1-2lec Study of Religion

8/12/2019 1-2lec Study of Religion

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2003 1:2 THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGIONS

To many people the phrase "the scientific study of religions" might seem a

contradiction in terms. Religion is commonly understood in our culture to be a system of

belief and worship which is not scientific. People might point to the Church's condemnation

of Galileo in the 17th century as an example of how religion has always opposed science, or

evangelical resistance to the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. In this talk I want

to sketch out some key stages in the history of the study of religion, in particular in the

history of scientific study of monotheist religious traditions.

The study of religion in the 19th

century

The 19th

century is rightly remembered as the great age of scientific controversy. You

all know of the importance of Darwin in biology, and the revolution he effected in our

understanding of the age of the earth. As you are probably also aware, there were groups of

Christians who rejected this insight. This is still a major issue in some areas. A survey

published in June 1992, reported that 11% of Monash biology students supported biblical

"creationism", while 41% believe in evolution over millions of years guided by God, 43% in

evolution without God; in the US a staggering 47% of the general population support strict

creationism. What is often forgotten that the 19th

century also witnessed a revolution in the

understanding of religious texts, by appreciating that religion is a cultural phenomenon

subject to evolution, just as much as human beings have evolved over time. Protestant or

catholic fundamentalism was a reactionary move by Christians who did not wish to change

what they believed was precious in their culture. Exactly the same dilemma has struck both

Judaism and Islam in the 19th

and 20th

centuries.


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Scholars like Wellhausen in the 19th

century, showed that the Bible was the product of

a long period of evolution. Different strands were collected at different times in Jewish

history. He and other scholars demonstrated that the scientific study of religion is really a

branch of the study of human society and of the individual, within the context of society and

the natural world. For example, to examine stories about Abraham in the Bible or the Quran

is not about establishing whether the story about Abraham in the Bible is literally true. It is

about asking what the story of Abraham has meant to different people at different times.

Within the Bible, there are thus a number of different interpretations of the same basic

traditions. A text acquires authority if it has a meaning that it far richer than its literal

meaning. For this reason it may be important to study not just an individual passage in the

Bible, but aspects of every day culture, like stories, visual art or political action, to see how a

religious image may have significance for a particular people or society. In this course we

cannot hope to look at the whole history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; rather we can

only look at a few examples to see how a religious tradition is interpreted at any time in

history.

19th

century scholars had an optimistic belief that historical enquiry would reveal the

truth about religion. German protestant scholars, like David Strauss, led the way in insisting

that the Old and New Testaments had to be studied in the same way as any historical text.

The great catch cry of these reformers was the call "to recover the historical Jesus"--as

distinct from the icon of pious devotion. Traditionalists accused these reformers of gutting

the Gospels of their spiritual message, of turning Christ into a social reformer rather than a

redeeming Saviour. The reformers insisted that they were rediscovering the lost truth of

Christianity. Jewish intellectuals too were affected by critical scholarship of the Old

Testament, which found it impossible to accept that Moses could have written the Torah, the


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first five books of the Bible. Liberal Judaism divided from more orthodox Judaism over such

issues in very similar ways as affected the mainstream Christian churches.

The theories of Charles Darwin about evolution by natural selection meant that the

Biblical narratives of Genesis were no longer seen as statements of facts. This fitted in much

more with what historical science was saying about the literary structure of the Old

Testament. By going back to the Hebrew it was realised, for example, that Genesis contains

two quite different stories about the creation of the world. In the first God is referred to as

ELOHIM--literally gods, who creates mankind in his image, male and female (Gen. 1:27), on

the 6th day of the week. In the second YHWH creates woman from the rib of man, and there

is no step by step story of creation. The two stories were put together perhaps in the 9th

century over a thousand years after Abraham was supposed to have lived.

The very nature of religion came into question in the 19th century. Karl Marx,

influenced early in life by the investigations of Strauss and Feuerbach into the Life of the

historical Jesus, came to believe that religion was a cultural projection, legitimizing dominant

political and economic relationships in society. "Religion was the opium of the people",

providing necessary relief in their misery. Marx was also however the son of a rabbi. He

inherited a powerful Jewish conviction that history had a direction, towards a promised land

in which tyranny and injustice were eliminated. His ideal state was a classless form of

society, in which decisions were made by those people who were actually producing the

wealth on which society's prosperity depended. In the Marxist perspective religion would

eventually disappear, as society moved to an ideal classless state in which exploitation was

no more. Even if we do not accept his view of historical progress, his insight into the close

relationship between religious and socio-economic structures is an important one which we

should bear in mind.


