Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 84 No. 2, 2014.
Original scientific paper
Religion and Faith. Universal Religious Experience and Christian Specificity According to Romano Guardini
Anđelko Domazet
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Split, Split, Croatia
Abstract
This article discusses, though in a very concise way, the relationship between faith and religion in the works of Romano Guardini. The general phenomenological atmosphere of the first half of the 20th century, especially in Germany where Guardini spent his life, has certainly contributed tremendously to his analysis of religious experience. The question that surfaces from an analysis of the concept of religion can be taken as a perspective that allows one to pinpoint the specificity of Christian faith, because that specificity is not beyond the horizon of the anthropological analysis. The article has been divided into two parts. In the first part the author aims to cast light on historical presuppositions of the issue of relationship between faith and religion, while trying to recognise ‘invisible’ interlocutors in Guardini’s texts, with whom this theologian led intellectual dialogue (F. Schleiermacher, A. Harnack, K. Barth, R. Otto, G. van der Leeuw, M. Scheler and others). In the second part the author attempts to systematically specify the relation between Christian faith and universal religious experience. This relationship will be illustrated by discourses fromtwo of Guardini’s fundamental texts: Die Offenbarung and Religiöse Erfahrung und Glaube. Guardini attempted to combine two approaches to the phenomenon of religion, Schleiermacher’s and Barth’s, which are, it seems, entirely incompatible, into one constructive relationship, so that he might use their theses to build his own vision. Pre-Christian and non-Christian religions, as well as natural religiosity, are not only a prelude to historical Divine revelation, but instead they have their own internal meaning and contain great richness of experience, myths, and symbols, which Christianity, as a religion of revelation, can gratefully accept. However, Guardini shows convincingly that the full meaning of the entire natural religiosity is disclosed to the human being only in light of the Divine revelation in Jesus Christ.
Keywords
faith; natural revelation; phenomenology of religion; theory of religious experience; dialectic theology
Hrčak ID:
124961
URI
Publication date:
11.7.2014.
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