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Commitment, Theology, and the Dilemma of Religious Studies at the State University
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
The dominant practice among scholars in Religious Studies has been to exclude committed religious belief from the teaching of religion. Theology was once the center of the academic study of religion, but its present-day exclusion has deprived Religious Studies of a methodological center characteristic of a true academic discipline, and thus Religious Studies appears to be merely a marginal interdisciplinary program rather than a discipline in its own right. Theology was once taught in a denominational way that is inappropriate to the pluralism of a secular university. Another understanding of theology, however, is as a distinctive worldview offering a unifying perspective on life, a worldview which has the same rights on the campus as any other contemporary worldview. The presence of theology so understood would restore the methodological center to the discipline of Religious Studies and would enhance that intellectual pluralism to which the modern university is committed.
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- Copyright © The College Theology Society 1992
References
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10 Throughout this paper I am writing as an evangelical Christian. I believe that these comments and those that follow apply, mutatis mutandis, to all members of Religious Studies programs who take their faiths seriously. I believe that it would be presumptive of me, however, to attempt to specify just how these remarks apply to adherents of other religions, so I leave it to others to make the necessary transpositions.
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20 The last is an awful word, implying as it does that all persons in Women's Studies are feminist ideologues. It seemed better, however, than “femininely” or “womanly.” The problem of selecting from among such outrageous adverbs illustrates the problem: programs that cannot be neatly encapsulated appear to be lacking in intellectual precision.
21 Raschke has written: “The notion that an effective field of inquiry could be organized around a body of data or as a cluster of ‘studies,’ as in ‘black studies,’ ‘women's studies,’ or ‘American studies,’ without an underlying conceptual architecture was unique to that heady age of ethno-idealism and self-confident positivism [of the 1960s] The field must now face the wincing fact that all the aforementioned factors, in which the operative assumptions of the ‘discipline’ have been embedded from the beginning, have been quietly erased, particularly in the last four years” (“Religious Studies,” 132).
22 A department which understood its mission in this way was usually not called the Religious Studies Department but the Theology Department or (in more evangelical colleges) the Bible Department. Theology departments in church-related schools were often renamed Religious Studies departments as they moved in the direction of objective academic study and teaching of religion.
23 I am intentionally using the term “worldview” in a general way. Many recent discussions of worldviews owe much to Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigms in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 [2nd ed. 1970]).Google Scholar See more recent discussions in Barbour, Ian, Myths, Models, and Paradigms (New York: Harper & Row, 1974);Google ScholarGutting, Gary, Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982);Google ScholarHolmes, Arthur F., Contours of a World View (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983);Google Scholar and Placher, Unapologetic Theology. The idea of comprehensive worldviews does not depend upon Kuhn, however, and similar concepts have been developed independently. Examples include R. M. Hare's notion of bliks (“Without a blik there can be no explanation; for it is by our bliks that we decide what is and what is not an explanation” [in Flew, Antony, Hare, R. M., and Mitchell, Basil, “Theology and Falsification” in Mitchell, Basil, ed., The Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 17]Google Scholar) and the neo-Calvinist thought associated with Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands (see Wolters, Albert, “Dutch Neo-Calvinism” in Hart, Heridrik, van der Hoeven, Johan, and Wolterstorff, Nicholas, eds., Rationality in the Calvinian Tradition [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983], 113–31Google Scholar).
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29 This does not mean that all Christians agree in the details of their worldviews, nor that the worldviews of Christians and others do not overlap. There is a large number of practical matters about which, say, Christians, Marxists, and Moslems may be expected to hold similar views. It is often those points of overlap between worldviews which offer the most fruitful occasions for dialogue. See Placher, , Unapologetic Theology, 138–49.Google Scholar
30 Robert Wuthnow has written: “Knowledgeable persons in the academy recognize of course that Christians are a minority group; whether it is statistically true or not, Christianity has long been seen as a dying remnant from a less enlightened past. But unlike other minority groups, Christians are not the subject of affirmative action, special programs, or efforts to promote greater tolerance…. Universities that might bend over backwards to start programs in women's literature, in African-American or Hispanic culture, or in Jewish studies would never consider a comparable program in evangelical studies” (“Living the Question—Evangelical Christianity and Critical Thought,” Cross Currents: Religions and Intellectual Life 40\2 [1990]: 171–72Google Scholar).
