Inventions and imprisionment
February 4th, 2010“I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can’t handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind. Meanwhile religious experience goes on experiencing, so that by the time I get my dogma stated so that I can think about it, the religious experience becomes an object of thought.”
Howard Thurman, interviewed in 1979
for the BBC’s The Long Search, a television series on world religions
![[Valid RSS]](valid-rss-rogers.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Theology, in its truest and purest form is not imprisoning, but freeing, literally meaning, “knowledge of God.” There is a fine balance between intellectualism and making use of the mind which our Creator uniquely gifted humans with. For example, Howard Thurman was a leading proponent of “Liberation Theology,” and as such (right or wrong) used his own form of theology to meet the needs of his own socio/cultural agenda, rather than a Kingdom agenda. Reason without experience leads to arrogant intellectualism. Experience without reason can lead to foolish idealism. Neither is sufficient for the reality of God.
And by the way…my previous comment was not written in disagreement with your post. Rather, you provoked me to “think.” LOL!