Is this a good psychological analysis of salvation?

Hmm

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In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James largely speaks as a psychologist and he looks at published accounts of people's feelings and behavior in response to religious experiences and at data he had gathered himself. In his conclusion, he identifies commonalities shared by these personal experiences and different religious traditions and says that salvation consists of two parts:

"1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:—

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it; and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy."

I wonder what you think of this and how well or poorly this matches your own personal experience or Christian tradition (I hesitate to use the word "denomination"!)?

The book btw is available for free at Project Gutenberg.
 

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In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James largely speaks as a psychologist and he looks at published accounts of people's feelings and behavior in response to religious experiences and at data he had gathered himself. In his conclusion, he identifies commonalities shared by these personal experiences and different religious traditions and says that salvation consists of two parts:

"1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:—

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it; and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy."

I wonder what you think of this and how well or poorly this matches your own personal experience or Christian tradition (I hesitate to use the word "denomination"!)?

The book btw is available for free at Project Gutenberg.
It is just a psycho-speak way of explaining away the Christian experience as something produced by the self. It has no relationship to the truth. I read between the lines and see "It's just your imagination".
 
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Hmm

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It is just a psycho-speak way of explaining away the Christian experience as something produced by the self. It has no relationship to the truth. I read between the lines and see "It's just your imagination".

Amazing how you are able to refute a world renowned philosopher and psychologist in a few sentences. Impressive.
 
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Aussie Pete

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Amazing how you are able to refute a world renowned philosopher and psychologist in a few sentences. Impressive.
1 Corinthians 1:19-21
For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know Him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.…

I had the best teacher. But for the grace of God I would be nodding sagely as if I knew what on earth the guy was on about.
 
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Carl Emerson

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1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

For me this did not apply...

It wasn't about the wrongness of me but the rightness of Him that impacted me the most and drew me to salvation.

Of course there was repentance but it is a sense His Holiness that brings an understanding of our unworthiness.
 
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Hmm

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But for the grace of God I would be nodding sagely as if I knew what on earth the guy was on about.

Well, if you want to know what he's banging on about you can always read the book. See details in the OP.
 
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Hmm

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What the world calls "world renowned" , i.e. what people of the world hold in high esteem,
God Himself calls an abomination.
(and the world's wisdom leads people away from Jesus). (seeks to get people to trust man instead of God's Way)

Thoughtful.
 
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Rachel20

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... he identifies commonalities shared by these personal experiences and different religious traditions and says that salvation consists of two parts:

"1. An uneasiness; and
:
1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

I agree with this, though the uneasiness for me doesn't take a moral character so much as an unmet longing which I sense can't be met by this world or the things in it. CS Lewis likened it to a "home-sickness" when he said this -

“The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.”
 
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fhansen

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In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James largely speaks as a psychologist and he looks at published accounts of people's feelings and behavior in response to religious experiences and at data he had gathered himself. In his conclusion, he identifies commonalities shared by these personal experiences and different religious traditions and says that salvation consists of two parts:

"1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:—

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it; and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy."

I wonder what you think of this and how well or poorly this matches your own personal experience or Christian tradition (I hesitate to use the word "denomination"!)?

The book btw is available for free at Project Gutenberg.
Hmm, Hmmm!, you come up with some really good and intelligent and thought-provoking questions and contributions, amid some really sorry stuff here on the forums sometimes. Yes, something wrong, something missing, something false in this world, this life-we're here to develop a sense of how deprived we are, to become jaded by the world's offerings that promise to satiate us while we're simultaneously sickened by the sin and evil that we all experience -and participate in to one degree or another and can't seem to overcome in this exile here on earth. Not to mention the death that ever looms behind the scenes that mocks our very existence and threatens to make everything we value purposeless and meaningless in the end. This life can serve as a very good teacher-with revelation and grace filling in the missing portions of the education.

Man was made for something better, much better, and only God can fill it while we meanwhile try to look for it in all the wrong places. And He wants to fill it, for our sake. He actually wants unbridled, inexhaustible happiness for man and He knows as no other that He's the very source of that happiness that we all innately desire-because He put the desire there to begin with! Our true desire, as Adam hadn't yet learned in Eden, is for Him.

