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Book Review and Notice: The Psychological Dynamics of Religious Experience

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Andre Godin. Translated by Mary Turton. (Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, 1985). 279 pp. $13.95. (paper) Andre Godin, Belgian priest-psychologist, has made his name both here and abroad for his empirical studies of adolescent religious experience as well as original and highly creative works in pastoral psychology. This book represents his attempt to write on the border of theology and psychology. It is a well reasoned book, yet it has about it the quality of poetry as he expresses his own experiential faith. Godin sets out to do two things in this book: (1) to analyze religious experience in terms of its human determinants and social contexts, and (2) to structure a living faith, as a Christian, particularly in the light of Freud's critique of religion. In the first part he proposes to work as a disinterested scientist; in the latter as a committed man of faith. "Religious experience" is the keystone which connects the two sections of the book. What enables him to use religious experience for that task? It lies in his definition of religious experience as having two components: Erlebnis (the passive emotional type) and Erfahrung (the active synthetic type). Psychologists of religion have studied religious experience of the first type since William James wrote the Varieties in 1900. Godin says experience (Erlebnis) can be studied functionally, although psychology cannot authenticate that experience as real. Such experience consists of "the beliefs, prayers, mythical tales,