364 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

What Should Religion Departments Teach?
By John W. Dixon, Jr.

"This is the paradox of the study of religion. It studies the faith of other people but, infidelity to the university, cannot participate in faith. Departments of religion are the only departments forbidden to be committed to their own subject, compelled to act as though it did not exist. We can do anything we want to do with the study of religion except for one thing: we cannot, professionally, take it seriously, believe that it is true, or act on that belief.

RELIGION departments have proliferated in recent years, and thousands of students take courses in religious studies. The quality of teaching is, generally speaking, as high or higher than in any department in the university. The religion departments probably shape the idea of religion held by more young people than the institutional church. So, what is taught in departments of religion matters.

The issue is not only the curricula of religion departments; it is the proper working of "the Christian intelligence." Religion departments happen to be a specific case of the general problem and, therefore, apt as illustration of the dilemma of faith and belief.

I

It is elementary that faith is not belief but a state of the soul, a relation to something outside the self, a condition of being. It is not ideas about the world, it is the ground for all ideas. It is the world of those who live in it. It is, by definition, beyond and outside argument; to debate it, argue it, is, by definition, to deny it.

Beliefs are attempts to work out in one of our many languages the consequences of faith. If the world is made in such-and-such a way (faith) then we think such-and-such consequences follow (belief). In contrast to faith, beliefs are human products, works, faulty and corrupt, not only open to examination and debate but requiring them for the health of the soul.

The true fatality of religion is not simply to confuse faith with belief but to make faith depend on belief, which is our present condition. This

John W. Dixon, Jr. is Professor of Religion and Art, Emeritus, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Nature and Grace in Art (1964) and The Physiology of Faith (1979). His article on "Franciscan Exegesis" appeared in the January 1987 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

365 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

is the paradox of the religious life. It is also the paradox of the academic teaching of religion.

So the dilemma appears in another form. Professors in religion departments are not required to be religious, but I suspect a majority are. Those who are, are caught in the dilemma of faith and belief, and it is more acute for them, since their work requires verbal statements. At the same time, the price of admission that departments of religion must pay to the university is that they not serve the interests of the church (although, curiously, every other school and department is free to serve its constituent community outside the university). It is not only a price of admission (a political fact), but a requirement of their work as a mode of scholarship. However often it may be violated, free inquiry, not the propagation of faith, is the defining characteristic of the university.

This is the paradox of the study of religion. It studies the faith of other people but, in fidelity to the university, cannot participate in faith. Departments of religion are the only departments forbidden to be committed to their own subject, compelled to act as though it did not exist. We can do anything we want to do with the study of religion except for one thing: we cannot, professionally, take it seriously, believe that it is true, or act on that belief.

Given this situation, the scholar and teacher of religion has a limited range of possibilities. Since we cannot take seriously the claims of faith, we can only investigate what people do when, in their various ways, they make their faith manifest in their beliefs and their actions. That only intensifies our dilemma. We cannot act as though there is a reference on the other side of these attempts to represent the object and the occasion for faith. We cannot assume that these faiths, or any one of them, might be telling the truth or showing the truth about something we most emphatically need to know. Therefore, we can only describe what they do, or, if we are not content with simple description, explain it by something external to itself.

Therefore, there isn't very much that distinguishes the religion scholar from the historian, the anthropologist, the literary critic, etc. Since there is no core of data, of method, of purpose, there is nothing to hold the disparate areas together; there is no axle, only spokes, in this wheel.

Why did people do these odd things that we call "religion"? There are only two possible classes of answers: either they do them because there is something "out there," beyond, that they are genuinely responding to, or they do them for some other immediate, accessible reason. By the definition of our place in the university, we are not permitted to assume that there is something genuinely there which we can come to understand by the study of human responses to it. Therefore, we must come up with a different explanation: they are resolving certain deep-seated psychic conflicts; they are seeking the lost father; they are creating a sanctified equivalent of the order of society; they are manifesting an ideology that conceals self-interest in a particular class structure (socio-economic, sexual, racial); they are working out the internal logic

366 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

of a particular language, or they are trapped in the illogic of language. We have a great many of these explanations, all of them concealed from the practitioners of our subject and evident only to us.

I once commented to a colleague, speaking of another scholar in the field, "I don't think she is really interested in religion." "Oh," he said, "you mean the Weber-Durkheim sort of thing." Well, no, I didn't mean the Weber-Durkheim sort of thing. Why should I identify religion with those aspects of it that Weber and Durkheim studied?

II

Let me try a different approach. My old friend and colleague, Arnold Nash, has been in the habit of asserting that departments of religion should rightly be called departments of theology. I have pleaded with him not to do that. Nobody understands the word "theology" as he is using it. They instantly register, "propositional statements of Christian beliefs," and that kind of theology is acceptable to a department of religion only when deeply embedded in the study of a historical situation. So they simply do not and will not bear him.

Yet he has a point, and the point is an important one. Defining theology as a propositional system is not its original use nor the use that makes it parallel to other university disciplines with comparable names. Biology is the study of, the knowledge of, the bios. Psychology is the study of the psyche. Theology is the study of, the knowledge of, the theos. "Theos" has to do with God, or the gods or divine things or sacred things. Thus, on the perfectly respectable model of the other disciplines, ours should be the study of divinity, of sacred things.

