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Re-Visioning Religious Studies: A Call to Come Home

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Donald Heinz
Donald Heinz*
Affiliation:
California State University, Chico
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Abstract

This is a look at the rise and development of religious studies in the United States, at the terms and implications of its “charter,” and then at current models and perennial phobias (theologizing being an example of the latter). There follows a plea for people working in religious studies to complete the hermeneutical circle, to return to the essence, to explore and act out the religious wager. The paper closes with a glimpse at two possible roles for such a revisioned venture: symbol repository for the university, seminary for an expanded and critical civil religion.

Type
Creative Teaching
Information
Horizons , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Fall 1978 , pp. 233 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1978

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References

1 Quoted in “‘Being Jewish’ and Studying About Judaism,” an address by Neusner, Jacob at the Inauguration of The Jay and Leslie Cohen Chair of Judaic Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, January 12, 1977, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

2 Neusner, pp. 2-3, writes: “Scholarly standards of careful inquiry and dispassionate examination of facts are the norm. These convictions form the theory in virtually all departments of religious studies in universities and colleges, whether public or private, Church-related or secular. If they are subject to serious challenge, it is not in the paramount journals and scholarly societies devoted to the academic study of religions. To be sure, these principles set up a norm by which all, when measured, may for one infraction or another be found wanting. Their practical applications and their implications, moreover, remain subject to much deep thought. Honorable people disagree on the requirements for the academic approach to religion-study. But if there is a disagreement on the principle that religion in the academic setting is to be studied with detachment and objectivity (however these words be interpreted), it is not public. It enjoys no powerful advocacy known to me.

3 In Graduate Education in Religion (Missoula: University of Montana Press, 1971), p. 16Google Scholar, Claude Welch is relieved to report that “the temptation to look upon the study of religion as a specially valuable means to the redemption of the university has been resisted.” On p. 55, he remarks that “nothing appears in a program of religious studies that could not appear elsewhere.”

4 In the Journal of Higher Education 35 (October, 1964), pp. 373–378Google Scholar, Robert Michaelsen laments the influence of what he calls “the legal syndrome” on the study of religion in the state university. This essay is reprinted as the appendix to A Report on an Invitational Conference on The Study of Religion in the State University (New Haven: The Society for Religion in Higher Education, 1964).Google Scholar

5 McGill, Arthur C., “The Ambiguous Position of Christian Theology,” in Ramsey, Paul and Wilson, John F. (ed.), The Study of Religion in Colleges and Universities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 117–118.Google Scholar

6 Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1945), p. 398.Google Scholar

7 McGill, , “The Ambiguous Position of Christian Theology,” pp. 119–120.Google Scholar

8 Neusner, , “Being Jewish,” p. 22.Google Scholar

9 Novak, Michael, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. xiii.Google Scholar

10 Heschel, A. J., Who is Man (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 66.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 119.

12 Holbrook, Clyde A., Religion, A Humanistic Field (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 3.Google Scholar