31 Placher, , Unapologetic Theology, 155.Google Scholar See also Robert L. Wilkens' remark in his 1989 Presidential Address to the American Academy of Religion: “It has come time to ask whether ‘critical’ reasons as defined by the Enlightenment is the only intellectual trait we should honor, the only song we must sing” (“Who Will Speak For the Religious Traditions?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57 [1989]: 702Google Scholar).
32 In their preface to Theology and the University, Griffin and Hough write that the combined message of the festschrift's essays “is that theology, at least theology of a particular sort, is not only appropriate in the university but vital” (viii). One may disagree with its authors on specific points, but taken as a whole this recent volume is an important instance of how theology may be practiced in the university.
33 Walterstorff, Nicholas, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 63–70.Google Scholar Gutting writes that a paradigm provides “a basis for an on-going activity of problem-solving in the community that accepts it” (Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism, 125).
34 Robert Farrar Capon writes: “Theology… receives in the mail a gross of very odd flashlights from the Lux Invisibilis Flashlight Co. It then takes these and proceeds to point their mysterious light not only at God but also at creation and, in the process, discovers movements, shapes, and colors it never saw before” (Hunting the Divine Fox: An Introduction to the Language of Theology [Minneapolis, MN: Winston, 1985], 16–17).Google Scholar
35 Wolterstorff, , Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 113–14, 116.Google Scholar
36 Dixon, John W. Jr., “What Should Religion Departments Teach?” Theology Today 46/4 (1990): 365.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Thomas J. J. Altizer has written: “our academic world has succeeded in creating a field of religion in which everything exists except the very center and ground of religion itself” (“Total Abyss and Theological Rebirth: The Crisis of University Theology” in Griffin, and Hough, , eds., Theology and the University, 175Google Scholar). See also Raschke's remark, “The outcome has been a strange sort of reverse Tertullianism—Jerusalem has been forsaken in favor of Athens” (“Religious Studies,” 134).
37 Nor should it be the case that the job security of one whose convictions changed during the course of his or her employment would somehow be in jeopardy, as an earlier reader of this paper wondered. See Schubert M. Ogden's discussion of recent statements by the American Association of University Professors in his “Theology in the University: The Question of Integrity” in Griffin, and Hough, , eds., Theology and the University, 67–80.Google Scholar A Religious Studies program which thought it important to have, say, a committed Mennonite on its faculty would have no option, should the incumbent change his or her convictions, but to go out and hire another one.
38 One reader wondered whether according to this paper one must be a “model Christian” to teach Christian theology, and by what criteria such a person would be selected. Of course not everyone who teaches about a religion must be a committed believer in that religion, but it would be inconsistent with the thesis of the paper to think that one could teach as a committed believer without actually believing. How much of a personal commitment is necessary? It is desirable from a pastoral standpoint that the Christian professor also be a fully-developed Christian in his or her private life as well. But since intellectual gifts and sanctity are not often given to an individual at the same time, the latter cannot be an academic consideration.
39 The literature on the testing of worldviews is large, and the issues involved cannot be discussed here. In general, however, I would expect it to be the case that differing theologies and worldviews would be relatively immune to small-scale empirical criticism, but capable of examination on the basis of consistency and comprehensiveness. “Is it defended in terms of its self-consistency, adequacy to the facts, or illuminating power (rather than in terms of the claim, whether explicit or implicit, that its basic ideas are revealed truths)?” (Griffin, , “Professing Theology,” 30Google Scholar). See also Barbour's remark: “There is increasing resistance to falsification as one moves from simple laws to limited theories, comprehensive theories, paradigms and finally metaphysical assumptions. Yet at none of these levels … can an accumulation of counter-evidence be completely ignored” [Myths, Models, and Paradigms, 130; see also 112-18). Other recent discussions include Gutting, , Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism, 114–22Google Scholar, and Placher, , Unapologetic Theology, 138–49.Google Scholar
40 Does this proposal mean that all religions and quasi-religious worldviews must somehow be represented? Clearly there are practical limits imposed by the size of Religious Studies programs in most universities. Although the argument of this paper does not entail any particular procedure for selecting religions to be included, I believe that most departments' focus should be on the religious traditions that have shaped Western culture, on the principle that it is more important to know one's own cultural forebears than those of others.