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Dooyeweerd and the experience of
‘Silberblick’.
By J Glenn Friesen
(The following is an extract from 'Enstasy, Ecstasy and Religious Self-Reflection: A History of Dooyeweerd’s Ideas of Pre-theoretical Experience' by Dr J Glenn Friesen.)
How is it, that the whole world around us can seem so empty, like the lead-grey clouds hanging low or the plaintive noise of rain trickling down on disconsolate grey towns, as a weeping melancholy comes over us and we see nothing but ghostly shadows of an unreal world, and hear nothing in our ears but monotone sounds from far away? How is it that the world, which has been created by the Father, can seem so lamentably empty to the Christian? Is it not because we do not see things in the way that regenerated persons must see them, everything under that single category of their goal? (Dooyeweerd 1915b; translation by J Glenn Friesen).The world is experienced as empty unless we see it in terms of its (transcendent) goal. He repeats this idea in his mature work:
Every Christian knows the emptiness of an experience of the temporal world which seems to be shut up in itself. He knows the impersonal attitude of a “Man” [cf Heidegger's "Das Man"] in the routine of common life and the dread of nothingness, the meaninglessness, if he tries to find himself again in a so-called existential isolation. He is acquainted with all this from personal experience, though he does not understand the philosophical analysis of this state of spiritual uprooting in Humanistic existentialism. But the Christian whose heart is opened to the Divine Word-revelation knows that in this apostate experiential attitude he does not experience temporal things and events as they really are, i.e. as meaning pointing beyond and above itself to the true religious centre of meaning and to the true Origin (New Critique III, 30)When we do see things as “pointing beyond and above themselves”– to a transcendent center, then the light of eternity illuminates our temporal world.
In the Biblical attitude of naïve [pre-theoretical] experience the transcendent, religious dimension of its horizon is opened. The light of eternity radiates perspectively through all the temporal dimensions of this horizon and even illuminates seemingly trivial things and events in our sinful world (New Critique III, 29)
The above text is an extract (pp 47-48) from
'Enstasy, Ecstasy and Religious Self-Reflection:
A History of Dooyeweerd’s Ideas of Pre-theoretical Experience'
by Dr J Glenn Friesen.
Download this entire article (PDF 125 pages)
Visit J. Glenn Friesen’s Dooyeweerd Site
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