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Summary Of Experience And Metaphor By Janet Martin Soskice

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After reading Experience and Metaphor by Janet Martin Soskice and Religious Language as Symbolic by Paul Tillich you are able to grasp what they mean by experiencing religion through metaphors and symbols. Religion is experienced, is what Soskice mentioned several times. The experience of metaphors is what created religion, especially Christianity. “...be the first to say that God’s presence is like that of a powerful wind” translates to being able to feel the spirit there on your skin. Standing outside, feeling that powerful wind striking your skin for the first time, would be the same as that who has recently accepted God and felt as if they could feel his presence. Soskice does a phenomenal job explaining different metaphors and how they were once believed, and have died off. This wind is also a sign according to Tillich. To him, religion is understood through symbols, which are signs that have been used (as he said) to a point where they become symbols. The symbols then represent something much more, some examples he gave were: the holy water, crosses, and candles. From what I understand from these …show more content…

“On this view, even the abstractions of natural theology are based, in the long run, on experience--although of a diffuse kind.” Many people try to describe similar experiences with God as different metaphors, she goes about saying. She also explains why she thinks that many Christians believe that those have lost the living sense of the biblical metaphors which our forefathers had , because it is the consequence of urban life and not reading the Bible. This is said be be a strain on the religion because: generation after generation has changed without the experience of having other leaders(shepherds and kings) in your time to be able to guide you, and church becoming optional to many groups (not reading the Bible because some do not

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