The study of religion is not the same thing as the practice
of faith, and therein lies the problem.
THOMAS A. IDINOPULOS, Professor of Religion at Miami University of Ohio, is the author
of Jerusalem Blessed, Jerusalem Cursed and Weathered by Miracles: A History
of Palestine from Bonaparte to Muhammed Ali to Ben-Gurion and the Mufti (Ivan R. Dee,
1991 and 1998, respectively). His articles in Cross Currents include
"Dostoyevsky's Criminal Heroes" (Summer 1975) and "Christianity and the
Holocaust" (Fall 1978).
"Religion. . . . means the voluntary subjection of
oneself to God."
---The Catholic Encyclopaedia, 1913
"We have learned more about 'the religions,'
but this has made us perhaps less. . . . aware
of what it is that we. . . . mean by 'religion.' " ---Wilfred Cantwell Smith, 1962
I begin with two epigraphs. The first, which speaks for itself, is useful in pointing
to the transcendent dimension of religion. Today increasingly, we who are students and
teachers of religion are in danger of ignoring this dimension. The second epigraph is
drawn from Wilfred Cantwell Smith's excellent study of the dilemma facing any serious
study of religion.(1) I should express the dilemma
this way: our rationally based academic study of religion must be the study of what is
observable, which includes historical knowledge of the rituals, mythologies, religious
communities, ideas, teachings, institutions, arts, architecture. But religion is not
exhausted by the observable. There is another dimension called the nonobservable, which is
the source of religion's purpose and meaning. It is the failure to recognize the
difference between the observable and the nonobservable, confusing one with the other or
by denying one in behalf of the other, that confounds our understanding of religion.
What are the difficulties in understanding religion? Begin with the multiplicity of
religions. History shows a bewildering variety of religions, cults, sects, denominational
developments, and spiritual movements of every sort. Taken together, the world's religions
reflect the geographic, social, and linguistic diversity of the planet itself. While no
scholar can be expected to know about all these religions, anyone seriously studying any
of them will hunt for some principle, definition, or criterion of meaning that identifies
the "one in the many." What should we understand by "religion" amid
the study of religions?
The question inevitably leads to comparison, a rational seeking of the intelligible,
common element or pattern of meaning in a group of otherwise diverse entities. Comparison
among religions assumes some sort of commonality among religions, a very big and perhaps
faulty assumption. Unfortunately, most comparisons of religion seem to consist less in the
discernment of commonality than in the imposition of it. Whenever, for example, different
religions are compared according to such notions as deity, eternity, grace, judgment,
salvation, and so on, selected criteria of meaning are used to organize data rather than
to discern a pattern within them.
If there is something common to religions that makes useful comparison possible, it is
not obvious to everyone. This should not surprise us if we recognize what Smith called
"the inebriating variety of man's religious life."(2) Today, increasingly, religion scholars are moving toward area studies,
which eschew comparison in favor of what is distinct or unique in any ethno-cultural
configuration called religion.
The more we learn about religions, the more we appreciate not their similarities but
their differences and some are important. The religion of ancient Israel, for example, was
shaped by the preexisting religious culture of the ancient Near East; but Israelite
religion is not finally understood without grasping how and why the Israelites
distinguished their deity, Yahweh, from the deities of Canaan. Another example:
Christianity was mothered by first century apocalyptic Judaism, but (as the present-day
Jesus-studies industry demonstrates) the uniqueness of the Christian religion is wrapped
in the mystery of how and why the person of Jesus inspired (if not actually caused) a
religion separate and distinct from first century Judaism to come into being.
To take a more extreme example of how differences more than similarities are crucial in
shaping and understanding a religion, take the case of Theravada Buddhism. Here is a
something called "religion" which is not a religion. Although Theravada Buddhism
is usually included in any book on the world's religions, it is not theistic, recognizes
no sacred being or beings, and does not officially encourage worship of Buddha or any
"higher being" (despite popular veneration of the Buddha-ideal). Theravada
Buddhism appears to be a technique or program for human self-purification or
self-fulfillment or self-negation. If the word religion is attached to Theravada Buddhism,
it must be done so loosely as to allow the differences from other religions to prevail.
