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Ústav
religionistiky
Robert Cummings Neville. Religious Studies and Theological
Studies, in: Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXI/2
1993, s. 185 ­ 1999
FRVŠ
1890/2005
Téma: Religionistika versus apologetika
The privilege of addressing you this evening is one for which I am deeply
grateful. As most of you know, the presidency of the Academy involves a certain small
amount of work in addition to presenting this address. What you may not know is that this
work puts one in touch with some of the most thoughtful, effective, and good willed leaders in
our business Leadership at all levels of the Academy is important, in part because of the topic
I am about to call to your attention. The responsibility on this particular occasion is a deep
one because the Academy is at a crisis point in its self-definition, which in turn is critical for
the definition of the study of religion. The crisis has been building for many years, as is the
nature of such things, but it has been given sharp focus in the report on the profession by Ray
L. Hart published in the Winter, 1991, issue of the Journal of the American Academy of
Religion (Hart). The visible part of the crisis is the feeling of many people engaged in
theological studies, particularly those who themselves are committed to the practice of
religion, that they are not welcome in the Academy. They believe that the Academy defines
the public objectivity of religious studies in terms of Enlightenment skepticism and holds in
contempt the kind of thinking that requires long years of yogic or spiritual practice and that in
the Christian tradition has been called "faith seeking understanding."
Often the discontent centers on whether the kinds of theological education appropriate
for seminaries find their professional home in the Academy. But the discontent is also felt' by
professors in liberal arts colleges who see their teaching task as helping students become more
sophisticated in their faith.
Prior to the complaints from people in theological studies, the chief complaint about
the Academy came from some who believe religious studies does indeed require skepticism
and distance from religious practice, the complaint, namely, that the leadership is still too
fixed on the Christian theological model. The leadership in all my years of involvement,
however, has attempted consciously to guarantee representation from all perspectives. That
attempt has been overwhelmingly successful. No one approach to the study of religion
dominates the leadership of the Academy, and nearly every approach that can be identified is
represented. The result is the robust diversity and intellectual power that characterizes our
regional and annual meetings. The life of the Academy is by no means in crisis but is
flourishing. The crisis is in the sense of identity.
I propose to address the crisis of identity by putting forward eight theses. That might
seem a lot for a Saturday evening but it is eighty seven less than the most famous bunch of
theses. (The reference to Luther is theological, that to counting is scientific.) My point is not
to secure agreement on the theses but to deepen the discussion of the identity of the field of
religious studies and to encourage reflection on how each of us relates to that identity.
Thesis 1. Religious studies, as properly represented in the American Academy of
Religion, comprises all those disciplines and angles of inquiry that individually can contribute
to the understanding of some aspect of religion.
By "religion" I mean whatever any of those disciplines or approaches might mean by
religion, including any listing of historical religions, any social science criteriological
definitions such as having social maintenance functions, rituals, myths or cosmology, or
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spiritual practices. Dimensional analyses need also to be included, such as the religious
dimension of art, morals, politics, philosophy, and so forth. So do definitions of aspects of
religion that arise from specific disciplines, such as psychology of religion, anthropology,
sociology, and literature. Disciplines are also part of the field if their subject matter includes
elements of religion, such as philology and hermeneutics for dealing with texts that have
religious import, archaeology for dealing with religious relics and architecture, history for the
study of religions in history and for the history of religions, and the constructive, normative,
and critical disciplines for the analysis and assessment of religions' suppositions, claims,
cultural consequences, and obligations, those disciplines often called theological.
The contradictory of this thesis is the claim that some of the aforementioned
disciplines or angles of study do not belong properly to religious studies. This might be
because their definitions of religion are mistaken or beside the point, because their
methodology or approach is faulty, because their sense of understanding or explanation is
inappropriate, or for a host of other reasons. Indeed, any approach to the study of religion is
vulnerable to criticism. All of the unimpeachable standard disciplines themselves have altered
through criticism over the decades or centuries.
