01/27/2021 What Is Interreligious Studies?

I made a new website on interreligious studies. But what is interreligious studies? Let’s talk about it. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. It’s early 2021 and over the winter break from school I decided to learn basic HTML and CSS, the backbone of website programming, just for fun. I developed a new website called Interreligious Info to see if I could do it. It was little challenging, but I was able to produce a simple website about interreligious studies which I can hopefully grow in the future. This vlog is going to be a brief overview of the history of interreligious studies over the past 50 years or so. I split this up into three main thematic areas, but before I get to those, some quick background. First, it’s a little difficult to provide an overview of the contemporary history of interreligious studies from the mid-20th century to the present without leaving out a lot of the story. Yet, there are a number of important sub-movements, figures, and landmark books which can be highlighted in order to demonstrate the big picture over time. There are also ways to tell the story differently from the perspective of many of the major religious traditions, but that would take a nearly Herculean task to assemble so we’re not going to go there right now. In Western history, specifically Europe, one could trace the hints of questioning near the start of the Modern Philosophy era in the late 1600’s with Spinoza’s writings, but it really didn’t get off the ground until a guy named Schleiermacher in the early 1800’s. This line of thinking continues into the early 1900’s with Ernst Troeltsch, an important early figure in world religion inquiry with his long-titled book, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions. Finally, from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, the hermeneutic philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, significantly widened the door to new methodologies of explaining interpretation. With that in mind, the three thematic areas we’re going to highlight are religious pluralism, theology of religions, and comparative theology.

Religious Pluralism’s heyday, so to speak, was from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. Four of the key players in the religious pluralism movement were Raimon Panikkar, W. C. Smith, John Hick, and Paul Knitter. One could also add John Cobb, Jr. to include a process theology model, but that is more of its own tangential niche (which also later led to the open and relational theology paradigm). Raimon Panikkar’s The Unknown Christ of Hinduism and The Intrareligious Dialogue were two books which established the importance of the internal-external character of interreligious understanding. W. C. Smith provocatively stated, “We [Christians] explain the fact that the Milky Way is there by the doctrine of creation, but how do we explain the fact that the Bhagavad Gita is there?”¹ (The Bhagavad Gita is a key Hindu text). All who are interested in the history of interreligious studies should especially read his Meaning and End of Religion which describes his idea of a cumulative tradition. John Hick’s “Copernican Revolution” in religion decentered specific religious referents such as Allah, God, or Brahman for more neutral terminology, while Paul Knitter put the focus on praxis, how do we live out religion? In all of these efforts, the issue of what is truth and where is truth became a key concern.

The second thematic area is theology of religions which was popular during the 1980’s and 90’s. The religious pluralism movement continued but it was overlapped by more of a theology of religions approach. How was a religious adherent supposed to view an adherent from another religion? Religious scholars tried to develop ways in which to describe the possible options for interpreting other religions from the standpoint of their own religion. In 1983, Alan Race published Christians and Religious Pluralism which defined what would become a very popular model of categorizing religious relationships: exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Later, in 1995, Mark Heim wrote a landmark work, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion which critiqued John Hick’s (and others’) views while countering with more of a perspectival depiction of religion. Were the meaning and truth of religion relative to culture? Several challenges emerged such as the nature of religious communities and institutions, the doctrinal dimension of faith, and the social and political aspects of religion relating to public platforms and power dynamics. This became particularly clear through Diana Eck’s popular work, A New Religious America, exposing and inquiring how the diversity of religion had affected and changed American culture. All of these ideas led to the further wedging of such opposing categories as individual/community, diversity/uniformity, liberalism/conservatism, and public/private divides.

The third thematic area is comparative theology which came to the forefront in the 1990’s and has continued into the 2000’s. It’s a new way of explaining and understanding interreligious studies which arose largely through the work of Francis Clooney at Boston College (now Harvard) along with James Fredericks at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Comparative theology abandoned the idea of one religion entirely explaining another religion through its own lens and narrowed the focus considerably. Instead of taking on the largely impossible task of comparing two cumulative traditions over millennia, one could rather focus on one small aspect that one finds in common, such as Mary in the New Testament and the Qur’an, or forms of prayer and meditation in Judaism and Buddhism. The goal is to gain insight into oneself and one’s understanding of one’s tradition by learning from another tradition through such specific data of investigation. Yet it did not end there. Many of the previous themes and figures from prior decades still remained active. Robert Neville from Boston University produced a philosophical theology which continued the ideology of Paul Tillich’s “ultimate concern” framework from the mid-20th century. Perry Schmidt-Leukal at the University of Muenster in Germany continued to refine John Hick’s model though his fractal interpretation of religious diversity. Catherine Cornille, at Boston College has continued as an important leading expositor and interpreter of nearly all models of interreligious studies. John Thatamanil from Union Seminary in New York through hard work and sagacious wit has created a hybridity of Clooney and Neville’s work. The element of praxis has not gone unnoticed either. Interfaith scholars and movements abound all over. Marianne Moyaert in Amsterdam is an academic leader in interfaith rituals and participation while Eboo Patel’s organization based in Chicago, Interfaith Youth Core, focuses on educating interfaith leaders on college campuses and beyond. Finally, Jerry Martin has initiated a yet further method to pursue interreligious relations labeled transreligious theology where the starting point can be any religion, more than one religion, or no religion at all, such as the SBNR movement – spiritual but not religious.

I realize this is kind of a laundry list of people and ideas, but at least it gives you an overview of the diversity of thought taking place in interreligious studies. As the field of interreligious studies grows and expands, new faces and ideas will further shape how the interaction of religious adherents interpret and understand both each other, and the wider scope of their religious traditions. Now go check out all of the resources at my new website, InterreligiousInfo.com.

The next episode we’re going to get into a somewhat provocative subject: the origin of the Jews. I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.

¹Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Faith of Other Men (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1963) 133.