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The discovery of other religions

While in the 19th century the ideas of Darwin and Marx were seen to challenge or

overturn traditional Judaeo-Christian beliefs, other scholars were beginning to re-assess the

nature of religion as an aspect of human experience. One of the consequences of the great

European Empires in Africa, Asia and the Pacific was that colonial administrators and

missionaries came into contact with an immense range of religious behaviour in human

societies. Such experiences forced scholars to speculate about the origins of religion. In the

19th century, attitudes were closely tied in with ideas of evolution and progress towards a

"superior" type of humanity. Early anthropologists believed that humans gradually evolved

from believing in animism, living powers in material objects, to monotheism, and perhaps

beyond that to atheism. By studying all human religions, scholars thought they could trace

the "evolution" of the human spirit. The idea of a "science" of religion was first coined by a

German, Max Mller (1823-1900), who devoted his life to making available to Western

readers a massive collection, Sacred Books of the East--which opened the eyes of a number

of people to the treasures of the Indian tradition. His was a literary approach to religion. A

consequence of this great opening up of knowledge by the late 19th century was that people

were becoming interested in common themes behind all the world's religions. James Frazer

(1854-1941), was a representative of this approach. In his Golden Bough (1890), he argued

from a wide range of mythological traditions that the basis of religion lay in magic. Religion

was an attempt to control external nature, and that with the progress of science and

technology, magic and religion would fade away--a form of primitive philosophy.

Twentieth century ideas

Perspectives about religion in the 20th century have developed in a number of

different ways. When studying different versions of the monotheist tradition this semester,


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we should keep in mind some of the different theories of religion, to see if they help us reflect

on the evidence we will be studying.

The sociological approach

One of the key thinkers influencing 20th century ideas of religion was a Frenchman,

Emile Durkheim, who published the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in 1912. He

believed that primitive religion was a projection of social experience. This insight seemed to

explain a great deal about primitive religions among the Aborigines of Australia or the Jews

of the Old Testament. The question to consider is whether such a theory holds also for the

mainstream religions at later stages of their development. Do Jews, Christians and Muslims

engaged in worshipping their own society? Religion and nationalism have certainly been

closely linked even in the present. We need only think of Israel and Judaism or Poland and

catholicism. The difficulty with it is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are also prophetic in

nature. While these religions often act as social cement, they also provide opportunities for

individuals or small groups to criticize the community. It might be better to speak of religion

as a projection of a social ideal, to which society tries to adapt itself.

Another very influential thinker this century on the sociology of religion was Max

Weber, who was particularly interested in the social outlook of religions. In Protestantism

and the Spirit of Capitalism (first published 1904-5) he argued that protestantism, in

particular Calvinism, with its strong stress on individual achievement, was very important in

encouraging an untrammelled capitalist spirit. The medieval church was always opposed in

theory to usury, lending at interest, seeing it as a form of theft. Whereas Marx saw religion

as a projection of economic relationships, Weber saw religion an ideology facilitating certain

kinds of economic and social relationships. He believed that there were always different

types of religion. Some manifested themselves by symbols of authority (like traditional


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medieval catholicism), some by the spoken word (like Calvinism), others by feeling (like

charismatic evangelical groups). It is worth keeping these three types in mind, when we look

at different religious traditions.

The psychological angle.

A more psychological angle to monotheist religions was suggested at about the same

time by Sigmund Freud. Freud thought that the biblical notion of God the Father was a

projection of repressive forces in one's childhood. Society itself and religion all stemmed

from the murder of a primordial Father figure, with whom the son is always in conflict. His

great successor, Carl Jung broke with Freud in refusing to reduce religion to problems of

sexual repression. Jung believed in a collective unconscious, that influenced our behaviour

whether we knew it or not. He became very interested in the idea that all of the great

religions adapted symbols and myths which echoed great truths in the collective unconscious.

Whereas Freud blamed religion for perpetuating the guilt complexes of society, Jung thought

that the problem with humanity was not sexual repression but loss of contact with the realm

of the sacred. The scientific, technological approach of society had meant that we were no

longer in touch with key religious symbols. He believed that authentic religious symbols in

every culture enabled echoed archetypes in the collective unconscious. Through these

symbols, for example of the Cross of Christ, individuals could achieve a degree of wholeness,

or individuation. He was very interested in all those religious traditions which spoke of a

union between female and male archetypes in the soul. In the catholic tradition, the role of

the Virgin Mary played a balancing force to that of a male Christ. When studying Jewish,

Christian or Muslim mythology, and particularly mystical literature, it is worth considering

what this literature has to say about the process of gaining individual identity.


