Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God

The title of Lash's book, inspired by a combination of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, symbolizes his answer to the problem with which he is concerned, that of religious experience. 'I propose,' he says, 'to argue, on the one hand, that it is not the case that all experience of God is necessarily religious in form or content and, on the other hand, that not everything which it would be appropriate to characterize as "religious" experience would thereby necessarily constitute experience of God.'

To sustain his argument he begins by building up an account of the relationship between the principal elements of human experience which contrasts quite fundamentally with that proposed and presupposed in William James's classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, drawing on writers as different as Schleiermacher and Buber, Rahner and Newman. 'However,' he goes on, 'this is not a book about James or Newman, Rahner or Schleiermacher. It is the issues, or the argument, which interest me.' 'I want to try to understand the senses in which, and the circumstances in which, our common human experience may be said, from the standpoint of a Christian account of such experience, to furnish us with experience and knowledge of the mystery of God, and to indicate the doctrine of God that is implied in this attempt.'

Nicholas Lash is Emeritus Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. His many books include Theology for Pilgrims, Believing Three Ways in One God, and Easter in Ordinary, all published by the University of Notre Dame Press.