| Summary: | The purpose of this article is to describe the religio-psychological role theory presented by the Swedish scholar Hjalmar Sund<eac>n and to exemplify its application to personal documents, particularly in three cases: Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), John Wesley (1703-1791) and the Swedish Mystic, Ruth Dahl<eac>n (1906-1976). <BR> Dr. Sund<eac>n was formerly professor of Psychology of Religion at Uppsala University. In his magnum opus Religionen och rollerna (1959), Sund<eac>n has developed his theory as an instrument to interpret and understand religious experiences. <BR> Sund<eac>n's theory implies that religious traditions contain systems of roles, models of performance in interactional systems. When, for example, Old Testament prophets speak of Jahve and Israel we find such an interactional system. God's acts are known from the history of the fathers of the people, and the acts constitute the role "God," and what is told about the fathers constitutes a number of human roles which together with the role "God," in this case, form the interactional system. <BR> The role "God," as described in the biblical text, functions as a pattern momentarily structuring the Bible-reader's perception of his own actual situation. If a person, knowing his Bible, finds it impossible to cope in a technical or ordinary human way with his situation, a model of performance from the Bible, one of its human roles, can be actualized for him, since the activity of the brain and the nervous system amounts to finding patterns permitting the coping process to go on.
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