What then are we to do about the books like those of the late Alan Watts, Aldous
Huxley, and more recently Huston Smith, that stress the similarities of religion? Such
works will always be in demand because human beings want to believe that there is an inner
core of common religious meaning that provides an intelligible unifying structure of
meaning to the bewildering multiplicity of world religions. No matter how much we stress
the differences among religions, the public desire for assurance about religious unity
will inspire authors to continue to invent overarching pseudo-philosophical categories
like "Eternal Wisdom," "Universal Spirit," or "Cosmic Soul,"
and promote them as the "truth" to which the various religions point.
Perhaps there is a universal religious truth and perhaps there is not. If there is,
however, I believe we should look for it not in what a religion asserts as truth
but in how it asserts its truth. As we shall see in discussing W. C. Smith's
ideas, it is form not content that religions have in common.
There are other problems in comparing religions. Comparison proceeds through an act of
abstraction by detaching a religion from its cultural matrix and viewing it as a discrete
set of symbols, myths, ritual ceremonies, and verbally stated beliefs or teachings. This
practice reduces religion to a set of meanings, principles, or truths. The result is a
kind of intellectualized scholars' religion, which can be discussed, taught, and written
about. The only question is whether or not this scholars' religion bears relationship to
the religion which human beings live by on a daily basis.
I can illustrate scholars' religion by my own experience as a graduate student at the
University of Chicago Divinity School more than thirty years ago. My professors, with a
few notable exceptions, approached the teaching of Christianity on the basis of what
Christians believe or have believed. Thus the study and teaching of Christianity, and
hence the understanding of it, was based almost exclusively on formal doctrines or the
belief-content of the religion. What interested my professors was the Christian religion
taken as a set of formal confessional and theological meanings, together with the
theoretical methods or philosophical ideas which could illuminate and extend those truths.
I cannot say that my professors showed much interest in the thoughts, feelings, and
practices of Christians believers. They did not pay much attention to Christianity as a
practiced religion. Virtually no attention was paid to the diversity of Christian
expression in different cultures. In fact, religion per se was hardly studied, except in
the History of Religions field, which, for all the attention paid to myth, ritual, and
symbol, was top-heavy with methodology and theory.
It is remarkable how the trends of study in our profession have changed in the thirty
years since I left Chicago. Today, I would say that not Christian theology but the
Christian religion in its cultural context is what scholars want to know about and what
students want to learn about. This does not mean that confessional beliefs, doctrines, and
theological ideas are not relevant, but they are now put on the same footing as church
festivals, ritual practices, and the ordinary day-to-day habits of faith that distinguish
one Christian from another.
I think this is a healthy development. When emphasis shifts away from what a Christian
believes or does not believe, we can begin to understand the power and meaning of
Christianity in a given culture, at a certain time. In other words, I should say that a
better way to ascertain Christian belief is to focus on how Christians actually live their
lives. I say this on the basis of years spent with Greek villagers who, when asked what
they believe, can hardly answer in any precise way. But ask them how they would identify
themselves as Greek Orthodox and you will hear a recital of ritual observances and
traditional acts of faith that leave no doubt that their faith is not a matter of what is
believed or thought about, but rather what is done or felt or imagined. For such villagers
the daily life of faith is not reducible to or equatable with a set of formal beliefs. The
academic or pedagogical implications here are enormous. When professors teach Christianity
as a matter of beliefs, ideas, and institutions, they may be teaching something that is
not at all equivalent to the religion practiced by the people who claim the Christian
religion as their own. But if they were to teach Christianity as practiced, they would
have to pay attention to that which is not so easily categorized as doctrine -- the
unspoken, often emotional undertones of faith on the part of ordinary believers.
A big part of the difficulty in understanding religion is that of definition. We don't
exactly know what we mean by the word, religion. We don't know how to use the word or what
constitutes a misuse of the word. It would be convenient to assume that by
"religion," we mean the fetishisms, animisms, polytheisms, and monotheisms of
the known historic religions. It would also be convenient to assume that all the religions
were like branches of a large tree, with a visible trunk. If we looked hard enough at the
tree trunk we could discover a common structure of meaning that would lead to an accurate,
comprehensive, and convincing definition of religion.
