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‘Why the Academic Study of Religion?’ Motive and Method in the Study of Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Donald Wiebe
Donald Wiebe
Affiliation:
Trinity College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H8
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Extract

The methodological implications of the motives that underlie the study of religion and, more particularly, the academic study of religion have not, I think, received the attention they deserve. They are of the utmost importance, however, for the differences of motivation between the study of religion legitimated by the modern university and the scholarly study of religion that antedates it, sponsor radically different, if not mutually exclusive, approaches to its study. In asking why the study of religion is undertaken as an academic exercise – which is, after all, a comparatively recent development – I shall be attempting to delineate, to some extent, the relation of motive to method in what has come to be called Religious Studies. In clarifying that relation I hope also to show that Religious Studies – that is, the academic study of religion – must be a vocation in very much the same sense that Max Weber speaks of science as a vocation and, therefore, that such study must take as merely preliminary a ‘religious studies’ that is concerned only to ‘understand’ rather than to explain the phenomenon of Religion.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 403 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

page 403 note 1 I use the capitalized phrase ‘Religious Studies’ to designate the political reality of academic departments, schools, centres, institutes, etc. and not to characterize the style or approach of the study undertaken.

page 403 note 2 Weber, Max, ‘Science as a Vocation’ in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, pp. 129–156).Google Scholar It was originally published in Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1922, pp. 524–555). I use the notion of ‘vocation’ not, obviously, in its religious sense but rather to emphasize the stark contrast in aims and intentions between a ‘religious calling’ and a ‘scientific career’.

page 403 note 3 I have given brief attention to this contrast in my ‘Explanation and the Scientific study of religion’, Religion, V (1975) and ‘Theory and the Study of Religion’, Religion, XIII (1983). The position espoused is the precise opposite to that of Dougherty, D. L. in ‘Is Religious Studies Possible?’ in Religious Studies, XVII (1981, 295–309, especially p. 308).Google Scholar

page 403 note 4 The scholarly study of religion has a rather long history and it should be clearly distinguished from the narrower, more academic interest in religious phenomena that emerged in, roughly, the last quarter of the nineteenth century. See, e.g., Sharpe's, Eric J.Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975), 1975)Google Scholar, or Vries's, Jan deThe Study of Religion: A Historical Approach (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. 1967).Google Scholar

page 404 note 1 Important here is Peter Munz's distinction between ‘catechismic’ and ‘cognitive’ beliefs. Beliefs, that is, function not only cognitively but socially (i.e., non-cognitively). Beliefs have often survived falsification, he points out, because they constituted a catechism that served as a social bond amongst members of the group. Indeed, the catechismic function of beliefs depends upon the incorrectness of the beliefs: ‘To form small groups distinct from other small groups of the same biological species – to form pseudo-species – it was necessary to use propositional knowledge which differed essentially from propositional knowledge similarly used by another group. Only ‘false’ knowledge can, in this sense, be sufficiently exclusive of beings which belong to the same biological species. ‘Correct’ knowledge would not have been able to provide a criterion of exclusion, for correct knowledge could be shared by members of other societies’. (Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge, [London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1985; p. 300].) Membership of such a society, that is, depends on members being able to give not the correct answer to a genuinely cognitive question but rather the ‘correct’ answer to a catechismic question.

page 406 note 1 Weber, Max, op. cit.. 143.Google Scholar

page 406 note 2 The desire for ‘objective knowledge’ – what we might refer to as ‘cognitive intentionality’ – first emerges in Presocratic Greece. Belief/knowledge, that is, was for the first time released from the noncognitive/social function it had until then fulfilled in the structuring of a cohesive group. Changes in the economic, political and social complex of ancient Greek society provided opportunity for a truly cognitive apparatus to develop. Alternative kinds of social bonding, however, had not emerged so that the cognitive and non-cognitive uses of belief operated side by side. Nevertheless, the emergence of the more purely cognitive intentionality is the emergence of a new value that, like life itself, is its own justification. I have argued this claim in some detail in my (as yet unpublished) ‘In Two Minds: Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Greece.’ G. Thomson catches the ambiguity that must have existed quite clearly by noting that scientists and philosophers were only one section of the ruling class in Miletos and that they functioned in society at two distinct levels. Thus he writes: ‘These Milesian nobles had outgrown superstition in their private lives, but there was no question of abandoning it [religion/theology] as an instrument of public policy. (Aeschylus and Athens, [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973/1941; p. 152]

page 407 note 1 Weber, Max, op. cit. p. 152.Google Scholar

page 407 note 2 Ibid. pp. 1443–4.

