Page 291 - Contribution To Phenomenology

284 JAMES G. HART

perience, thereby plays the role of natural theoretical experience. What
he has in mind is what we akeady saw in regard to himself: an
encounter with the figure of Christ in the Gospels and with the
perceptions of the early Christians as evident in the epistles, which then
goes on to inform, and be shaped by, everyday perception and life. The
figure of Christ and the perceptions of the early Christians constitute
what he calls an original tradition which awakens an intuitive empathic
faith. This, in turn, becomes the occasion for an original intuition of
values which guides experience, what he here is calling faith-experience.
This experience of value is original but not of the same kind as that of
the "founder'' or the person religiously liberated from reUgion. The latter
is that upon which ultimately the "faith experience*' of the contemporary
and subsequent follwers is based.
Faith, like experience properly understood, can be corrected, in part
through new experiences and in part mediately through thinking. The
contemporary faith-experience stands in a relationship of dialogue with
the first Christian communities and makes progress in getting to know
Christ. Here there is an enrichening and self-correcting process. But a
dogmatism and "routinization" builds up within the community which
eventually become a norm of faith and this dogmatized faith is what
characterizes tradition and is not the fruit of original faith-experience.
There thus occurs a tension between, on the one hand, the faith which
is a result of the interplay of the faith experience and rational reflection
which builds on this, and, on the other, dogma or the requirements of
the tradition. This demand of tradition acquires the status of a second
subsequent revelation. (Husserl is doubtless here thinking of types, such
as that of Roman Catholicism, where authorititative pronouncements of
the Church or pope approach the status of revelations.) Its objectional
feature is that it is an unintuitive dogmatization in which one believes,
but which lacks the original experiential character of authentic faith (Hua
XXVII, 104). Dogmatic faith in both the Christian and Jewish traditions
was inseparable from hierarchical states and a representation of an
essentially despotic God (Hua XXVII, 105).
Husserl, who on occasion referred to himself as an "undogmatic
Protestant" (Letter to Rudolf Otto), believed that the Protestantism of
the Reformation was a revolutionary breakthrough because it enabled an
original empathic faith-experience of the ancient Christian communities
and a disavowal of the tradition's dogmatism and its claims to be a
source of new revelations. We thus see, in terms of Husserl's broader