If what was already said about the diversity of religions is taken seriously, we would
not think that religions are branches of a single tree. Therefore, no single definition of
religion seems possible. Efforts to define religion according to conceptions such as
"the supernatural," the dichotomy of "sacred and profane," and
"ultimate concern," may clarify aspects of religious expression, but they are
hardly adequate to the meaning of religion itself. Buddhism does not easily accommodate
references to the "supernatural." Nor does the sacred/profane dichotomy do
justice to the complexity of religious feeling, which is often a mixture of the two. And
the phrase "ultimate concern" suffers from such vagueness that it hardly
qualifies as a general definition of religion.(3)
An examination of writings on theories of religion shows that most definitions of
religion are achieved not by exhaustive empirical study but rather by singling out one or
another attractive or compelling feature of religious practice, and then elevating that
feature normatively as a criterion of meaning. Certainly this is true of Dewey's
definition of religion as "the active relation between the ideal and the
actual," and Whitehead's, "what a man does with his solitariness"; or
Westermark's more wordy rendering, "a regardful attitude towards a supernatural
being, on whom man feels himself dependent and to whom he makes an appeal in his
worship."(4) These and similar definitions
suffer from the old Greek philosophical practice of hunting for essences among a welter of
related particulars. The problem is that any exception from the norm is simply called
that, an exception; the norm remains unaffected. Another large problem is that so much of
actively practiced religion is on the level of feeling, and is mystical or ineffable.
Words like "ideal," "actual," "solitariness,"
"supernatural," can hardly do justice to religion as experience of and response
to mystery.
Exceptions to norms are no small matter in religion. People are willing to die to
prevent exceptions and others to fight to the death to prevent being seen merely as an
exception. Historic Christianity has had its own struggles with exceptions. Having gone
through the agony of the Reformation, the Catholic Church eventually recognized, even if
it did not approve, the existence of exceptions to itself. Judaism has never been so
tolerant. When Halachically correct Orthodoxy firmly established itself as the essential
norm of Judaism, it rejected both Conservative and Reform Judaism. They were not
recognized even as exceptions to the essentialism norm of Orthodox Judaism.
That essentialist norm of Orthodoxy proved so powerful that it prevailed for all three
branches of Judaism. For none of the three traditions of Judaism were tolerant of real
deviations from the norm. Thus none will accept the authenticity of a new movement called
"Jews for Jesus." Members of the movement champion the messiahship of Jesus but
go to great lengths to deny that they belong to the Christian church and do not want to be
called Christians. They consider themselves Jews, "Jews for Jesus," they say,
and want to be so recognized by all other Jews.
If we accept the Orthodox definition of Judaism, then the "Jews for Jesus"
movement is not Judaism. What then is it? Is it an exception to Judaism, a sect, a thing
all its own? Or is it like one of the Protestant sects of the sixteenth and seventeenth
century, which was detested and rejected by the established Catholic Church -- only to
reemerge several hundred years later fully recognized and respected as the Baptist and
Methodist churches. Whether or not the "Jews for Jesus" movement is a religion
or a sect will not matter to established Judaism today. Committed, as they are, to an
essentialist, unchanging, and nonfluid conception of Judaism, none of the three branches
of Judaism will accept its credentials.
A further difficulty in understanding religion arises over the issue of values.
Scholars and teachers of religion like to believe that there is a specific beneficial
religious value, not in conflict with other values; I suspect there are few who do not in
some way recommend positive religious meanings or values to their students. The constant
reliance on terms like "sacred," "spiritual," and "ultimacy"
suggests that, try as we might, our teaching of religion is not value-free. Each of us has
some working notion of what constitutes good religion and what is bad religion -- and that
notion figures in our teaching.
The social scientists would scold us for this. If we listen to them, we should be able
to study and teach religion according to its multiple functions and its social dynamics.
Richard Comstock is a scholar and teacher who admires the social scientific approach
to religion:
The normative problem of what a good religion ought to be is a problem for
philosophers, theologians, religious thinkers; however the scholarly study of religion is
rather concerned with an understanding of how religions have actually operated in human
history, not with how they ought to operate according to the particular value scheme of
the critics."(5)
I wish it were possible to make a neat distinction between critics and scholars of
religion, as Comstock does. But for me the difficulty of understanding religion increases
in confronting religious practices that are wrong, evil, degraded, demonic, and don't
appear any the less religious for being so. Consider the Hebrew Bible. One recalls
Lucretius's remark: "To how many evil deeds has religion persuaded men." Has
anyone satisfactorily explained why Yahweh, the author of the Covenant law prohibiting
murder, orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and commands Saul to massacre the
Amalekites? Consider the immolation of infants on ancient altars; the blood sacrifices of
the Aztecs; or the Hebrew herem, which gave rise to the Muslim jihad and to
the Christian crusade. I would not hesitate to make a moral judgment on these practices.
