Chapter 1

How to do Transcendence with Words?

The Problem of Articulation in Religious
Experience
Jörg Lauster

As a Bavarian living close to the Alps, I have an extraordinary experience behind

me this winter. This year we have had almost no snow to date! In Greenland,
however, they have at least fifty words for snow. According to certain theories
of human expression we can assume that these fifty words are the result of a
long interaction between humans and snow in Greenland. In the evolution
of Inuit culture, the encounter with an immense variety of snow created an
immense variety of expressions for snow and, likewise, the immense variety of
expressions for snow facilitates the Inuit experience of snow. The more words
we have, the more constellations of sense experience we can represent to
ourselves in consciousness. With their fifty words, Greenlanders can form
more complex experiences of snow. I need not remark that this observation
has significant import for our understanding of religious experience.

Why Religious Experience?

If we look at the general discussion in sociology, philosophy and theology,

the category of religious experience is not the main topic of discourse.1 After
a long period of discussing the institutional aspects of religion, sociologists
have placed emphasis on the social and the political dimensions of religion.
The extensive research on the various kinds of fundamentalism illustrates
this. Philosophers reflect on the idea of the origin of religious propositions
as products of the human mind, which is quite close to what the neurosci-
ences do when they consider religion as a function of the brain. For a long
time, research in the study of religion was dominated by a detailed empirical
description of religious practices, often under the guise of so-called ‘scientific
objectivism’. Even in theology, religious experience is not a self-evident

1 For the variety of possible approaches see Martin Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation:
A Theory of Religion, trans. Stephen Rendall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004328600_003

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category. For example, it is well known that biblical theology plays a central
role in Protestantism. But for the modern exegesis of the Bible, the main points
of interest are philological and historical aspects of the texts on a structural
level. To confront biblical scholars with the category of experience is like show-
ing up to a twenty-first-century party in a nineteenth-century suit. Indeed, it
is difficult to define the relation between experience and text. How could we
trace back texts which were produced in a complex process of oral and written
transmission to some original religious experience or experiences?
This very short overview of current debates in the research on religion
demonstrates that we have to take some difficulties into consideration when
we talk about religious experience. The category of religious experience was
mainly introduced by prominent scholars of the nineteenth-century, such as
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Otto, and, in the Anglophone
tradition, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson and finally William James.
They employed different descriptions but they fundamentally agreed on one
point: whoever wants to understand religion must go back to the religious
experience of human subjects, to their articulations and interpretations, and
to the self-expressions and self-understandings of these experiences. For the
study of religion, this is still the most important methodological argument:
we do not learn more about religion if we look at it from the point of view of
a ‘scientific objectivism’ which only wants to talk about religion. It is evident
that this ‘objectivism’ is nothing but an ideological bias which shows a curious
interest in the world of religion but which also seeks to exclude in advance any
claim of the truth of this world. This is a classical and crucial methodologi-
cal blind spot in the research on religion. The category of religious experience
avoids this limitation. We learn more about religion, if we analyze the inward
perspective of the religious subject.
The category of religious experience not only brings a methodological
advantage, but it also corresponds to a deep conviction of modernity, namely,
that we cannot conceive of the world in any mode other than that of our sub-
jective perspectives. Personal experience is our window to the world.

Religious Experience as a Reference to Transcendence

The classical references from Schleiermacher to Otto and James have devel-
oped a variety of analytical instruments to shed spotlight on religious expe-
rience. As with all kinds of experience, religious experience also consists in
personal engagement and involvement, it is something that occurs and cannot
be directly produced. It is here that we can locate the differentia specifica of

