ABSTRACT

As is well known, the current status of the study of religion legitimated in our modern Western universities is the result of successful argumentation on the part of our forebears that a scientific study of religion was possible. And yet here we are assessing the issue of how a ‘rational and disciplined scientific/scholarly discourse on religion’ is possible, 1 which, to my mind at least, suggests that we still face fundamental problems in the field of religious studies. Now this is not an altogether new experience for our discipline, for the emancipation of the study of religion from the religio-theological framework within which that study had been undertaken until the latter part of the nineteenth century has never fully been achieved. ‘The very abundance of contemporary literature about how religions and their study ought to be conceived or organized’, Sam Preus rightly contends, ‘amounts to evidence of an identity crisis in the field’ (Preus 1987, 17). The problem with the study of religion which we are facing here, however, is not, I think, merely a continuation of that crisis of identity; it rather catapults the problem to an altogether different level of severity.