Role Theory

Abstract

Dr. Hjalmar Sunden was formerly professor of Psychology of Religion at Uppsala University. In his magnum opus Religionen och roUerna (1959), Sunden has developed his theory as an instrument to interpret and understand religious experiences. Sunden's theory implies that religious traditions contain systems of roles, models of performance in interactional systems. When, for example, Old lIbstament prophets speak of Jahve and Israel we find such an interactional system. God's acts are known from the history of the fathers of the people, and the acts constitute the role God, and what is told about the fathers constitutes a number of human roles which together with the role God, in this case, form the interactional system. The role God, as described in the biblical text, functions as a pattern momentarily structuring the Bible-reader's perception of his own actual situation. If a person, knowing his Bible, finds it impossible to cope in a tehnical or ordinary human way with his situation, a model of performance from the Bible, one of its human roles, can be actualized for him, since the activity of the brain and the nervous system amounts to finding patterns permitting the coping process to go on. A situation which to begin with is structured in an ordinary way can be restructured in such a way that the individual experiences himself to be in interaction with God. A reader of the Bible can identify himself, for example, with a voice from the Book of Psalms. In such a case, he acquires definite expectations of how the God of the Bible who dealt with earlier generations will deal with him. The God king in the Book of Psalms will be experienced as reality by the reader of the Bible. Tking the role of a human being and making the Psalmist's words his own, he adopts at the same time the role God: God being the Partner of the human being in the Bible.