page 407 note 3 Although my concern here is primarily with research and teaching in this field in the university setting it seems to me that it applies, in all essentials, to ‘the teaching of religion’ at the primary and secondary levels as well, although I shall not argue that matter here.

page 408 note 1 The concept of an ‘epistemic morality’ or ‘morality of scientific knowledge’ is quite appropriate although I do not here provide justification for its use. I refer the reader here to the use of notion in the philosophical literature. See references, e.g. in my ‘Is Religious Belief Problematic?’ Christian Scholar's Review, VII (1977), 33–52; especially note 5, p. 25.

page 408 note 2 My use of these notions follows that of Popper, K. R. in his two volume The Open Society and Its Enemies, (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)Google Scholar and in the essays in Conjectures and Refutations, (New York: Harper and Row, 1963.) I am not unaware of that vast body of literature from the Frankfurt School and other ‘hermeneutical’ type enterprises that argues the contrary claim. To argue the weaknesses of those claims here, however, is not possible. A good hint as to how such an argument might be developed, however, can be found in B. Nelson's comments on Habermas in his ‘On the Origins of Modernity: The Author's Point of View’, in his On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science and Civilization, Huff, T. E. (cd.) (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1881).Google Scholar

page 409 note 1 See, for example, Sperber, D., On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 11).Google Scholar

page 409 note 2 This notion is borrowed from Geertz's, C. ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 3–30).Google Scholar

page 409 note 3 On this score I am very much in agreement with D. Sperber's discussion of the nature of interpretation in ethnology. Interpretations are a species of nondescriptive representation of a culture based on a subjective understanding by the researcher. They are, Sperber suggests, faithful to the meaning of the phenomenon rather than mirroring exactly its directly observable character. They are not, therefore, in and of themselves adequate to the phenomenon concerned but neither are they wholly useless. They can be very helpful, he insists, when combined with ‘descriptive comments’ that allow for some intersubjective assessment of their adequacy to the phenomenon in question. See Sperber, op cit., especially chapter 1.

page 410 note 1 This is not, of course, to rule out ali possibility of such a reductionism, although a reductionism somewhat less crude than such a behaviourism. I have touched on this matter in my ‘The “Academic Naturalization” of Religious Studies: Intent or Pretence?’ (in Studies in Religion, XV 1986) and will not, therefore, elaborate further here. On the general question of the possibility of such reductionist moves in the social sciences, however, see especially Rosenberg's, AlexanderSociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).Google Scholar

page 411 note 1 On this score I find myself in serious disagreement with a number of scholars in the field. Time does not permit counter-argument here. However, grounds for the disagreement can be found in my response to a similar argument put forward by Smith, W. C.: ‘The Role of Belief in the Study of Religion: A Response to W. C. Smith’, Numen, XXVI (1979), 534–549.Google Scholar

page 411 note 2 This is a fairly common argument from a purely religious/theological perspective that, it seems to me, has some merit. When it is the conclusion of an argument in support of an academically legitimated study of religion(s), however, it makes the argument a reductio. On the former issue see, for example, Altizer's, Thomas J. J. ‘The Religious Meaning of Myth and Symbol’ in Altizer, Thomas J. J. et al. (eds.), Truth, Myth, and Symbol (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962)Google Scholar and on the latter see my ‘Does Understanding Religion Require “Religious Understanding”?’ in Tyloch, W. (ed.), Current Progress in the t1ethodology of the Science of Religion (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1984/1985).Google Scholar

page 412 note 1 For possibilities of developing the argument in this direction see Richard, W. Comstock, ‘A Behavioral Approach to the Sacred: Category Formation in Religious Studies’, The journal of the American Academy of Religion, XLIX (1981), 625–643.Google Scholar

page 413 note 1 Weber, Max, op. cit. p. 146.Google Scholar

page 413 note 2 Cox, H., Religion in the Secular City: Towards a Post-modern Theology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 229).Google Scholar

page 413 note 3 See, for example, his Historical Fundamentals and the Study of Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1985; especially chapter 4, ‘The History of Religions and the Critique of Ideologies’).