And our own pride and ignorance are the main obstacles preventing us from finding Him, from even wanting to find Him. When the "fulness of time" had come Jesus came to set the record straight, to fully reveal the true God so that, having begun to recognize His supreme beauty and incomparable value we might forsake the pitiful earthly treasures and preference for our own empty and futile ways for the real treasure we've now found. But we're lost; we cannot navigate to that treasure; He must come to us. Then we can embrace it, that Love that sought us out, and begin to love Him in return.
 
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The OP is true almost by definition. It doesn't make sense to talk about salvation unless there is something to be saved from. However there are varying types of uneasiness and solution among Christians, and even in the NT.

The situation can include the transitoriness of human life (the solution being eternal life), the brutality of life (the solution being forgiveness, love, and reconciliation), obvious moral problems both on the social and personal levels (the solution being God's judgement, personal repentance, and a renewal both in history and in the afterlife). The complexity within the last parenthesis indicates that it really represents several perceptions of the problem, and several solutions.

There is no reason to restrict ourselves to just one of these. But Christian theology tends to focus on one or two -- which ones depend upon the specific theological tradition.
 
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Dave L

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In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James largely speaks as a psychologist and he looks at published accounts of people's feelings and behavior in response to religious experiences and at data he had gathered himself. In his conclusion, he identifies commonalities shared by these personal experiences and different religious traditions and says that salvation consists of two parts:

"1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:—

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it; and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy."

I wonder what you think of this and how well or poorly this matches your own personal experience or Christian tradition (I hesitate to use the word "denomination"!)?

The book btw is available for free at Project Gutenberg.
This is a self-help routine many practice. But true salvation is beyond a person's control. It is a supernatural event wrought in a person's core being by God that causes them to hate sin and desire righteousness as defined in the Ten Commandments, properly understood.
 
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mlepfitjw

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@Hmmm! Remember learning about God and the devil at a very young age. Seen movies about demons and monsters, haha. Growing up, around the age of 11 or so, seeing this one movie where these rats come and form this demon/devil on a throne... scared me, just like the movie Exorcist scared me.

These visions were horrifying. When I see the rats come and form a devil, shocked, I went and got this new testament book that was given to me at a younger age, and read the revelation...

Now I got visions of the Devil coming out of the sea, and destroying everything in the cities, and people were on their cell phones and and looking up at the devil...

Psychologically intimating...

Years in silence and never knowing God, only calling out to him when I was being bad cause the thought of people who preached hell fire, would haunt me... this would go on for years... at 14 or 15 things got even worse for me finding out about Satanism.

Questioning God and going on to live isolated without him, even though really he was still there, just lead me dark, cold and miserable... hating everyone around me, even my own family though my mother being so good to me to be able to stay at the house, I even hated her especially when I didnt get my own way.

I have a documented page on facebook at me being 21. I am 29 now.

  • there is a post on there and BEING PROUD of telling my sister that I hate her, and when her children die that I wouldn't shed a tear and would not care if she died... Where was I? Gone, entrapped in darkness.
  • How much I hated Christ, Christians, and even God.

Took 26 years to and 3 1/2 years to finally be set free of the old psychological way that once was. No longer fearing hell, and the mercy of God turned me to the truth.

Not sure if this relates to the topic just felt like sharing.

Thank you and God bless.
 
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fhansen

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This is a self-help routine many practice. But true salvation is beyond a person's control. It is a supernatural event wrought in a person's core being by God that causes them to hate sin and desire righteousness as defined in the Ten Commandments, properly understood.
Yes, there's a problem when someone attempts to subsume supernatural experience under or within the concepts that reason and psychology can arrive at on their own. But it's normal for us to desire understanding-the more the better-and he's basing his ideas on reported experiences at least. It's also not a bad thing when faith and reason meet and agree, or when reason can support faith to the extent that its able. Or when an objective secular writer at least acknowledges the real and practical value of these experiences in one way or another. IMO.
 