But whether a discipline or an angle of inquiry does or does not belong properly to
religious studies is a question within the conversation of religious studies itself, or within the
discipline itself insofar as it attempts to understand religion. Therefore all these disciplines
and approaches properly belong to the study of religion until they are convincingly
demonstrated to be inappropriate. That demonstration would be a proper part of the study of
religion.
Thesis 2. The contributing disciplines and angles of inquiry do not need to
communicate with one another in order to do their work; but they do need so to communicate
if they are to present themselves within the Academy as part of the field.
Each discipline or approach has a kind of integrity of its own, with self-definition, selfcriticism,
and a kind of ongoing self-regulation concerning what to study and how. The selfregulation
is based upon its history, upon the serendipity of new finds and new ideas, and
upon a more or less well-defined community of peers constituting a guild or an intellectual
project. The field of religious studies, in the corporate person of the Academy, must always be
careful not to dictate what a discipline should be doing, what research counts as legitimate,
and what teaching is to be respected within the component disciplines. In a certain respect,
what the component disciplines and approaches do is a private matter within those
communities, for their work must be sensitive to their own internal dialectic.
The contradictory of this part of the thesis is the horrendous prospect of censorship
and delegitimation. We have observed the tragedy of our colleagues in the American
Philosophical Association, who have demeaned themselves by claiming that their
philosophical opponents are not mistaken but illegitimate, "not real philosophy." May the
Adityas, Vasus, Rudras, Asvins, and Maruts keep us from that disgrace!
In another respect, however, any of the disciplines or approaches within religious
studies does need to communicate with other disciplines and approaches if it wants to present
itself as more than private, as saying more than "this is what we say religion is," as claiming
that something true and valuable is known here about religion that should be respected by
anyone interested. The field of religious studies is not itself a discipline but a topic area within
which many approaches make themselves public to one another and thereby represent their
work as true, or at least as less false than what previously had been asserted. Although in their
private mode the disciplines have their own professional associations and need not regard
their topic as even being the same topic as studied by other disciplines, in the private mode
the disciplines make no claim for truth that anyone outside the private community logically
should respect. To make a truth claim is to present one's topic as well as one's claims as
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public, and to acknowledge that other disciplines too can address that topic. To gain publicity,
the disciplines do need to communicate with one another with all the efforts of translation, of
objectifying assumptions and methods, and of learning one another's disciplines that
communication requires.
The contradictory of this part of the thesis is the claim that the results of a discipline's
inquiry are objective and public in themselves irrespective of whether they bear upon any
other approach. They may in fact be valid and the validity might be appreciated by all who
work within the discipline. But unless a common discussion allows the assertions to be
expressed and explored more broadly, the validity cannot be asserted objectively and
publically with reference to a topic or subject matter, such as religion, that a discipline shares
with other approaches.
Thesis 3. Objectivity in religious studies consists in the sustain ability of results
through a process of criticism that makes the results vulnerable to correction. The complexity
of this philosophic thesis requires clarification through some distinctions that people ought
not have to think through after dinner and drinks but that are at the heart of what makes
religious studies academically objective. First is the distinction between truth and objectivity.
Truth, as people have said since Aristotle, is the property of assertions that assert of their
subject what the subject is and deny of it what it is not (Metaphysics .1V.7.1011b26). To put
the point in more contemporary terms, truth is the characteristic of interpretations that
represent the interpreted subject appropriately in the respects in which the interpretation
interprets the subject. The meaning of truth, which I have just indicated, is different from the
criteria by which we can tell when an assertion is true, a topic to which we shall return in a
moment.
Whether an interpretation is true is a function of the reality it interprets; either the
reality is as the interpretation asserts, in the respect in which the interpretation is made, or
reality is not that. An interpretation is true or false whether the interpreter or an interpreting
community knows it or not. There are two relative modalities of truth, however, private and
public. A truth is private, relatively speaking, when the interpretive context in which a case
can be made for it is an individual or a group with a closed discourse. A truth is public,
relatively speaking, when cases can be made for it in a variety of interpretive contexts, indeed,
in any interpretive context that might be relevant. The relativity of the private-public
distinction is illustrated in that an interpretation might be publically true within a specialized
discipline, available for correction by all who practise the discipline's methods, at the same
time that the interpretation is private with respect to the other disciplines whose differing
methods might provide other interpretive contexts. The previous thesis asserted that the
various disciplines of religious studies might proceed quite well within their individual
publics but that they must communicate with each other if their interpretations are to be public
as pan of the field of religious studies.