Nor would I hesitate to condemn the American church community called "Faith
Tabernacle," which finds in The Letter of James warrant to prohibit the use of
modern medicine and allows their own children to die from sickness rather than resort to
doctors.
Professor Comstock, it seems, would caution scholars not to judge religious practices
that are different from our own. But is this not asking us to suspend our moral
intelligence? Most people would distinguish between faith and fanaticism. Whether we rush
quickly or slowly to judgement, we who are professors of religion know that the line
between faith and fanaticism is very thin indeed. And that thinness only in turn thickens
the difficulty of understanding religion. For if religion is one of the forces within the
complex psychic energy of human beings, that force is both creative and destructive.
Faced, then, with the powerful and morally complex character of religion, some scholars
will want to emphasize the right and good in religion and forget the rest. Such is the
case with Gordon Allport in his classic study of religious psychology, The Individual
and His Religion. For none can doubt that religion is a source of psychic strength,
providing support, solace, and warmth in a world experienced as cold and cruel.
Allport says he writes "as a scientist" and that his approach is
"naturalistic." He wishes to dissociate his analysis from any sort of
psychopathology of religion, an approach favored by skeptics:
My reason for not dwelling more fully than I do upon the function religion plays in
infantile and neurotic personalities is that I am seeking to trace the full course of
religious development in the normally mature and productive personality. I am dealing with
the psychology, not with the psychopathology, of religion. The neurotic function of
religious belief, its aid as an "escape from freedom," is indeed commonly
encountered, so commonly that opponents of religion see only this function and declare it
to dominate any life that harbors a religious sentiment. With this view I disagree. Many
personalities attain a religious view of life without suffering development and without
self-deception.(6)
I couldn't agree more with Allport's last sentence. Indeed, we know of countless human
beings who are well-adjusted religiously and who are mentally healthy because of their
religious convictions and associations. But we also know, as Allport certainly knows, of
numerous individuals who suffer their "dark nights of the soul," and never truly
experience the dawn of psychic health. Many of those individuals are famous as spiritual
heroes and pioneers, such as St. John of the Cross, Martin Luther, and Søren
Kierkegaard. We also know that Moses, Gautama, Jesus, and Muhammad suffered their
Gethsemanes as prelude to a greater vision of the ideal, for which they strove.
But the "dark night of the soul" is not always creative. It can also be an
invitation to madness. Is not madness often intertwined with spirituality? Do not
molesters, murderers, mass murderers, and terrorists often invoke some sacred being or
meaning as cause or justification for their actions? Why should we doubt their sincerity?
Is it not true that the religion which condemns murder also legitimizes it?
I have had my own experience of the connection between religion, madness, and murder. I
once tried marijuana, three joints in ten or fifteen minutes, washed down with glasses of
Southern Comfort. My brain cracked; I was suddenly seized by anxieties of great intensity.
I imagined myself under a judgment so severe I thought myself doomed. I remember telling
my wife that I feared throwing myself off the balcony of the house into the ravine below.
I also felt this terrible fear that I would harm the children who were sleeping nearby. As
my fears mounted I urged my wife to call the police to come and get me. Fortunately, she
didn't. She had drunk nothing and had taken only a puff or two of one joint. More sober
and sane than me, she ignored my request and called a friend, who was experienced in drug
counseling.
Upon arriving, the friend sat me down and began what became a two-hour conversation.
Her intention was to coax me away from anxiety until the liquor and drugs wore off. In the
middle of the ordeal, suddenly, unexpectedly, I experienced a moment of total lucidity. I
announced that I knew who God was. Yes, I knew all about God. I remember it as a very good
feeling. I believed I had solved an immense theological problem. I was ahead of my
colleagues; I would be recognized for my achievement. Then I was asked to explain God. I
wanted to but couldn't. I said nothing. There was silence. I was sure I knew all about God
but I couldn't say anything about God.
I recalled this experience in rereading recently Allport's book about the positive
affects of religion on the human psyche. But just as there is religion which can help to
socially organize a human being, bringing about a more mature outlook on life, there is
also another kind of religion which is unpredictable, chaotic, and potentially
destructive.
