Some Implications of Parapsychology for Theology

THE MORE usual view of theologians today is that the Christian revelation of God is not given directly in propositions. It is seen rather as an event, an experience, a meeting with God in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Subsequently, propositional judgments are legitimately made about this experience. However, the experience itself is always mediated to some degree by one's own world view, by one's philosophy. As Karl Rahner has written, one cannot hear another's word "without confronting it with the rest of what is already present in one's mind and consciousness." " . . . Faith is already a human activity in which man's own subjectivity, together with its logic, its experience, native concepts and perspectives, already enters into play." The hearing of the message is "hearing by means of categories already possessed from elsewhere, a reception within previously given horizons, however much these horizons themselves may be altered by this hearing," and hence the hearing of revelation itself "necessarily implies philosophy, i.e. a previous, transcendental, as well as historical self-comprehension of the man who hears the historical revelation of God." It is impossible, then, for man to escape the necessity of bringing to the experience of revelation something of his own world view. This world view includes insights gained from psychology, sociology, the physical sciences, and one's own, even implicit, philosophy. It is the conviction of this essay that today one can no longer exclude parapsychology from those human efforts which influence man's world view. The Parapsychological Association was accepted as an affiliate member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. Parapsychology challenges some of our scientific models. It has implications for philosophy, and theologians in particular owe its findings a new respect.