A Critique of Religious Ritual: An Examination of Its Meaning and Efficacy in Christian Education Settings

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper investigates the dark side of religious ritual/worship with some critical distance and perspective on ritual performance. This paper focuses on the ritual experience in the Sunday worship setting, by looking at the ritual experience critically and suspiciously in order that its social effects and implications may be exposed. Since the religious ritual in many Christian education settings, including Christian liturgy, misrepresents our social and personal experience; our own convictions often mask the truth which is supposed to be conveyed in the liturgical experience.
These are the reasons we have to carefully observe ritual gestures and words that cause the teacher/pastor to manipulate the performance in positive and negative ways in the name of religious tradition. Using Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic of suspicion”, ritual performance should be examined not to support the very foundation that makes possible specific prejudice or ideology, but because the ritual performance often gives more power to this consciousness. Thus, taking ritual seriously means being prepared to critique the theological and ecclesiastical establishments and their one-sided emphasis on doctrinal meaning and efficacy.
For this purpose, this paper explores the relationship of ritual performance to power and authority, and traces ritual efficacy in perpetuating traditional authority. Since the power is not morally neutral, ritual performance functions in the production of concentrations of power which are very dangerous. In this paper, the views of several scholars on the meaning of ritual and its relationship to efficacy are examined in order to show how and why their approaches to the meaning of ritual simplify the complexity of ritual practices with their manifold efficacies.

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