Abstract

This thesis attempts to understand the perception of Charismatic Christians of the world they live in in relationship to their religious experiences. It explores a variety of experiences of holiness in the lives of Charismatic Christians, drawing upon numerous testimonies found in their own literature as well as the writings of anthropologists and sociologists of religion, and those obtained through interviews with individual Charismatic Christians. Being sensitive to the methodological difficulties of understanding any religious experience from a perspective outside a religious community, and yet desiring to pursue a non- reductionist approach to religious experience, the phenomenological tool of the epoche is applied. As we demonstrate through our discussion of the alternative scholarly approaches to the study of shamanism, religious experience is neither pathological nor a mere therapeutic tool, but irreducible to any other experience. In the light of this methodological principle we describe and interpret Christian Charismatic religious life and experience as it occurs in our own Western world as well as in non Western societies, and in so doing we consider its adaptability to other cultures and its relationship to indigenous religion of Christian and non Christian tradition. In order to identify the relationship of Christian Charismatic religion to our own culture, we compare it to another contemporary Western religious phenomenon, the New Age movement. Finally, identifying similar experiences in the history of Christianity, we find that from the beginning of the Christian Church there has been a struggle between a more hierarchical form of religion, which emphasises the values of the community of believers, and a more individualist form of religion, drawing its authority mainly from the personal experience of the Holy Spirit. Our modern Western culture tends to endorse more the values of the latter. It will be argued that the ecstatic experience of Charismatic Christians can be interpreted as the climax of secularisation: for a rapidly growing number of Charismatic Christians the institutionalised Church has become dispensable.