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How To Do Transcendence With Words ? 17

religious experience: what is special about religious experience is that it is the

experience of a break-through. The framework of our daily life is in some mean-
ingful sense transcended. There is a movement from the mundane to a super-
mundane dimension. The differentia of the religious experience is neither the
intensity nor the object of the experience; the differentia of the religious experi-
ence is the reference to the dimension of transcendence. It is fascinating to see
how carefully the classical authors try to handle the category of transcendence.
When they analyze the self-expressions of religious experience, they do not
immediately claim an ontological or metaphysical proof of the transcendent.
James is the most cautious in his famous definition: religion “shall mean for us
the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as
they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider
the divine”.2 The German tradition is, for well-known reasons, more closely
affiliated with a metaphysical approach. Building on Schleiermacher’s analysis
of the religious consciousness, Troeltsch argues that religion is the “product of
an impact”.3 Otto criticizes Schleiermacher’s concept in his famous The Idea
of the Holy, because it seems to him to be too limited by the bounds of human
subjectivity. For Otto, the religious feelings represented in consciousness are
a subjective “concomitant and effect”, but basically they make “indubitably
immediate and primary reference to an object outside the self”.4 Otto calls this
the feeling of the numinous.5 Although Troeltsch and Otto go further in their
description of transcendence, we cannot call them pure realists. What they
say in their initial approach is only that religious experiences are experiences
which force the persons who have them to use the category of transcendence
in their expression of the experience.
This short foray into classical concepts of religious experience allows us to
arrive at an interim result. The category of religious experience leads us to a bet-
ter understanding of what basically happens in religion. Religious expressions
are neither projections nor simple reflections, nor idolatrous symbolizations
of a divine reality. They are a special kind of human reaction and construction

2 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, 2002), 31.
3 “Erzeugnis einer Einwirkung”. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion”, in Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 1, ed. Christian Albrecht (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 359–535 (428), my
translation.
4 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the
Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1969), 10.
5 See ibid., 11.

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which attempts to express particular events and experiences. The reference to

transcendence is the central element of religious experience. The subject of
religious experience makes a reference to transcendence. Transcendence is a
result of the interpretation of religious experience; transcendence is a mode of
articulation of religious experience.

Experience and Interpretation

To conceive of transcendence as a result of interpretation leads us immedi-

ately into the eye of the storm. Where do the articulations with reference to
a transcendent dimension come from? In earlier discussions we might find
a repetition of the radical dilemma between religion as an answer and reli-
gion as an illusion. We could assume that it is the event which produces the
articulation; religious experience would then be the result of something like
an epiphany and, according to this model, its expression would be a necessary
consequence.
In opposition to this simple impression-expression model of experience we
find a radical culturalism, according to which there is no pre-linguistic event
or experience: everything we experience is formed by cultural signs such as
language. As far as I can see, no one sides with either extreme of this radi-
cal opposition in the current debate on experience and religious experience.
There is no pure event, no pure pre-linguistic act without any interpretation,
and there is no interpretation without any encounter with something. So the
question is how experience and interpretation work together. How does the
experience influence the interpretation, and how does the interpretation form
the experience?

A Theory of Articulation

Here it may be useful to consult contemporary theories of the articulation of

human expressions. One of the most inspiring theories in the German con-
text can be found in the work of philosopher Matthias Jung.6 His claim is that

6 See Matthias Jung, Der bewusste Ausdruck: Anthropologie der Artikulation (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2009). It is interesting to see that Jung started his academic career with a theory of religious
experience and then came to the theory of articulation. See Matthias Jung, Erfahrung
und Religion: Grundzüge einer hermeneutisch-pragmatischen Religionstheorie (München:
Alber, 1999).

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How To Do Transcendence With Words ? 19

expression is an anthropological constant. Human beings tend to express them-

selves in order to handle their experiences in relation to other human beings.
Any form of expression has its starting point in inward consciousness, and
expression is just the articulation of what someone is experiencing. We accom-
pany everything we experience with a ‘film of words’ in ourselves, so to speak,
a running commentary, but our feelings are also a constant commentary on
our experiences. Only in a second step, expression goes outwards, in verbal and
non-verbal communication. It is as banal as it is interesting that human beings
must learn to articulate themselves. Language is the most evident example.
This is one of the strongest arguments against any idea of an immediate, pre-
linguistic experience. Articulation is a part of a complicated process of cultural
education and formation which is the result of a long process of interactions
between the inward mind and the outward world. The fifty words for snow in
Greenland are an excellent example of this interaction.