The criteria for determining whether an interpretation is true depend on any or all of
the conditions that allow us to engage the subject matter. In very limited contexts, truth might
be a characteristic we are willing to assert because a given method has been followed. But
those contexts are indeed limited because methods themselves are always up for criticism. A
number of years ago Van Harvey, following Stephen Toulmin, characterized the process of
appraising claims according to diverse criteria as making a case." I know of no way to
improve upon that general slogan. The point is that different kinds of cases are relevant to
different subject matters and also to different disciplines. For an interpretation arising within
one discipline to make itself public to other disciplines is for it to be prepared to make a case
for itself that is accessible within the approach of the other disciplines, or to show how the
other disciplines ought to respect the original case.
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Objectivity is not merely being public but is rather a subjunctive property of a truthclaim
with its cases. Objectivity is the sustain ability of the claim through a process of
criticism that would correct the claim if correction is needed. Objectivity is thus not an actual
status but a status concerning how the claim would fare in diverse circumstances. When a new
interpretive context does correct an interpretation, we see that the claim was not as objective
as previously thought but now has been corrected and can be taken to be objective until yet
another correction seems needed.
The philosophical supposition behind this point is that human thinking is always in the
middle, always assuming things that need correction and sometimes finding that correction.
The question to ask about candidates for knowledge is not whether they are derived from a
sure foundation nor whether they have passed all the tests. The question is whether they are
vulnerable to correction and are sustained while vulnerable. An intellectual discipline is
distinguished from random thoughts by its methods of making itself vulnerable to correction.
Attempts to render truth-claims invulnerable to correction are desperately mistaken.
Objectivity in religious studies then comes when its component disciplines and approaches
make themselves vulnerable to correction by each other. Of course not all disciplines are
relevant for the correction of others, and not all attempts at criticism do more than beg the
issue. Whether a criticism is a valid correction is itself a matter for which a case must be
made. But the objectivity of a truth-claim requires its vulnerability to correction. A claim is
objective to the extent that the cases to be made for it can be sustained through critical
processes that would correct it. The criteria for determining whether the claim is true can be
exercised only in a public and objective context.
Thesis 4. The phrase ,,theological studies" comprises those disciplines within religious
studies that deal with first-order normative issues in religion.
By "first-order normative issues" I mean the matters about which religions intend to
suppose or assert something true, good, or obligatory insofar as these are religiously
important. These suppositions or assertions include characterizations of religiously important
ultimate realities, for instance God, the Absolute, Brahman, the Tao, Principle, human origins
and destiny. They also include matters of belief and practice for the living of the religious life.
And they include nonnative analyses of the religiously important aspects of history, culture,
the arts, and society. Theological studies of course begin by analyzing what religions assume
or assert about these normative issues, and theology in this broad sense is generally sensitive
to the nuances and variations of symbolic religious meanings in both illocutionary and
performative senses. But theological studies also go on to examine what ought to be said
about the true, the good, and the obligatory in nonnative religious issues, to assess whether
religions have it right, and to make practical judgments about how to face those issues both
within and without institutionalized religious practice. Theological studies in this sense are
nonnative disciplines, going far beyond description or any attempt to limit themselves to
value free analysis. Thus they are not immediately continuous with those disciplines which
believe their objectivity consists in value-neutrality, and they need to make a case for
nonnative judgment to people schooled to attempt to shun it. Nevertheless, like the valueneutral
approaches the theological disciplines ought to be publicly objective in the sense
defined in the third thesis, namely, that their nonnative judgments need to make themselves
vulnerable to criticism from all sides and to sustain themselves through the process of
correction.
