Respecto a la posibilidad de regular la sociedad unipersonal en el

A cognitive understanding of knowledge of God that emphasizes epistemic answers is one perilous extreme for persons with intellectual disabilities. Similarly, an experiential view of revelation that heavily emphasizes the human role in revelation also is perilous theologically because it can tip easily into subjectivism.68

Theological reflection that tends toward this experiential extreme is arguably evidenced in the works of theologians and philosophers Frederich Schleiermacher (1768- 1834) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). In his effort to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant orthodoxy, Schleiermacher emphasizes the category and theological significance of the realm of feeling and experience. In On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers, Schleiermacher presents his novel conception of religion as feeling: “Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal.” (Schleiermacher, 1996; 36) He goes on to say: “…true religion is sense and taste for the Infinite.” (Schleiermacher, 1996; 39) Schleiermacher is arguing against religion as a “knowing”, understood in the rationalist, Enlightenment sense. Instead he argues that religion is to be found in the realm of feelings, and an interior, personal experience.

In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher argues that: “The feeling of absolute dependence, accordingly, is not to be explained as an awareness of the world’s existence, but only as an awareness of the existence of God, as the absolute undivided unity.” (Schleiermacher, 1999; 132). Allying with Immanuel Kant, Schleiermacher argues that knowledge is necessarily bound to experience. Schleiermacher however views experience:

many reports of revelations or alleged revelations need to be profoundly modified or even rejected in light of such scrutiny. ” (Macquarie, 1977; 103). Thus, Macquarie suggests that revelation requires epistemic abilities of reason, perception, scrutiny and reason.

68_{Time and space is limited for an in-depth discussion of Hegel and Schleiermacher’s works, as} representative of the wider “pathology” of an experiential revelatory extreme in terms of persons with intellectual disabilities. For further reading however on the nature of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit see Kain, 2005, Henrich, 2002 and Barnett 1998. For further study of Schleiermacher’s experiential understanding of revelation see Kelsey, 2003 and Sykes, 1971.

…as the matrix for a new approach to theology. Our experience, analysed in depth, demonstrates an awareness, given within that experience but not identical to it, of God understood as one on whom we are absolutely dependent. Theology’s task is to explicate that experience as it takes shape at any given time. In the Christian church, theology is therefore the articulation of the experience of God mediated by Jesus of Nazareth. According to Schleiermacher’s famous characterization, “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections as set forth in speech.” They therefore express the doctrine of God as essentially a function of human experience of the divine (Gunton, Ed., 1997; 17).

The human experience of God, including the experience of persons with intellectual disabilities serves in this “matrix” to inform the respective doctrine, such as revelation. Similarly, G.W.F. Hegel closely allies knowledge of God with immediate human experience. Indeed inThe Phenomenology of the Mind,(1949; 758), Hegel states, “this concrete God is beheld sensuously and immediately as a self, as a real individual human being…” Thus both these thinkers argue that the being of God may be directly gleaned from with human being and experience.

The “flipside” of a view of revelation that is overly epistemic is a view of revelation that is too heavily based in experience has significant drawbacks. A theology of revelation that is overly experiential can only be seen as relating human consciousness as interpreted through religious experience. This tendency lurks in 20th century theology because of the reliance on a non-theological epistemology (experience), which claims a wide reaching application and justification. Christoph Schwöbel expounds upon the difficulty with an overly experiential view of revelation:

The problems which are raised by such a conception are intimately connected to the interpretation of the concept of experience which is seen as the foundation and testing ground of theological statements. Where experience is interpreted as exclusively constituted by human subjectivity, the contents of theological discourse can only be seen as descriptions of attitudes and dispositions of human consciousness…In such a framework the prevenient character of God’s self-disclosure can no longer be maintained (Schwöbel, 1992; 86).

The primacy and sovereignty of God must be maintained in a responsible account of knowledge of God for persons with intellectual disabilities; God’s being must not be directly equated with human being.

Whereas a too-cognitive view of knowledge of God threatens to delimit and exclude those who are less able in this way, knowledge of God that is overly experiential threatens to describe every experience as revelation, to the point where the significance of the category of revelation is lost. A knowledge of God for persons with intellectual disabilities that relies too heavily on the realm of experience threatens to lose the distinctive and orthodox marks of Christ. The result of this extreme for persons with intellectual disabilities is a view of knowledge of God that is relative, relying too heavily on an experiential basis, whereby all experiences are viewed as revelatory.