Orthodoxy and Religious Experience

The author begins by defining terms, noting that 'orthodoxy' is subjective, as Bishop Warburton's quip illustrates. They then question what 'religious experience' means, referencing William James's 'The Varieties of Religious Experience,' a work that collects diverse phenomena labeled as religious experience. The author suggests James's empirical approach, while limited in philosophical generalization, demonstrates the wide variety of experiences placed in this category, leaving open whether they legitimately belong.

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Abstract

It may be as well to begin, in the approved scholastic manner, by defining one's terms; or at least by delimiting the field of discussion-a very necessary step surely with a paper so ambiguously worded as this one! Orthodoxy, my Lord'. said Bishop Warburton, is my doxy-heterodoxy is another man's doxy'. No doubt we could improve on that and together hit upon a less question-begging statement of what we mean by ‘orthodoxy'. All the same, I must try not to confuse the issue by taking too much for granted. And what are we to understand by that indeterminate phrase ‘religious experience'? At the beginning of the century William James devoted a series of Gifford Lectures to The Varieties of Religious Experience-a work still being reprinted even in these days of paper shortage. James was, professedly an empiricist, with but a limited gift for philosophical generalisation, so that his collected data have both the interest and the tediousness of a case book'; but they serve to show how varied are the phenomena which have been placed-whether legitimately or not is another question!—in the category of ‘religious experience’.