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Hmm

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Yes, there's a problem when someone attempts to subsume supernatural experience under or within the concepts that reason and psychology can arrive at on their own. But it's normal for us to desire understanding-the more the better-and he's basing his ideas on reported experiences at least. It's also not a bad thing when faith and reason meet and agree, or when reason can support faith to the extent that its able. Or when an objective secular writer at least acknowledges the real and practical value of these experiences in one way or another. IMO.

I agree with that although James actually did believe in God. The "more" he talks about here, quoted in the OP:

"He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck."

is God, although it is a nebulous God to be sure. He describes what he means by God later in the conclusion:

"The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our
present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that
exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a
meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences
and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at
certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my
poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and
true. I _can_, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's
attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of
scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear
that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the
word "bosh!" Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name,
and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively,
invincibly urges me beyond the narrow "scientific" bounds. Assuredly, the
real world is of a different temperament,--more intricately built than
physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both
hold me to the over-belief which I express. Who knows whether the
faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may
not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own
greater tasks?"

As you can see, he was a beautiful writer.
 
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Clare73

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In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James largely speaks as a psychologist and he looks at published accounts of people's feelings and behavior in response to religious experiences and at data he had gathered himself. In his conclusion, he identifies commonalities shared by these personal experiences and different religious traditions and says that salvation consists of two parts:

"1. An uneasiness; and
First cracker outa' the box, he is not right. . .too simplistic.

Those who faithfully live by a moral code usually do not have an uneasiness.
.
 
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fhansen

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First cracker outa' the box, he is not right. . .too simplistic.

Those who faithfully live by a moral code usually do not have an uneasiness.
.
Yes, but he's essentially saying that the uneasiness precedes a change towards living rightly, but by turning one to God, first of all, which means faith. And in Christianity isn't it so that God then does the justifying from within this relationship, placing the moral code (the law) in our minds and writing it on our hearts? Jer 31
 
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The Great Battle spiritually for any person is between Self, the "old man" Paul called it, and God. We are naturally preoccupied with ourselves, we're Self-centered, but God has made us to be centered upon Himself. Anything, then, that gets us navel-gazing, looking inward at ourselves, distracts us from God and His excellency. And the more we consider ourselves, the less we consider Him. This is, essentially, the Great Battle.

Too often, we feel we need to "understand ourselves," to psycho-analyze ourselves, and by this means somehow grow beyond our weaknesses and sinfulness. But this is not God's answer to our selfishness. His solution is to put Self to death and in its place institute in us a new nature anchored in Christ.

Whenever, then, I encounter someone who proposes to investigate the human psyche, more and more I tune out. The deepest truths of my life will never be found in me, but only in the One who made me. And the more I search for His truth in me, the farther from The Truth I get. Self only produces more of itself; staring at myself, pondering me, only results in greater preoccupation with myself and increased blindness to God. No thanks.
 
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fhansen

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The Great Battle spiritually for any person is between Self, the "old man" Paul called it, and God. We are naturally preoccupied with ourselves, we're Self-centered, but God has made us to be centered upon Himself. Anything, then, that gets us navel-gazing, looking inward at ourselves, distracts us from God and His excellency. And the more we consider ourselves, the less we consider Him. This is, essentially, the Great Battle.

Too often, we feel we need to "understand ourselves," to psycho-analyze ourselves, and by this means somehow grow beyond our weaknesses and sinfulness. But this is not God's answer to our selfishness. His solution is to put Self to death and in its place institute in us a new nature anchored in Christ.

Whenever, then, I encounter someone who proposes to investigate the human psyche, more and more I tune out. The deepest truths of my life will never be found in me, but only in the One who made me. And the more I search for His truth in me, the farther from The Truth I get. Self only produces more of itself; staring at myself, pondering me only results in greater preoccupation with myself and increased blindness to God. No thanks.
Yes, but we're stuck with me and me is an education in itself. And me is what should be driving me to embrace God instead when He comes calling. There's reason behind why we figure out that this world and myself don't have the answers; it's because they can't possibly satisfy the human soul. I don't think the author is saying a lot more than that. At least from what I've read here.
 
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