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Mircea Eliade

Within academic circles, perhaps the most significant writer on comparative religion has

been Mircea Eliade (1907-86), a Romanian who became fascinated with the East, but became

the key figure at the University of Chicago, Dept of Comparative Religion, founded in 1892--

now the Centre for the Scientific Study of Religion. Eliade refused to evaluate any one

religion as better than another but he believed powerfully in the significance of every

religious tradition. He believed that religion is a symbolic system, always structured a basic

polarity between the sacred and the profane. Through the powers of a spiritually endowed

individual--be it a shaman, a saint or a guru, devotees may come into contact with the sacred.

His major work was on Indian religions, and on so-called "primitive" religions. Nonetheless,

by focussing on collective myths, like those of a lost paradise, and the need to return to

paradise he touches on themes which can equally well be applied to Judaism, Christianity or

Islam.

The contemporary situation: some thoughts

Only gradually this century insights gained from the study of other cultures and other

religions been applied to the "mainstream" monotheist religions, especially to Judaism and

Christianity. One of the problems has been that research into these two traditions has tended

to be carried out by teachers who have themselves been Jews and Christians. This has meant

that one tradition tends to be studied in isolation from the others. While there are many

books just on Judaism, or just on Christianity or just on Islam, there are very few which bring

them all together (F.E. Peters, Children of Abraham). The handbook contains extracts from

his 3 volume collection of texts on the three traditions. Karen Armstrong's History of God is

useful for bringing together the incredibly rich tradition of Jewish, Christian and Islamic


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thinking about God over the last three thousand years. This course will require you to think

further than most of the books in the library, in trying to get you to think about the

monotheist tradition as a whole.

When talking about religions it is easy to get bogged down in assertions of argument.

If you want to do this course, you have to be prepared to have question beliefs not for the

sake of undermining them, but in order to understand them better. The scientific spirit

depends on your being open to the evidence. It is false to think that we can ever look at any

document "objectively", as if we can be removed from it and determine whether any text is

true or false. Nonetheless, we should be aware that the study of religion is a legitimate sphere

of intellectual enquiry. We are now in the fortunate situation of being much more aware than

last century of the great diversity of religious traditions on this planet. The fact that the

institutional churches no longer hold a monopoly on the understanding of religion, enables us

to think much more widely about the nature of religion.

In a society in which everybody shares the same religion, it is very difficult to hold a

balanced, informed view of other religious traditions. If you have been brought up in a world

in which one religious tradition, interpreted in a single way, dominated your whole life, the

only way to move out is to move outside of its framework. Within the modern world, many

religious traditions operate as escape routes for people who do not wish to confront the

pressures of modernity. They operate as a kind of dream-time, but often in a very nave

kind of way. Religions can claim to provide a memory of the teaching of Moses, or of Jesus

or of Mohammed, when in fact they are providing a memory of fifty or a hundred years ago.

For some Christians, the ideal period could be the Middle Ages, or the 17th

century or the 19th

century or even the 1950s. To understand such a mentality, we have to step outside that

mentality, and appreciate the particular limitations which operate on the way people


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remember the past. At the same time, we can never understand any religious tradition purely

from the outside. When we look at any religion from the outside, we are studying very human

manifestations, at very specific points of time, shaped by all sorts of assumptions about

politics and gender, or even about the environment. I think we also need to look at any

religion from the inside, as a system of thought and belief that is always capable of being

appreciated. This does not mean that you have to be a believer in any religious tradition in

order to understand it. But I think it is very important to have a sympathetic understanding of

the core beliefs and practices, in other words of the spirit of a religious tradition. To catch

this spirit, the best way is to engage in worship with that religious tradition; if you cant do

that, read and enjoy religious texts as poetry, as inspired texts. Certainly it is absolutely

necessary to study these texts critically as if we are an outsider. But as individuals we can

never stand completely outside any text or tradition. We should study religion in exactly the

same way as we study literature or music. We must apply all our critical faculties to what we

encounter. At the same time, if we simply analyse some religious text like a piece of music or

of literature without actually being moved by that text, we are missing out on something very

serious. Any serious study cannot leave us detached. Studying Judaism, Christianity and

Islam as three manifestations of a single tradition should move or change us in one way or

another.

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