My one experience with marijuana and booze convinces me that just below the surface of
the mind lies a pool of chaotic psychic energy that finds expression in forms we call
religion. Could this be the source of the so-called "innateness" of religious
feeling in human beings? Just how we are to understand this energy, what meaning we are to
give it, I cannot be sure. What is most difficult to understand about religion is that the
angels which Allport describes so well and the demons I have tried to describe from my own
experience, seem to lie so close together that it may be difficult to tell
them apart.
Another difficulty in understanding religion focuses on our ignorance of the original
sources of religion. If we knew with any certainty how and why religion came into being,
we might then know what religion is. The quest for knowledge about religion's origins was
the intellectual motive behind the pioneering anthropological research on religion carried
out by such major scholars as Muller, Tylor, Frazer, Spencer, Marett, Durkeim, and others.
This effort to uncover religion's origins cannot be dismissed as speculative or
disregarded merely because there is considerable disagreement among scholars on this
subject. The anthropological data does not allow one to conclude that the human is
essentially homo religiosus, but we know of no period of history in which the human
has not expressed itself religiously. Religion may or may not be innate in human beings,
but the evidence for its inevitability is overwhelming.(7)
For us the outstanding question should not be, when did religion emerge?, rather how to
understand the dynamics of religion's inevitability. This means trying to understand the
function of religion in human experience.
Comstock would have us avoid questions of religion's origins in favor of the
"function" of religion:
The quest for origins has been superseded by a quest for more adequate description. A
different question is now being asked. Instead of asking, "What is the origin of
religion? scholars now tend to ask, "How does religion function?" "What is
it like?" "What does it do for the individual or for his society?"(8)
What is a functional analysis of religion? The answer seems to be that religion has a
host of observable functions -- psychological, social aesthetic, moral. A functional
analysis of religion would concentrate on them. Presumably, in a functional analysis,
myths, dogmas, creeds, confessions, and theological teachings would be conveniently
categorized as the "belief system," and placed alongside the more practical
system of priestly functionaries, rituals, ceremonies, etc. These systems would then be
listed together with another system, the institutional or social organization of the
religious community. Any number of subsystems could also be described.
Just what we are finally to understand by such systems, what meanings are to be
discerned in them, we cannot be sure, but the functionalist method is championed as a
truly empirical way of study religion. Consider what Comstock next tells us:
. . . . a more empirical approach to religion is now being adopted. The
question as to how religion originated is a speculative question, difficult to answer in a
scientific way. But the fact remains that religion does exist as a very concrete factor in
human experience and behavior. May it not be more fruitful to accept it as a
"given" which it is our task to examine according to the best analytical tools
and methods of accurate description that can be devised.(9)
Certainly we can accept religion as a "given." But that hardly settles the
issue of how to study religion. It is significant that Comstock urges his readers to use
the "best analytical tools and methods of accurate description," without telling
his readers what those tools and methods are. Just how are we to practice the
"empirical approach?" One would have thought that if one really took an
"empirical approach" and made an effort to describe religion, the first thing
one would do would be to take a long, careful look at the lives of religious people. And
if one did that, one would soon discover that a religious life, filled with energy and
faith, providing a vision for living and a will-to-live, is a whole life that cannot be
reduced to functions. To put the matter differently, the authentic religious life is so
filled with "nonobservables" as to defeat any application of the so-called
"empirical method."
It is one thing to preach empiricism and another thing to practice it. What can we
learn of American Catholics by describing the functions of American Catholics? We can
count their numbers. Discover places of residence. How much money they make. How they
vote. How they view the pope. How they stand on political issues. What they believe or
don't believe. Certainly the answers to our questions yield useful information. But is
information the goal of an empirical study of religion? Or is something more than
information needed?
Is there a point after a great quantity of information has been recorded, after the
descriptive task has been done, that one wants to sit back and ask thoughtfully, what
makes an American Catholic just that? What keeps him or her Catholic? Why does someone
stop being Catholic? What meaning does Catholicism hold for the Catholic? Is there such a
thing called Catholicism over and above what Catholics feel and think? These questions can
arise from information, but the questions are not answered by the search for more
information. Ultimately they are questions of meaning, of aim or purpose, of
self-identity. Such questions do not require further observation and are not answerable by
observation. They are questions that require intuition, insight, discernment. Questions of
religious self-identity are not Comstock's kind of functional questions. They are
old-fashioned humanistic or ontological questions and drive us back in speculative,
philosophical, or theological probings about religious being and meaning.
