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CHAPTER IV
DOUBT AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT
SOME psychologists seem to think that the concept of development
in relation to the religious life provides us with a key to all the
mysteries. It is not so. No key of knowledge can open the door
behind which are hidden the most secret aspects of living
religion. The psychology of religion makes this plain. Only the
purely human aspect of religious experience can be
psychologically explained.
Religious Development
The capacity for religious experience and the ability to make
religious decisions increase with the general development of the
individual. This is implied in the assumption that there is an
innate religious tendency. But there is another factor to be
reckoned with: something of a supra-individual nature. If
growth in religious insight and experience is to occur, the
individual must be confronted with objective spiritual values
which directly and personally speak to him. There can be no
religious experience or decision without a meeting between the
soul and the objectively spiritual reality.
The synthesis of these two essential elements, the individual
and the supra-individual, occurs through an experience of
fundamental importance: an act of dedication which is both
the culmination of individual spiritual development and the
beginning of a new phase of growth. It is, as someone has put it,
‘a crisis leading to a process’. The crisis is the discovery of
a new and supernatural order of relationships. The process is
the extension of perception, experience and insight—possible
only in this new context of relationships—through which the
individual becomes a person.
This decisive experience can occur more or less gradually.
The period of ‘gestation’ immediately preceding it is usually
marked by inward tensions and struggles, conquests and defeats
that reveal the individual’s uncertainty and perplexity as he
stands on the threshold of a new world of experience whose
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