THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

The question, "What are the religious propensities?" and the question, "What is their philosophical significance?" are two entirely different orders of inquiry from a logical point of view. Since a failure to recognize this distinct difference may lead to confusion, I wish to emphasize this point before we examine the documents and materials to which I have referred.

In recent books on logic, a distinction is made between two types of inquiry concerning any subject. First, what is its nature? How did it come to be? What is its constitution, origin, and history? Second, what is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it exists? The answer to the first question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the second is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil original: "value judgment"—a judgment based on personal or objective standards of worth, or what we may call a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They arise from different intellectual concerns, and the mind combines them only by forming them separately and then adding them together.

In the study of religion, it is particularly easy to distinguish these two types of questions. Every religious phenomenon has a history and is derived from natural causes. What is currently called "higher criticism" of the Bible is merely a study of the Bible from this existential point of view, a method too often neglected by the early Church. Under what specific biographical conditions did the sacred writers produce their various contributions to the holy volume? What exactly did they have in their individual minds when they delivered their messages? These are clearly questions of historical fact, and it is not immediately obvious how the answers to them can decide the further question: of what use