The relevant oven contradictory of the thesis that theological studies make normative
judgments about religious matters is the claim that there are no publically sustainable,
objectively correctable, nonnative judgments to be made. Admitting the difficulty of making
such judgments, the claim they cannot be made at all is itself extremely difficult to sustain. It
founders on the self-referential question of its own truth. And it founders on the broadly
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accepted content of many normative claims such as "might. does not make right" and "justice
is obligatory and its failure defines fault."
The relevant covert contradictory of the thesis is the claim that normative theological
judgments always unfairly superimpose one person's, group's, or religion's way of valuing
things on others'. Sometimes this claim is made by pure relativists who say that no normative
judgments are better than others, a position hard to sustain normatively. At other times it
reflects an historical observation that the normative judgments are imposed because of the
power of the imposer, not because of the validity of the arguments justifying the theology.
These observations are not limited to the power politics of imperialism, but also apply to the
inevitable historical power of an established discipline. Nevertheless, the public debate within
religious studies, as in any academic field, is precisely to sniff out and identify the unfair
influences that power alone might have on the persuasiveness of argument. The more
antecedently powerful an established mode of analysis, the more vulnerable it is to criticism
on that account, and the more ready it should be to adopt corrections where it is shown that
power corrupts its arguments.
Thesis 5. Both individuals (including those who are not religiously affiliated) and
religious communities need intellectual guidance and critical reflection on religiously
important issues, and rightly can turn to theological studies to pursue that in disciplined ways.
The bite of this thesis is that there are practical religious as well as purely intellectual reasons
for undertaking theological studies. The practical religious reasons most often give particular
historical shape to theological studies that they might not have when pursued for purely
academic reasons. An individual, for instance, even one who is unaffiliated with any religious
tradition and alienated from the common religions of the culture, might ask theological
questions because of an encounter with great suffering or tragedy, or to make sense of a
profound mystical experience, or to cope with a child's plan to marry someone from a
different religion. Religious communities, in turn, usually establish institutions that include
thinkers and an environment for theological reflection for the sake of acquiring the best
normative theology possible; these institutions include schools, universities, seminaries,
monasteries, temple complexes, ecclesiastieal bureaucracies, and religious conferences and
councils.
There are two important contradictories to this complex thesis. The first is that
religious people do not really need theological study because religion is performative rather
than intellectual. The argument here is that our understanding of religion has been skewed by
the Christian, indeed by the Protestant, preoccupation with theological orthodoxy.
Orthopraxy, rather, is at the heart of religion, and is even at the heart of what masquerades
itself as concern for true belief. This argument against the religious importance of truth has
some small historical merit, because indeed the shape of theological studies, as well as of
religious studies, has been skewed by the Protestant Christian interest in doctrine and belief.
Nevertheless, orthopraxy by itself is sufficient only under wholly static conditions when no
problems are perceived and no alternatives present themselves. In all other conditions
orthopraxy is underdetermined if praxis is to be related to concrete circumstances, and the
normative issues of theological studies are required to be addressed in order to determine
orthopraxy. This holds for religiously alienated individuals as well as for organized religious
communities, and neither individuals nor communities can fail to be affected in our time by
modernization and other changing conditions that call for theological reflection.
The second and more important contradictory is that theological studies are not the
right place to go in order to gain practical religious intellectual guidance. Rather, guidance
must be sought from revelatory sources that, while not necessarily a-cultural, are transcendent
of those cultural norms for good thinking that guide theological studies. This is an extremely
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complicated argument that has been fought out in our own time with immense practical
consequences in American education.