Transcendence – Toward a Mediated Realism

The Greenlanders help us slip between the horns of the dilemma between
experience and interpretation with regard to religious experience. Religious
experience is, as I have argued, characterized by its reference to transcen-
dence. This reference is the result of a long cultural evolution in which
human beings built up different modes of expressing their experiences of
something that goes beyond their daily experiences and opens the horizon to
a dimension interpreted by them under the category of transcendence. And
the variety of these expressions increases the possibilities of representing
these experiences in the human mind. This circular model of religious experi-
ence and interpretation is based on what we might call an ‘indirect realism’
(vermittelter Realismus) regarding transcendence. It occupies a middle ground
between the two extremes of immediate realism and culturalism. Indirect or,
phrased differently, mediated realism argues that we do transcendence via
procedures of interpretation, but that we do so because something in the expe-
rience of the world activates a long cultural and religious history of expressions
of transcendence.

Transcendence and Words: The Plurality of Religious Expressions

The modes to express our experiences of transcendence are inconceivably

diverse. We should distinguish psychological and anthropological perspectives

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20 Lauster

on the one hand, and cultural and historical perspectives on the other. If we
trace the history of both perspectives, we end up bringing together the psycho-
logical tradition – culminating in James – with the continental tradition of the
history of religion.
With respect to psychology, we can distinguish between reason and feeling
as different modes of representing transcendence in the human mind. From
simple words to the cathedrals of religious thought, we can find modes of cog-
nitive articulation of religious experience. But this is, of course, not the only
mode of religious expression. Actions such as religious rituals also express reli-
gious experiences in performances. More recent discussions have emphasized
the importance of religious feelings. Feeling produces an evaluative represen-
tation in the human mind.7 Instead of merely providing an objective descrip-
tion, this kind of symbolization emphasizes the importance of that which is
experienced for the subject; it accentuates how the subject itself is engaged
with the world. Hence, religious feelings, such as gratitude, humility and peni-
tence, articulate the centrality and the consequences of the religious experi-
ence for the subject.
With respect to history, we can observe the cultural context, the devel-
opment and the variety of cultural forms which religious experience uses
to express itself. Art, architecture, music and literature might all be ways of
expressing religious experience. Thus, we can say that we do transcendence
with words, but not only with words. Human beings use a complex variety of
expressions. Reason and feeling are the most important vehicles for expres-
sion, and they also employ a multitude of cultural forms to express themselves.

The Order of Plurality: “Nothing is ever lost” (Robert Bellah)

This immense plurality of religious expressions raises the question of how

these modes of articulations are related. The prominent models at the begin-
ning of the modern pursuit of religious studies were largely hierarchical.
Georg W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of religion is an impressive example of con-
sidering religion as a development in both psychological and historical terms.
With respect to psychology, he describes the evolution of religion in the
human mind from feeling as the lowest, imagination as the middle, and con-
ceptual articulation as the highest form. With respect to history, he attributes
these forms to concrete religions like Greek religion, Judaism, Buddhism and
Islam, and considers Christianity as the most sophisticated in terms of its

7 See Sabine A. Döring, Philosophie der Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 14.

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How To Do Transcendence With Words ? 21

