ABSTRACT
When we began our discussion in the last chapter, even a description of the problematic at hand seemed almost insurmountably difficult. The text we read was generally treated as an oxymoronic blend of competing agendas. It was fictitious and real, carefully crafted and exhibiting no rhyme or reason at the same time. This had to do more with the analytical criteria to which the text was being subjected and less with any inherent qualities of the text, or of any worldview developed within it. Still, those inherent qualities and worldview were ignored as a result. These criteria enforce a rigorous-yet-limited view of several key concepts
involved in religious experience within the textual, theological perspective pursued in this study. The one which concerned me most in the previous chapter was the concept of a “problem,” or to put it more exactly, a “crisis.” Perhaps this would be best demonstrated by quoting a passage from Karl Barth’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Barth, one of the most influential Christian theologians of the twentieth century, had this to say about the notion of religion as a phenomenon easily placed within a harmonious spectrum of human thought and experience: “Nothing is so meaningless as the attempt to construct a religion out of the Gospel, and to set it as one human possibility in the midst of others … it is a betrayal of Christ. The man under grace is engaged unconditionally in a conflict. This conflict is a war of life and death, a war in which there can be no armistice, no agreement, and no peace.”1
