The Encyclopedia of World Religions

religion, history of S 379

Historians of religion take yet a different approach. They seek to understand what religious people claim and what religions are about, partly by talking to religious people, partly by studying religions historically, and partly by comparing reli gions with one another. They put the question of religious truth to one side and consider religion simply as something human beings say and do. (However, many historians of religion have hoped eventually to discover religious truth as well.) His torians of religion sometimes say that in putting aside the question whether the claims of religion are true, they are “bracketing” it. They borrow this term loosely from a field in philosophy known as phenomenology, which talks about “phenom ena”—that is, about “what appears” to the senses and the mind—rather than about whether those appearances are true. (The British-American scholar of religions Ninian Smart [1927–2001] once referred to this attitude as “methodological agnosticism”: Scholars are free to believe what they will, but as scholars they think as if they were agnostics.) In treating religion this way, historians of religion generally claim that there is something called religion which is sui generis, a Latin phrase meaning “in a class by itself.” These scholars mean that just as it is possible to study society as society, literature as literature, and music as music, so it is possible to study religion in and of itself, rather than as belonging to some other field such as psychology or sociology. The Rumanian-born French-American historian of religion, Mircea Eliade (1907–86), once put it this way: “a religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychol ogy, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it—the element of the sacred” ( Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. xiii). A word that is often used in these discus sions is reductionism. Historians of religion reject any approach that tries to “reduce” religion to

“What do they do?”; and third, the sociological, dealing with issues of leadership, organization, institutions, and relations with the larger society. All real religions, by this understanding, have both an ultimate point of reference and an expression in all three of these forms. If there is only the theo retical, it is philosophy rather than religion. If only practices, it is MAGIC rather than religion. If only the sociological, it is a club. But put them all together with a reference to some understanding and expe rience of ultimate reality, that which one cannot go beyond in comprehending the meaning of the universe, and it is religion in the sense the word is used in speaking of the traditional religions, such as J UDAISM , C HRISTIANITY , I SLAM , H INDUISM , or B UD DHISM . While this approach may not coincide with everyone’s personal definition of religion, it may be useful for looking at and distinguishing religion socially or historically. religion, history of A way of studying religions that arose in Europe and North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The name is somewhat misleading. The books and articles that “historians” of religion wrote did not all deal with history. Other names sometimes used for this way of thinking about religions include the comparative study of religions and the phenom enology of religion, an unusual term that is dis cussed below. THE BASIC APPROACH Most people are familiar with theology, even if they do not use that word. Theology attempts to say what religious truth is, which is a topic of great interest to many religious people. Other people try to explain how it is that people come to have religions. Some, but not all, who try to do this consider religion to be false. Still other people try to engage in what is known as interreli gious dialogue, sharing their religious views with one another. They may want to learn about and develop respect for other people, and they may also hope to discover an ultimate truth that all religions share.