ABSTRACT
The fundamental assumption of this paper is that human beings are able to explore, rationally, their own imaginative constructs and behaviour, and that this applies among other things to those matters commonly designated as religion. Such rational exploration of religion may very conveniently be designated by the German term Religionswissenschaft (literally ‘science of religion’) 1 and its equivalents in other languages such as Danish (religionsvidenskab) or Polish (religioznawstwo). Equally acceptable equivalents are to be found in Chinese (zongjiaoxue), Korean (chongkyohak) and Japanese (shukyogaku), for all of which the same Chinese characters are employed. 2 In English there is the well known difficulty of the relative diffuseness of the term ‘religious studies’, and at the same time the lack of institutional backing for the term ‘science of religion’, in spite of its having being used by Max Müller. 3 This latter phrase has however occurred more recently as the title of the widely distributed bibliographical journal Science of Religion. 4 Other terms used in English are ‘the academic study of religion’ or more briefly ‘the study of religion’, which is a little like the German alternative Religionsforschung (literally ‘research into religion’) or the East Asian equivalents mentioned above. The word ‘exploration’, in the phrase ‘rational exploration of religion’ is intended here to refer to a cluster of related operations including, in particular, the following spectrum: documentation, elucidation, characterization, comparison, theoretical analysis and explanation. At one end, this spectrum takes account of the criterion, established notably in phenomenological studies of religion, that the self-understanding of believers or actors within the system has a certain priority in determining our perception of the system in question. At the other end, comparison, theoretical analysis and explanation may stand in tension to this self-understanding of the believers or actors, that is, of the insiders. The precise relations between these need not be pursued here. Issues of wider debate about religion, such as questions of truth or falsity, value or otherwise, though interesting and in some cases important for various reasons, lie beyond the immediate range of the science of religion. Examples of such issues would be: ‘Is Anglicanism rational?’ ‘Is Tibetan Buddhism politically progressive?’ ‘Is Manichaeism true?’ ‘What is the cultural value of Saint Paul?’ or ‘Is Sufism compatible with post-Modernism?’ However such questions fall into a wider range of debate than is envisaged here and certainly go beyond the scope of the science of religion.
