The Organization of Religious Experience

Abstract

The implications of the findings of the social and psychological sciences are that religion is a fundamental and irreducible aspect of human experience and that it is a factor to be accounted for and directed for constructive social ends. In its highest function, the task of religious education is the conscious, intelligent, and purposive organization of religious experience. This implies a critical attitude toward the various types of religious experience, the understanding of the nature of religious experience, and an understanding of the technique of its control. As the organization of religious experience determines the task of religious education, so it also determines its procedure. Its aim must be interpreted in terms of the deepening, enriching, socializing, and spiritualizing of the crude, immature forms of religious experience. The materials, valuable because they are the outgrowth of past experience, must be selected and organized with a view to interpreting and directing the experience of the present. Similarly, method must be thought of in terms of widening experience, of actual participation in living under the guidance of the experience of the past. Only so can knowledge preserved in logical form through symbols be vitalized. So also the school of religion should be organized as a religious community with typical relations, functions, activities, and responsibilities. In seeking to organize religious experience, the religious educator must not bind it. He must definitely organize religion so as to give it fresh access to the primary sources of experience, thus making it creative, forward-looking, dynamic. In attempting to organize religious experience, religious education has risen to the creative level of religious statesmanship.