conceptual articulation and therefore as the highest form in the history of

religion. In contemporary debates on religion, Hegel is not particularly well-
received. His systematic thought and also his metaphysical theory of the world
and the human mind as forms of the self-realization of the absolute spirit are
considered somewhat out of fashion. His Eurocentric preference is against all
rules of political correctness. Nevertheless, his claim of a systematic order of
religious articulations still presents a great challenge for us today.8
That there is a variety of religious expressions for religious experiences goes
without saying; the question is, how do they come together? I consider Robert
Bellah’s fruitful but unfortunately final book, Religion in Human Evolution, to
be an impressive attempt to accept the challenge which Hegel brought into the
contemporary thinking on religion. The book is the sum of Bellah’s life work,
full of inspiring nuggets. I would like to summarize his striking statement
“Nothing is ever lost”.9 Bellah concludes his discussion by considering the idea
that there is a hierarchy of articulate modes of religious experience. According
to Bellah, approaching transcendence means understanding the variety of reli-
gious expressions not as a hierarchy but as a network of articulations which all
attempt to interpret religious experience. To comprehend fully what religious
experience calls ‘transcendence’ we have to complete the variety of articula-
tions. Bellah has used this idea to analyze the ancient religions up to the axial
ages in a fascinating manner. I would like to carry this approach into a theo-
logical analysis of Christianity.10

The Christian Universe of Articulations: The Program of a Cultural

History of Christianity

As with all religions, Christianity uses an immense variety of religious expres-

sions to articulate the central experience of what Christianity actually means:
the break-through of divine transcendence into the world of common experi-
ence. In order to understand the Christian concept of transcendence, we have

8 See Georg W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke 3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 495–574; Georg W. F. Hegel,
Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I–II, Werke 16–17, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
9 Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 13; 267; 284; 489; 501.
10 For the following see Jörg Lauster, Die Verzauberung der Welt: Eine Kulturgeschichte des
Christentums (Munich: Beck, 2014).

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to analyze the sum of its various articulations. First, the biblical writings alone
represent a universe of religious expressions with narrative, poetic and also – if
we think of Paul’s letters – conceptual interpretations of transcendence. And
the fact that the first Christians accepted not only one but four gospels under-
lines the multiple approaches to transcendence. Second, the rise of Christian
theology in ancient and medieval times is the result of various conceptual
interactions with ancient philosophy. Christian theologians are always at the
same time the heirs of Plato and Aristotle. Among Protestants the bashing of
scholastic theology is a common sport – an unjustified cliché. The scholastic’s
endeavor to conceive of transcendence with the logical power of rational con-
cepts deserves our admiration even today. A third classical form of Christian
expression is the liturgy, a kind of enacting representation of the sacred. These
expressions were embodied in institutions with a special organization of their
communal life. These common forms alone demonstrate the broad framework
necessary for religious articulation.
It is not only in the Bible, the dogmatic tradition, the liturgy, and the tradi-
tional institutions, where we find adequate expressions of religious experience.
Since its very beginning, Christianity has also employed iconic and musical
modes of articulation. I would not go as far as Marshall McLuhan in his famous
statement that “the medium is the message”,11 but Christianity surely employs
various forms of media in its transmission of religious experience. It can make
use of the advantages of each medium. Images fulfill a deep religious desire of
concrete visualization of the sacred – against all the theological criticisms of
the iconoclastic tradition. It is not a coincidence that the rise of Western art
took place during the Renaissance when Francesco Petrarca and others dis-
covered the power of the subject. From Giotto to Michelangelo, visual art is
full of attempts to conceive of the sacred so concretely that it can produce a
real experience in the spectators. One could call to mind the extraordinary
success of Giotto’s crucifix in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.
Never before had the Florentines seen the suffering of Christ in such a real-
istic representation. Alternatively, one could consider Michelangelo’s Pietà,
which we can admire today in the St. Peter’s Basilica. It made the young artist
famous overnight with its perfect iconic symbolization of charity. While art
enables the religious imagination, music addresses the emotions and repre-
sents the invisible and the ineffable dimension of transcendence. The discus-
sion in the nineteenth century on “absolute music” was about the interesting
question of whether music is the most appropriate medium to represent

11 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1964), 7–21.

