There is a hoary view – the legacy of generations of works of Christian theology, and endlessly resurfacing in the syllabuses of Theology departments in the Christian world – that theology proper is the preserve of Christian self-reflection, or at most, of the ‘Abrahamic’ traditions. All other faiths do not have theology in this sense; as such they belong to the ‘religions’ of the world, and must be studied under some rubric called Religious Studies or the Study of Religion.

No one quite knows what goes into the dumping-ground of Religious Studies or the Study of Religion. But it is not ‘theology’. For, in this view, it is only in the ‘great monotheism(s)’ of Christianity or the Abrahamic faiths that the cosmic drama of the production of the world and the healing and redemption of the human condition can properly be considered. It is only in this domain that there exist the ingredients continually to recover – historically, ontologically, epistemologically – the basis for the appropriate conception and grammar of what it means to be truly human in terms of the human community's ultimate source and end, ‘God’. And by some process of mission-creep in much modern intellectual discourse, theology has been appropriated to Christianity, and the teachings of non-Christian religions, or more precisely, the non-Abrahamic faiths, have been relegated to the Study of Religion.