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Fiddling While Rome Burns: The Place of Academic Theology in the Study of Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
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Theology, defined specifically as academic theology, belongs as a legitimate area of expertise in the study of religion. Academic theologians, like historians, comparatists, philosophers, and social scientists of religion, should hold a rightful and honorable place as teachers and scholars in the discipline. Like other scholars of religion, academic theologians advance knowledge of religion. As intentional critics and makers of religious symbol systems and as critics of the wider cultures within which such systems flourish, academic theologians make a distinctive, valuable contribution to teaching and to scholarship—in non-sectarian liberal education environments, as well as in seminaries and divinity schools. In this essay I seek to represent the contribution of academic theology to private undergraduate institutions of liberal education in particular.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2000
References
1 Whether other areas of theological studies such as biblical studies, properly belong to the study of religion as an academic discipline is beyond the scope of this essay. I do think that arguments can be made to validate their inclusion.
2 Nuland, Sherwin, How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1994) 156Google Scholar.
3 Here I include biblical studies, theology (philosophical, systematic, and practical), religious or theological ethics, and church history.
4 For a comparative analysis of parallel contentions within the discipline of economics, see Cady, Linell E., “The Public Intellectual and Effective Critique,” The Council of Societiesfor the Study of Religion Bulletin 27 (1998) 36–38Google Scholar.
5 See Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966).Google Scholar Though one could move quickly to philosophical idealism here, it does not necessarily follow from this way of viewing things that nothing is real, that all is arbitrary, that no judgments can be made regarding truth, falsity, goodness, or evil, or that the possibilities for doing things differently are unlimited by material conditions. If one assumes that nature requires that humans make cultures in order to survive as a species, then one can avoid reduction either to thoroughgoing idealism or to crude realism. But this is an issue beyond the scope of the present discussion. See Cooey, Paula M., Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar For an excellent critique of the limits of postmodernism, see Eagleton, Terry, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar.
6 For the implications of this epistemological position for the natural sciences, see, for example, Harding, Sandra, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).Google Scholar For a highly polemical disputation of this view, see Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
7 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, The Christian Faith (trans., Macintosh, H. R. and Stewart, J. S.; 2 vols.; New York: Harper & Row, 1963) 1. 3–93Google Scholar.
8 See Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
9 This is my own slightly modified version of Clifford Geertz's definition. See , Geertz, “Religion as Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 87–125Google Scholar.
10 See Proudfoot, Wayne, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
11 Essentialists insist that religion be studied on its own terms without reference to other approaches to cultural phenomena; they usually define religion with reference to a single essential feature, hence ironically performing an internal reduction. In contrast, self-proclaimed reductionists confine religion to other historical, non-religious elements of culture, for example, economic, political, social, or psychological forces. For a classic example of the former, see Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar For an example of the latter, see Freud, Sigmund, The Future of an Illusion (trans, and ed., Strachey, James. New York: Norton, 1989)Google Scholar.
12 See McCutcheon, Russell, “A Default of Critical Intelligence? The Scholar of Religion as Public Intellectual,” JAAR 65 (1997) 443–68;Google Scholarand Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
13 For example, Gerald K. Larson has argued persuasively to my mind that the concept “Hinduism” as a referent to a specific “world” religion is the product of the colonization of India. “Discourse about ‘Religion’ in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” presented to the Critical Theory Group at the national meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Kansas City, November 24, 1992.
14 Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (trans., Greene, Thomas M. and Hudson, Hoyt H.; New York: Harper & Row, 1960) 7–10Google Scholar.
15 There are, of course, other ways to think and to effect change as well. 1 think, however, that ultimately reason consists of questioning or wondering and that wondering is necessary, though not sufficient, not only to critique, but also to most forms of transformation.
16 Early exemplars of these shifts include the incorporation of social theory and sociology of religion by H. Richard Niebuhr and Gordon D. Kaufman, as well as the incorporation of aesthetics by Richard R. Niebuhr. H. Richard Niebuhr, for example, critically incorporated George Herbert Meade's concept of the development of the self as a socially interactive process of internalizing a “generalized other” into his own view of an ego-alter dialectic. See The Responsible Self: An Essay on Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).Google Scholar Gordon Kaufman has consistently argued that theology must be informed by good social theory and depends in part on theory arguing for the social construction of reality (, Berger and , Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge)Google Scholar for his own notion of God as a social construct (see note 5). See especially An Essay on Theological Method (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975).Google Scholar Richard R. Niebuhr has turned more toward aesthetic theory, informed particularly by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of imagination. See, for example, Niebuhr, Richard R., ed., Streams of Grace: Studies of Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William James (Kyoto, Japan: Doshisha University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
17 See note 4, Cady, “The Public Intellectual and Effective Critique.”
18 While some may see this wide sweep as the deterioration, even dissolution, of theology, I see it as a necessary move if religious traditions themselves are to survive (the desirability of their survival also being disputable, of course). See, for example, Ball, Milner S., The Word and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholarand Cooey, Paula M., Family, Freedom & Faith: Building Community Today (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996)Google Scholar.
19 It is important to keep in mind that there are counterparts to academic theologians who do the same kind of work in the context of polytheistic, Goddess-centered, and not-theistic traditions. See, for example, any of the works of Carol P. Christ, Mary Daly, or Naomi Goldenberg.
20 See, for example, Ruether's, Rosemary RadfordSexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983)Google Scholar and McFague's, SallieModels of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987)Google Scholar.
21 James Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).