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How To Do Transcendence With Words ? 23

transcendence.12 Finally, we may add literature as a medium of religious artic-

ulation. It is an amazing fact that the modern novel was born under the English
Dissenters. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Process and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
are impressive examples of the power of literature as a form of religious articu-
lation. Even if the English puritans were skeptical of all forms of fiction, the
novel brought immense advantages in describing inward religious feelings;
it can express more precisely what individuals actually think and feel. For
example, the Protestant esteem of the Bible is, dogmatically speaking, a very
abstract thing. If one reads what happens to Robinson Crusoe after he brought
a Bible, which he found in the wreckage, to his island, one understands why
Protestants admire the Bible. Robinson takes the words of the Bible as words
spoken by a divine authority directly into his life, full of the power of orienta-
tion, encouragement and consolation. I cannot imagine a better description
of the Protestant spirituality of the Bible than in Robinson Crusoe. Literature
has the capacity to bring religious articulations very close to individual life-
experience, offering interpretations of what happens to us. In a certain sense it
is still valid: we admire good books and good authors because they can express
our own experiences in a deeper way and can offer us a broader range of inter-
pretations of life.
In sum, Christianity expresses and transmits the experience of transcen-
dence through the evolution of various forms. It makes no sense to create a
hierarchy. Why should we attempt to choose between Thomas Aquinas and
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or between Michelangelo and Daniel Defoe as
the only and exact articulation of the heart of the Christian experience? What
counts is the interaction between the forms, the ways in which they make use
of their own means of expression to compensate for the lack in other means of
expression. Art and music are no better than other means of expression. The
best way to understand the Christian concept of transcendence is the program
of the cultural history of Christianity.

Secularization as a Transformation of Religious Articulation

If we understand the necessary plurality of means of expression, we may also

comprehend Christianity in the modern world in more detail and more depth.
Recently, it has become a broad conviction that ‘secularization’ is a watchword

12 Carl Dahlhaus, Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994). See also Mark Evan
Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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to assess this complex process.13 I cannot enter into the immense discussion
of this problem, but the program of a cultural history of Christianity enables
us to conceive of secularization not simply as a loss of the importance of
Christian articulations, but as a deep transformation in these articulations. It is
a kind of tragic misunderstanding to identify Christianity only with the classi-
cal and somehow canonical forms of religious articulation in the Bible, dogma
and liturgy. Both the Enlightenment and Romanticism are protest movements
against this identification.
Take, for example, the essay by Scotsman Thomas Carlyle entitled “The State
of German Literature”,14 which was full of admiration for German literature
and philosophy. Together with Madame de Staël’s book on Germany, it is one of
the sources of the myth that Germany is a country of poets and philosophers,
Dichter and Denker.15 But Carlyle is more interesting for us in another respect.
He gives one of the most impressive examples of the new self-awareness of
literature as a mode of religious articulation:

Literary Men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea; a per-
petual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after genera-
tion, as the dispensers and living types of God’s everlasting wisdom, to
show it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own
particular times require it in.16

Not the theologians, not the official priests – it is literary men who are the
new priesthood with their capacity to express and to interpret religious expe-
rience in a more adequate manner. The cultural history of the nineteenth
century is full of examples in which artists, musicians or writers attempted
to offer a deeper and broader articulation of religious experience. So what is
often simply called ‘secularization’ is, from a certain point of view, something
which regards the problem of articulation as at least a process of three steps.
First, we can observe the emancipation from the traditional modes of articula-
tion. The biblical, dogmatic and liturgical expressions are no longer the only
acceptable modes of expression. From Caspar David Friedrich through Ludwig
van Beethoven to Thomas Carlyle we can find supporters of this process. The

13 See Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt (eds), Secularization and the World Religions, trans.
Alex Skinner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
14 See Thomas Carlyle, “The State of German Literature”, in Complete Works, vol. 13
(New York: John B. Alden, 1901), 26–84.
15 See Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne (Paris: Charpentier, 1844).
16 Thomas Carlyle, “The State of German Literature”, 56–57.

