The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God: Toward a Theological Empiricism

by Sameer Yadav

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God can be an object of experience and how we should account for God’s empirical availability to us. The central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of God’s availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem and that in virtue of their entanglement with that pseudoproblem, the influential accounts of Christian religious experience, such as in Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hector, or William P. Alston, are at bottom incoherent. The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception. This critical retrieval of Nyssen opens the path toward a viable contemporary theological empiricism—one that characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world.

525 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2015

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yadav, in the bulk of the book explores two schools of perception, Givenism and Coherentism, looking at the apophatic and cataphatic modes of each. Finding both lacking coherence, he then turns to explanations for the rejection of a realist account of perception (i.e., the world actually communicates content that we can perceive) putting John McDowell in conversation with Charles Taylor. After arguing for what he calls a "naturalized platonism," he then turns to Gregory of Nyssa as a test case. As I understand the author, he sees Gregory of Nyssa as both advocating for a right perception of the world around us while affirming the limitations said perception has for experiencing God. While this doesn't mean we do not experience God through creation, it means that, given God's incomprehensibility, we only experience God partially; in other words, our perception of the world is not equivalent to our experience of God nor is the latter reduced to the former. The technical philosophical prose of this book makes it inaccessible to the average lay reader who is unfamiliar with the philosophical categories he is working with. However, for those who can digest this superb work, it is a welcome corrective to anti-realist, irrational accounts of perception and experience of God.