The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God: Toward a Theological Empiricism (Emerging Scholars) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451488858 ISBN 13: 9781451488852

Publisher: Fortress Press, 2015

Synopsis

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God can be an object of experience and how we should account for God's empirical availability to us. Can experiences of God serve to inform and justify our theological beliefs and practices? The central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of God's availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem and that in virtue of their entanglement with that pseudoproblem, the influential accounts of Christian religious experience, such as in Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hector, or William P. Alston, are at bottom incoherent. The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception. This critical retrieval of Nyssen opens the path toward a viable contemporary theological empiricismone that characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world.

About this title

About the Author:

Sameer Yadav is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. He earned a ThD in theology from Duke Divinity School. This volume is based on his dissertation completed at Duke University under the direction of Paul J. Griffiths.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1451488858
• ISBN 13: 9781451488852
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 509
• Editor: Yadav Sameer