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How To Do Transcendence With Words ? 25

second step is emancipation not only from Bible, dogma and liturgy but from
Christian expressions altogether. But these emancipated forms of articulation
are still religious, they only attempt to conceive of transcendence with new
concepts. Their background is apophatic theology. Transcendence should be
more than only one religious tradition can express. Modern art and litera-
ture are full of these religious hints which we might call secular epiphanies.
Only at the third step can we observe the radical denial of any transcendent
dimension – with sometimes tragic and banal consequences for contemporary
art and literature, but this would be a topic for another contribution.

Interaction of Articulations: Dancing Plastic Bags

All these modes interact with each other. I would like to give one example. In
the film American Beauty, Sam Mendes shows us the famous scene of a plastic
bag dancing in the wind. For about three minutes one sees only the dance. It is
a clip filmed by a teenager who presents his film to his girlfriend. He introduces
the clip in the following terms:

Do you want to see the most beautiful thing I ever filmed? It was one
of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing. And there’s this
electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? And this bag was
just . . . dancing with me . . . like a little kid begging me to play with it. For
fifteen minutes. That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life
behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to
know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever. Video is a poor excuse, I
know. But it helps me remember . . . I need to remember . . . Sometimes
there’s so much beauty in the world . . . I feel like I can’t take it . . . and my
heart is just going to cave in.

This comment is evidently full of religious hints, “benevolent force”, “no rea-
son to be afraid”, “to cave in”. Such forms of articulation are improbable, even
impossible, without any interaction with the classical expressions of religious
traditions, in this case especially the mystical tradition. That does not mean
that the teenager must have read Meister Eckhart before watching the dance
of the plastic bag; it means only that he has to live in cultural contexts which
still provide him with articulations for the experience of transcendence. This
enables him to interpret the dance of the plastic bag. His articulation provides
a concrete example of how we might experience what Christian doctrine calls
‘creation’ and what the content of the religious feeling of cosmic gratitude and

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thankfulness might look like. That does not mean that we should rewrite our
dogmatic tradition, inserting a chapter on plastic bags in the tracts on the doc-
trine of creation. The interaction between the forms of articulation is a process
of reciprocal compensation and supplementation.

The Limits of Religious Articulation

This example leads us back to our original question of the interaction between
experience and interpretation. Millions of people have seen plastic bags danc-
ing in the wind, but only a few tend to interpret them as an epiphany of a
benevolent force in the world. When I talk about this, I always have in mind a
colleague of mine, a philosopher who is a famous expert on the atheistic tra-
dition. He loves opera, and when he reports from his most recent visit to the
opera house, his description of the experience sounds to me very close to that
what I would call a religious experience or at least an experience where the
category of transcendence would assist us to understand what happened. My
colleague, however, categorically denies all references to transcendence or –
even worse for him – to a religious experience. But at least we can discuss these
experiences and we can learn more adequate or more appropriate modes of
description from each other – which is not nothing. But we must accept our
limits. There is no way to prove the necessity of a religious interpretation of
experience. It is difficult to accept this limit. This is one reason why religions
tend to be violent.

The Plausibility of Religious Articulation: The Task of

Hermeneutics

I finally come to the task of hermeneutics. The discipline of hermeneutics

has an interesting story over the previous two centuries. In the nineteenth
century hermeneuts served as a priesthood of interpretation. They claimed
that they could deeply empathize with the expressions of other persons and
other epochs, that they could understand authors better than they understood
themselves. They could endow every incident, every event and every story with
a meaning like ketchup to chips. So the revolt against interpretation in the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century is quite easy to understand. But we should
not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Understanding the nineteenth-
century attitude toward hermeneutics as a descriptive and analytical theory of