To simplify the matter for the sake of brevity, the argument against theological studies
on behalf of revelation has been associated with Karl Barth's kerygmatic theology, and the
defense of theological studies as critical reflection on first-order normative religious issues
has been associated with Paul Tillich. The differences between those two Protestant
theological giants have been unfairly exaggerated. Nevertheless, in American academic
politics, during the two decades after the Second World War, the Barthians attained to power
in many of the major Protestant seminaries and delegitimated their Tillichian opponents as
"mere philosophers" caught by the religion of culture, not real theologians at all. The
Tillichians and many others who were associated with them often left or were forced out of
seminaries to found liberal arts departments of religious studies, not based on a seminary
model but on the critical examination of religion in culture. Although the Tillichians and their
theological colleagues were genuinely theological in the sense. of asking first -order
normative questions, they were soon joined by social scientists, philologists, comparativists,
and non-Christian area or tradition specialists to make up religious studies departments as we
know them today. There are analogues to the Barth-Tillich distinction in Roman Catholicism
and Judaism. If history is the judge, the Tillichians seem to have won the day within Christian
theology with the argument that alleged revelatory spirits must be tested, and the tests come
back to the complex business of making a case for your revelation.
It may be true historically to say that the field has been won by the conception of
theological studies as critical reflection on normative, first-order religious issues, and that this
conception can easily acknowledge and honor revelations of many types. Nevertheless, there
is a deep uneasiness on the part of theologians in nearly every religious tradition that the
larger public theological discussion will not honor their revelation. Part of the discomfort in
the Academy felt by some people associated with theological studies is the belief that they
should not have to submit the revelatory or authoritative base of their tradition's practice to
public examination. The next two theses address aspects of this point.
Thesis 6. Theological studies need to relate to the history and symbols of concrete
religious traditions, analyzing their suppositions in context and reconstructing them in tenns
of the contemporary nonnative discussion.
Both theoretical and practical considerations justify this thesis. The theoretical ones have to
do with maintaining a continuity' between the most abstract concepts used in theological
studies and their origins in early and late symbolic guiding principles of behavior in religious
matters. Abstraction is always a matter of selection, and critical abstraction controls for
normative judgments about what is worthwhile to select out and what can be left behind. Even
the most abstract notions, such as Emptiness, Being, Nothingness, Goodness, Obligation,
Harmony, Suffering, Sin, and sometimes' God, are distillates of matters that are religiously
interesting in concrete practice. Perhaps philosophy of religion is well defined as the critical
study of what is left out and what is carried along in religious abstraction; in this sense,
philosophy of religion is a crucial part of theological studies.
The contradictory of the thesis along its theoretical lines is the claim that theologians
can just make up their symbols as they need them, without respect for history and traditional
developments. The answer to the contradictory is that any symbols have depths like
archaeological layers and that instant symbol-making cannot control for the hidden
implications of these. Even the sheer rejection of a symbol requires knowing what is implied
in the rejection if it is to be sustainable while vulnerable to correction.
The practical reason for relating theological studies to the concrete symbols and
significant practices of religion is that this addresses the real context within which religious
questions need practical theological guidance. A theologian thinking in and for a religious
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community needs to appropriate and articulate the symbols of the community's cultural
linguistic system in a normative contemporary mode. Perhaps much reconstruction is required
in order to appropriate the traditional symbols into a normatively defensible theological claim.
Perhaps also the traditional symbols need to be greatly supplemented to address present realities,
and perhaps they need to be rejected or sharply modified in the present situation. But
unless they are addressed, the theologian is not dealing with the religiously important firstorder
normative issues as they are faced by the religious community. To be what Christians
call a Church Theologian, or what might more universally be called a theologian within and
for a religious tradition, is critically to appropriate and reconstruct the tradition's symbols.
The contradictory of the practical side of the thesis is the claim that religious identity need not
have a past to continue, reform, or reject. But without a past there is no responsibility, and
religious judgments lose any practical relevance. To be religious just for the present is to be
religious in theory alone.
In their efforts to relate practically to the symbols of concrete religious traditions,
theological studies are often greatly aided by those disciplines within religious studies that
sometimes eschew normative first order issues. Historical, comparative, and social scientific
approaches give access to the symbols and their concrete roles through history that sometimes
are obscured by theological studies that jump prematurely to normative judgments.
Thesis 7. Theological studies need to be public and objective in the same sense that
applies to religious studies generally, and religious communities should have just as great a
commitment to this as should scholars with purely intellectual motives.