I spoke of religion as energy, faith, a vision of transcendence, and the will to live
in relation to it. When religion is thought of in this way, it ceases to be merely a
religion. To illustrate the point, allow me to speak of my mother, who would be amused
to learn that her son discussed her in this essay. She would question the need of it. She
is a conventionally Greek Orthodox woman who has never felt the need to ponder, much less
question, her religion. To her being religious is as natural as breathing. She recites a
few simple prayers before going to bed and lights candles in church on Sunday. She has no
sophisticated beliefs about God and God's relation to the world. Hers is a simple, strong,
direct faith that sustain her life. When she reads the Bible she does so to learn how to
lead her life and to gain the inspiration to do so. In every way she conforms to Allport's
account of a person strengthened in life by religious faith.
When religion and life blend as they do for my mother, religion ceases to be anything
distinctive, objective, something external, a mere practice. It is well-known that
religious people do not think of themselves as religious, because they cannot imagine
themselves as other than religious. One could think of authentically religious people as
growing a kind of skin which covers whole body, gives them their appearance, holds them
together, contains the pores through which they breathe; when breathing stops, they are
buried with this one skin and no other. To such people, religion is not something
"practiced," something that could be listed on a list of personality traits and
career achievements. When one is religious as my mother is religious, the word
"religion" loses its meaning or becomes irrelevant. No scholar has made us more
aware of the inadequacies of the word than Wilfred Cantwell Smith. He urges us to abandon
it altogether in favor of another word, faith, which he contends more accurately expresses
the meaning of religion. Smith defines faith as ". . . . a inner
religious experience or involvement of a particular person; the impingement on him of the
transcendent, putative or real."(10)
It is the experience of the transcendent, including the human response to that
experience, that creates faith, or more precisely the life of faith. Smith seems to regard
human beings as having a propensity for faith, so that one speaks of their faith as
"innate." In his analysis, faith and transcendence are more accurate
descriptions of the lives of religious human beings than conventional uses of the word,
religion. The reason for this has to do with the distinction between participant and
observer. This is a fundamental distinction for Smith, separating religious people (the
participants) from the detached, so-called objective students of religious people (the
observers). Smith's argument is that religious persons do not ordinarily have "a
religion." The word, religion, comes into usage not as the participant's word but as
the observer's word, one that focuses on observable doctrines, institutions, ceremonies,
and other practices. By contrast, faith is about the nonobservable, life-shaping vision of
transcendence held by a participant.
To illustrate the difference between participant and observer, Smith speaks of heaven
and hell. "Heaven and Hell, to a believer, are stupendous places into one or another
of which irretrievably he is about to step. To an observer they are items in the
believer's mind. To the believer, they are parts of the universe; to the observer, they
are parts of a religion."
Smith considers transcendence to be the one dimension common to all peoples of
religious faith: "what they have in common lies not in the tradition that introduces
them to transcendence, [not in their faith by which they personally respond, but] in that
to which they respond, the transcendent itself."(11)
If both faith and transcendence lie beyond the observer's knowledge, what is possible
within the limit of observation? The answer, it seems, begins with the frank admission
that the academic study of religion is about religion, a historical object, not about the
living faith of countless human beings. In grasping this point we are in a position to see
that all academic study of religion is actually study about (what Smith calls) "the
cumulative tradition"
of the past religious life of the community in question: temples, scripture,
theological systems, dance patterns, legal and other social institution, conventions,
moral codes, myths, and so on; anything that can be and is transmitted from one person,
one generation, to another, and that an historian can observe."(12)
The "cumulative tradition," in Smith's view, gives the religion scholar ample
data for study. And the recognition that the "cumulative tradition" is the
observable facts of religion, not the nonobservable reality of faith, should keep the
scholar from presuming that through study alone the essential meaning of religion can be
understood. It is equally true that no academic study of religion is worth its salt that
ignores or dismisses the dimensions of faith and transcendence that are an inherent part
of the religious life. It is not necessary for the scholar to define transcendence, to
name the gods, so to speak. There are as many envisagements of transcendence as there are
types of faith; and there are as many nuanced conceptions of transcendence, with or
without gods, as there are persons of faith. What matters is that human faith be
understood to have an ultimate reference, whose meaning, it seems must remain mysterious.
