Welcome to the Tuesday edition of the Coffee Hour at Street Prophets. This is an open thread where we can discuss what’s happening in our lives, what we’ve been working on, and our opinions on current events. Street Prophets is, of course, a group at the corner of religion and politics and so I thought it would be appropriate to bring up the subject of theology.
First, some background: I am currently working on a new book that deals with the origins of religion and language. One of the chapters in this book will deal with the topic of how we study religion. What follows has been borrowed from this chapter.
One of the most common ways of studying religion is theology in which the focus is generally on a single religion, generally from the viewpoint of a believer. It is not uncommon to find theologians assuming that there is only one valid religion and that the religions of other people are either not valid or they are not really religions. It is not uncommon, for example, to find Christian theologians who adamantly refuse to consider Buddhism, Confucianism, or Daoism as religions, usually dismissing them as “just philosophies.”
One of the errors of theology in looking at other religions has been to define religion narrowly: the religion of the theologian is therefore religion and all other religions must have the characteristics of this religion or they are not true religions. As a result, non-indigenous ideas are often superimposed on other religions with no concern for cultural differences. Since the central concern for Christianity is a god and the worship of a god, Christian theologians mistakenly (or ethnocentrically) superimpose their concept of god upon Buddha in the Asiatic religions, upon Gitche Manitou in the Native American religions.
German theologian Gerd Ludemann, in an article published in Free Inquiry (Oct/Nov 2005) writes:
“Theology becomes a valid academic discipline insofar as it employs the historical-critical method’s three presuppositions of causality, the potential validity of analogies, and reciprocal relationship between historical phenomena.”
Ludemann goes on to write:
“The scholar of religion must steer clear of ideologies, but he or she is obliged to use the methods and insights of the sciences and humanities, including those derived from such neighboring disciplines as sociology, psychology, and ethnology, for their illumination of historical phenomena is often decisive.”
This is an open thread: feel free to talk about theology or politics or current event or something really important, like what’s for dinner.