To be able to sustain one's case while being vulnerable to correction from any angle is the
only ground one might have for asserting that normative claims on first-order issues are true.
Precisely because the first-order issues often have to do with what people ought to be, do, and
believe in religious matters, there is a great practical importance to the pursuit of truth in
theological studies. Theological truth might well be a different kind of truth from classifying,
reporting, or describing. If it is, a case needs to be made for that, such as Lindbeck and others
have made, and that case examined. Then whatever criteria for truth are appropriate to
theology's kind of truth need to be applied and the results assessed. To the extent a theologian
can sustain a case under conditions of vulnerability, to that extent the case can lay claim to
being true and it should be respected by anyone who takes the trouble to follow the issues. To
the extent the case cannot be sustained, its public and objective claim to truth is in question.
When an important first-order religious claim is in question, religious individuals and
communities, as well as scholars, have a vital interest in pressing ahead for the truth.
The rough contradictory of this is that the criteria for truth do not lie in making a case
but in the authority for the source of truth. But an authority needs to be identified and
justified, and the appeal to authority itself needs to be justified. Most thinkers who appeal to
authority address all these issues, which is to say they make a case for their authority. Bur if
the task of justification is dismissed with the assertion that the authority is authoritative and
that's that, then the claim to truth is implicitly abandoned and a retreat is made to the claim
that this is what I or my community believes is true. That fact that something is believed is an
historical or sociological observation about the situation, not a nonnative claim that the belief
is true and that anyone should believe it.
A subtler version of the contradictory is that the authority of revelation cannot fairly
be appreciated and judged unless the critic enters into the community of practice and faith and
gains a crucial probative experience. Edward Conze, the great British Buddhist, argued that
no religion based on a yogic practice could be understood by a Westerner whose cognitive
model is science because they respect very different ideas of experience (see Conze:17-21).
For the Western science model, experience has to do with sensation, and one can learn to
construct instruments for sensing and to interpret the sensations mathematically with a decade
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or less in graduate school. For the yogic model, however, experience means the cumulative
wisdom that results from physical discipline, from habits of healthy and moral living, from
years of cultivated associations with more experienced people, and from many decades of
meditation, contemplation, or prayer. Similarly it can be argued that one must be an observant
orthodox Jew in order to understand Judaism, or a practising Christian in order to derive the
understanding for which faith is seeking. The yogic requirement of experience so common to
many religions stands opposed to the Enlightenment sense of experience as proving or
disproving things by a quick positivistic test. And it is that Enlightenment mentality that some
religiously committed thinkers believe characterizes religious studies.
But quite to the contrary, the experiential yoga argument is a powerful public critique
of Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism in religious studies. The range of valid
applications of Enlightenment thinking is far narrower than some people once believed, and
this point is being widely recognized. All this is to say that the varieties of the faith-seekingunderstanding
position have sustained their case that a fair judgment concerning some kinds
of theological matters requires participation in their community of practice and belief. For a
theological claim to be publically vulnerable does not mean that it must be reduced to what is
easily grasped by an external observer. The state of religious studies now is that the
conditions of authentic dialogue among adepts in different religions are far from established;
moreover even the categories according to which theologies can be compared are only
beginning to be formulated. Because of the relatively primitive state of religious studies in
these regards, public vulnerability is difficult to attain. Nevertheless, such vulnerability should
be sought if the truth of theological matters is important. Scholars of theological studies with
concern for the authority of their own tradition should not fear that it could legitimately be
condemned by being subjected to inappropriate external standards; they should fear rather that
the work of making their claims publicly vulnerable will be too hard for anyone to bother.
Thesis 8. The field of religious studies embraces all the world's religions, not only as
subject matter but as presenting scholarly traditions, including theological studies.
Religious studies as embodied in the American Academy of Religion developed at first very
much as an American phenomenon, with historical conditions shaping its course, such as the
initial focus on the teaching of Christian religion, the disputes between Barthians and
Tillichians, the effects of Vatican II, and the conversations between Christians and Jews. The
dialectic of public objectivity has driven the field to widen so as to include all religions within
its survey, and that same dialectic requires respect for the styles and standards of scholarship
and critical reflection in all those traditions. Respect, of course, does not imply acceptance.
