ABSTRACT
“Experience,” particularly as it is qualified by the adjective religious, i.e., religious experience, is probably among the most important terms in the history of the academic study of religion. Such importance, though, tends to be based less on analytic utility than upon its ambiguity and imprecision, with more vague concepts seeming to be more useful, given the almost unlimited breadth of their application. In the study of religion, “experience” is frequently associated with this latter sense of some vague feeling or inner and self-authenticating state. It is assumed that the meaning of such observable items as symbols, scriptures, practices, etc., derive from a private experience in the minds of religious founders, their disciplines, and subsequent practitioners. The increasing use of the rhetoric of experience demonstrates the continued universalization of Christianity by demonstrating religion’s own universality.