In conclusion, Smith writes: "There would seem little doubt but that the conscious
application of a tradition-faith analysis to an understanding of outside cultures would
prove quickly and richly effective."(13)
Unfortunately, he gives us no direction as to how to make the "application of a
tradition-faith analysis." We put down his book with a sense that we have been
introduced to a powerful critique of what is wrong with the study of religion without
being told how to correct it.
Part of the problem is that Smith draws sharp lines between faith and religion,
participant and observer, the nonobservable and the observable. This tends to suggest that
he views tradition, faith, and transcendence as three discrete, even disjunctive, elements
of experience. This is unfortunate because it is not, I think, what he intends. Smith is
no Barthian setting faith against culture, God against religion. Yet, lacking any concept
of relationship, we are left in his analysis with three elements whose organic connection
remains unexplained. The absence of explicit connections is no small omission; it betrays
Smith's reluctance to extend his thinking beyond the historical and personal to the nature
of experience itself. Had he done so, he would have found that there is considerably more
continuity to human experience, including the experience of faith, than his analysis
allows for.
My own understanding of the continuity of experience and faith was deepened by the late
Bernard Eugene Meland, my theology professor at Chicago many years ago. According to
Meland, faith is not only personal but also social.(14)
The social aspect of faith is an inheritance, which can include the "cumulative
tradition," but goes deeper into qualities of feeling that pass from one generation
to another, from older family members to younger.(15)
Thus faith cannot be just "an experience;" it is also a quality of experience
itself, mediated through the structure of experience that links the past to the present in
human life.
I can illustrate this social and inherited aspect of faith by again referring to my
mother. To use Smith's analysis, my mother's faith is expressed or made observable through
the "cumulative tradition." I do not share much of my mother's appreciation of
the "cumulative tradition" but I can say that her faith has entered my feelings
and shaped my life in creative, transforming, even redemptive ways. In that respect her
faith has shaped my own faith. If I were to use Meland's analysis, I would have to say
that what made this possible was the structure of experience, a "context of
feeling," which mediates faith. Thus faith is not only personal, "an
experience," but also a social energy, which links past to present by giving new
forms to old valuations.
The structure of experience also means that transcendence cannot be wholly
nonobservable and utterly mysterious, as Smith would have it. For if faith is experienced
within a structure of experience, then transcendence is not only "an
experience," but also a relationship of depth or ultimacy mediated through human
feeling. Apart from how transcendence is identified or named, transcendence is experienced
as a creative advance, linking past to present, one generation to another, offering a
vision of the creative and redemptive good that gives hope and a sense that life is worth
living.
The scholar of religion, therefore, need not feel limited to the observable, to the
"cumulative tradition." The structural connections between the "cumulative
tradition," faith, and transcendence make it possible for the academic study of the
religious dimension of human life to be not merely descriptive of data but also insightful
as to meaning. Acknowledging the structure of experience makes it possible to avoid both
historicism and social scientific reductionism. Acknowledging that structure restores to
the study of the religious a sense that this study is about something more than mere data,
just as religion is about something more than itself.(16)
Notes
Bibliographic note: In addition to works cited, I found of particular value
Steward Elliott Guthrie's Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), and Wayne Proudfoot's Religious Experience
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). See also two anthologies I edited with
Professor Edward A. Yonan: Religion and Reductionism and The Sacred and Its
Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data (Leiden:
Brill & Co., 1994 and 1996 respectively).
1. [Back to text] Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The
Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), 74.
3. [Back to text] See W. Richard
Comstock, The Study of Religion and Primitive Religions (New York: Harper &
Row, 1972). See also Comstock's probing article, "Toward Open Definitions of
Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 3 (1986):
499-517.
4. [Back to text] Cited in Bernard
Meland's Faith and Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1953,
1972), 107; Gordon W. Allport, The Individual and His Religion (New York:
Macmillan Paperbacks, 1960), 65.
15. [Back to text] Randall, The
Meaning of Religion for Man, 56.
16. [Back to text] I gratefully
acknowledge the critical attention given to earlier drafts of this paper by my colleagues,
Wagne Elzey and Alan Miller, who do not necessarily share my views of all the matters
discussed.
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