Just as Western styles of scholarship are constantly changing, as from the narrow rationalism
and empiricism of Enlightenment thinking to richer kinds of participant-observer critical
reflection and speculation, so are the styles and standards of scholarship in other traditions in
transition. Modernization is affecting other religions' senses of self-understanding as it did
those of Judaism and Christianity a century and a half ago. Moreover, the dialogue among
religious traditions itself is affecting their senses of inquiry and understanding. All styles and
standards of inquiry and understanding, including those typical of Western intellectual
culture, need to sustain themselves under conditions of vulnerability to all angles of criticism.
The discomfort currently felt within the Academy by scholars who believe their faith is not
respected in public academic discourse, or that it is threatened if made vulnerable, will be
magnified many-fold in the case of scholars faithful to traditions other than Judaism and
Christianity. If the dialectical development of religious studies from its origins in Western
disciplines of thought requires it to make itself public and vulnerable to other traditions of
disciplined inquiry as represented in other religious traditions, then we must face the question
of the integration of theological studies into religious studies squarely.
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Discomfort is always felt when the assumptions of one's project are objectified and
placed in a larger context. The discomfort is intensified when one's own symbols and heroes
are not predominantly honored in the larger context. So we may understand those among us
who believe their scholarship and religious practice are not honored in a context that prizes
Enlightenment skepticism. So we may also understand those who identify with the science of
religion and believe the context is preformed and controlled by a theological agenda. My
remarks are intended to intensify the feelings of discomfort even more on both sides, because
they call for an engagement of the issues at every level.
Let us take pride in belonging to an academic profession blessed with such diversity of
disciplines and angles of inquiry that its subject matter cannot for long be obscured by the
limitations of anyone.
Let us take comfort from the dual tolerance of religious studies, that it encourages each
approach to work out its own development on its own terms, and that it welcomes each
approach to present its results for scrutiny and use in the larger field.
Let us take courage to formulate our inquiries so that they are vulnerable to correction,
both within our disciplines and within the more general dialectic of religious studies.
Let us acknowledge that the normative issues of faith and practice, intellectual and
performative, verbally articulated and danced through space, are susceptible to critical
analysis, disciplined formulation, speculative reconstruction, and normative valuation. In this
acknowledgment, let us honor the sources of authority and revelation while engaging in
critical discussion of how they are understood and justified.
Let us embrace the human need for practical answers to religious questions, and the
peculiar shapes this human need gives to theological studies both for communities and for
individuals. In this embrace, let us not confuse practical need or traditional inertia with good
reasons for addressing the normative issues one way rather than another.
Let us admit the necessity for theological studies to come to terms with the concrete
symbols embodied in religious scriptures, traditions, and experience, recognizing both that the
symbols need to be understood in terms of their original and developing contexts and that the
critical evaluation and reconstruction of them is an essential part of theological study. In this
admission, let us recognize the mutual needs of theological studies and the non-theological
disciplines of religious studies for one another.
Let us insist that if theological studies are to present their judgments as true,
interesting, valid, and worthy of respect, they should engage in making vulnerable cases for
them that all the perspectives on the field might address. In this insistence let us be aware that
not everyone will be willing to enter into religious life and practice sufficiently to be able to
judge a case, but that the need to do so is respected by all.
Let us move forward from the study of the world's religions by the scholarly traditions
of the West alone to the engagement of mutual understanding, of critical objections to
Western scholarship, and of new disciplines and languages that might embrace a larger
culture of inquiry. In this step into a genuinely omnicultural understanding of religious
studies, let us not abandon the hard-won methods of making our inquiries vulnerable to
correction that have given Western scholarship its sympathies, sharpness, and dispassionate
piety before the facts. Bur let us also expect that an enlarged field of mutual engagement will
change us all for a better that cannot now be told. Excellence in the study of religion is
vulnerability to correction.