ABSTRACT
The study of religion, like any other intellectual discipline nowadays, is under attack as involving merely one perspective amongst many. Its rational basis is questioned; it can be viewed as just one more social phenomenon. Yet, paradoxically, the study of religion itself often wishes to treat religion as a mere social fact to be studied, and is dismissive of any theological agenda. The problem is why a study of religion can claim to have an insight into what is the case at the level of the reality of religious practice, without taking seriously the possibility that religious believers themselves could conceivably have any insight into what is the case concerning any divine reality. Why should scholarly interpretation claim a superior knowledge to that claimed by participants in a religion? How can claims to truth be allowed at one level but not at another? Yet if the notion of claims to truth is dismissed altogether, that can be as destructive of scholarship as of religion.