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How To Do Transcendence With Words ? 27

experience and interpretation enables us to understand religious experience

and the interaction between experience and interpretation. Hermeneutics is
an analytical theory of what happens in religious experience.17
To explain this interaction, we must start with a point which is far away
from the task of hermeneutics; it is a rather banal observation. The possibility
of a religious interpretation is necessarily linked to the existence of forms of
religious articulation. We can see what this tautology means in parts of Eastern
Europe where for over a generation communist governments tried to suppress
all forms of religious articulation. If religious experience represents the inter-
action between experience and interpretation, we extinguish all reference to
transcendence when we extinguish the forms of articulation of the transcen-
dent. Religious education and the public presence of religion are necessary
conditions for religious experience. As children in Greenland have to learn
fifty words for snow to enjoy a rich experience of snow, so too must our chil-
dren learn the plurality of religious articulations to create a deeper experience
of their lives and the world. According to the program of a cultural history
of Christianity, this means not only the classical articulations but also other
forms in art, music and literature, and it also means a profound interest in so-
called ‘secular epiphanies’.
The task of hermeneutics is to reveal the meaning of these articulations
and – importantly – to discover the limits of meaning. A theological herme-
neutics can attempt to explain a word of the gospel, the dogma of Chalcedon,
a painting of Michelangelo, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passion of St. Matthew
or a poem by Emily Dickinson, but all these explanations must make clear
that the gospel, the dogma, the Michelangelo painting, the Bach piece and
the Dickinson poem expressed more than we can express with our words.
The dimension of the ineffable, the emotive sphere, is an important aspect
of all religious articulations. So hermeneutical explanation begins a process
of inward and complex interpretation, but it does not bring it to an end. This
entails that hermeneutics is no longer just a theory of translation. The so-
called ‘old’ theological hermeneutics tried to translate religious expressions
from former times into what they thought a modern human could conceive.
Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologization is a famous example. Now
Bultmann has made a lot of important points and it is not so easy to get rid

17 See Jörg Lauster, Religion als Lebensdeutung: Theologische Hermeneutik heute (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005), 9–30.

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28 Lauster

of his program,18 but from Bellah and others we have learned that all kinds
of religious expressions fulfill a certain function in the system of religious
articulation.
This leads us to the special task of hermeneutics. Bellah’s “Nothing is ever
lost” brings a risk with it. Are all religious articulations equal and equally help-
ful in interpreting experience? George Steiner wrote in his fascinating “Ten
(Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought” that we have no way to discern
the religious importance of the rites of a Voodoo-priest from the writings of
Thomas Aquinas.19 I would not agree, but I know that this is a delicate point.
It is not only that the ‘Political Correctness Police’ are watching, it is also the
deeper problem of all kinds of plurality. The classical expressions of Bible,
dogma and liturgy have a traditional privilege. Opening the door to a cultural
universe of expressions raises the importance of an evaluative system – an
evaluative system does not mean a hierarchy. An important criterion for the
evaluation of religious expressions comes from the religious experience itself.
Experiencing transcendence produces acts of interpretation which, according
to the traditions of apophatic and cataphatic theology, combine what we can
say and what we cannot say. The best interpretations of the experience of tran-
scendence contain in themselves the limits of their own interpretation, they
produce the attitude that we can say this, but that there is much more that we
cannot articulate and yet is also unspeakably present in our minds.
Finally, we reach arguments for the plausibility of religious interpretations
of experience. The main task of hermeneutics is to argue that there are good
reasons to give a religious interpretation to certain constellations of experi-
ence. Good reasons are reasons for an interpretation which provide a broader
and deeper understanding of that which is experienced. Arguing with the
spectator of the dance of the plastic bag or with my philosopher colleague who
loves music, we might explain that ‘doing transcendence’ helps us to under-
stand the meaning of the moment in more depth and in more detail, and that
this could create an attitude and life-orientation which is open to the transcen-
dent dimension of our world and our life. This is, of course, not a proof, not an
irresistible argument, but it is a good reason for a religious interpretation – and
that is much more than nothing.

18 See Jörg Lauster, “Das Programm ‘Religion als Lebensdeutung’ und das Erbe Rudolf
Bultmanns”, in Hermeneutische Theologie – heute?, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Pierre Bühler
and Andreas Hunziker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 101–116.
19 George Steiner, “Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought”, Salmagundi 146/147
(2005), 3–32 (31).

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How To Do Transcendence With Words ? 29

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