Abstract

In classes on the Philosophy of Religion in Indonesia, students are often tasked to classify the country’s major religions under two different types: immanent and transcendent. Transcendent religions are grounded on revelation claimed to be received directly from God. On the other hand, immanent religions are grounded on universal intellectual intuition of the existence of the One True God or an all-encompassing Divinity. The Tagalog Bathala and the Javanese Gusti faiths are examples of immanent religions. The existence of the intuition of the One God in indigenous religions can be attributed to what we may call the Unfinished Story Model of the epistemological status of science, philosophy, and religion. There are questions that science eventually cannot answer but can be answered by philosophy. On the other hand, even philosophy is at a loss for words on some questions only religion can answer. This paper aims to provide a linguistic study of the terms Bathala and Gusti and show that they are indigenous intuitions of a God that will eventually lead these people to the acceptance of the concept of the One God found in the great monotheistic religions of the world, especially in Christianity and Islam.