But, as scholars, we aren't permitted to think there are divine things or sacred things. We are permitted to observe that other people think there are gods or a god, or God, or sacred things, and we can study what they do or think. We take them seriously on our terms; we cannot take them seriously on their own terms.

The most egregious example I know is found in a popular art history textbook, treating Bernini's famous sculpture, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. After describing Theresa's vision, the authors say, "...she came to believe that...." I don't insist that they acknowledge that Theresa was literally lifted up on a cloud and pierced with the arrow of divine love, But could they not do her the courtesy of assuming that she genuinely experienced something that could be accurately described only in such terms?

Suppose physicists were forbidden to act as though there were such a thing as matter and could only observe and try to explain what people do when they study the structure of matter. There are various ways of studying both science and scientists, but none calls into question the basic commitment of physicists that there is matter, that matter has an intelligible structure, and that it is their business to determine as much as they can of that structure.

367 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

This is what we are not permitted to do. My friend is doubly damned. No one understands the word "theology" as he does and if they did they couldn't accept it, for the canons of scholarship do not permit the existence, much less a consequential existence, of a "theos."

It is common to say, "We don't teach religion. We teach about religion." Does anyone ever say, "We don't teach chemistry, we teach about chemistry?" (This illustration is also Nasb's, who began as a physical chemist.) To the people we study, "theos" was the most important thing there is. Since we cannot take them seriously, we can only describe or explain what they do. We had better consider seriously a little of what is involved in explanation.

III

Explanation can best be considered along with its corollary, interpretation. The purpose of explanation is the identification of cause. The purpose of interpretation is understanding. Explanation is a very complicated principle, falsified by easy summary. For our purposes, there are two kinds of explanations. First, there is the explanation that finds the source of human action in historical precedent; what happens, what is made is caused by, or engendered by what went before. It is the more humane type of explanation, since it tends to be morally neutral but, at the same time, it denies human creativity, calls into question the action of responsible human will.

The second type goes under the name of "the hermeneutics of suspicion"; all human action (except the work of the critics) is understood as concealing purposes that are other than those ostensibly controlling the work. The most notable of these explanatory systems are those of Marx, Nietszche, and Freud, while more recent systems (French structuralism, deconstruction, much of semiotics, etc.) investigate the instruments of the concealments.

Interpretation, on the other hand, assumes the essential integrity of the works or the acts under examination, that they represent a genuine statement by a person or a people of an experience of the world that is a way of setting out the real. The purpose of interpretation is the grasping, the experiencing, the apprehension, the understanding, of the world of another person or people.

The contrast is too sharp, Interpretation has to assume the work done by explanation. Its search for understanding does not repeal the great explanatory systems. All of them are true insofar as each explores with great sensitivity one aspect of the major human energies and the forces that bear on all human work. Like it or not, we are all involved in the self-interests of a social class, we interpret the world through our gendered experience, we are a part of our psychosexual history, we are inextricably involved in the complexities of language and signs, and these involvements have a basic effect on all we do, including the forms of our religion. But, taken separately, each explanatory system is an exercise in power, an attempt of the critic or historian to establish power

368 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

over other people. Since all are true, Freud, Marx, Jung, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, etc., none is a sufficient explanation. They define the forces that have to be resolved in human creativity, and it is the resolution, not the forces, that determine human experience and, therefore, needs to be the focus of our study. Religion is not explained by Freud or Durkheim. Rather, religion is what people develop in their attempt to cope with those forces described by Freud and Marx and Durkheim and the others in the light of what they see as transcendent. This creativity cannot be, finally, explained but only grasped in understanding, which is itself a humane and a religious act.

IV

Human culture is not simply a matter of coping with the forces of the world, although it certainly is that in part. It is a matter of representing what cannot be known except by representation. Theresa had no other language to use to represent whatever it was that happened to her. Religion is the greatest of all the means of representation because it requires all the others. I do not know what Theresa experienced, but I demean both her and her vision if I try to explain her in terms of sexual repression or the like. She experienced something which she could grasp herself and represent to others only in terms of a remarkable account of a vision.¹

Religion is representation of the "theos," the sacred or the divine things on the other side of the representations, which we can know only in and by means of the representations. We do not, as scholars, sit apart from, above, those people we study as though they are engaged in mere representation while we (God save the mark!) see the truth. For our study of their representing is a part of our representing, their representations are the means for ours.

The religions are true because they are the manifestations of that people's representation of the "theos"; those who think Apollo does not exist have never been to Delphi, We are free, as humans, to decide which of the religions is the one that gives the firmest grasp of the ultimate meaning of things. That does not have a whole lot to do with our scholarship except as the very act of seeking to understand the world of another emerges from certain religious commitments and not from others. We are not free to treat others as less than ourselves, to be explained by our wisdom. They were, are, people like ourselves engaged in a common activity directed toward a common purpose. We must do them the courtesy of taking them seriously. They are, no more and no less than we are, victims of forces they don't even know about. They are, as we are, using what they have as best they can to represent the unrepresented. To treat them otherwise is to reduce them to an it. Explanation is an act of power inflicted on an it. True interpretation is an attempt to grasp the other as "thou."

¹ The words "representation" and "represent" are used here as I understand them to be used where I first learned them, in Owen Barfield's, Saving the Appearances (1965).

369 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

The world of the "thou" as of the "I" is a world of making, of making forms that represent the unrepresented. The apprehension of those forms is the mission of the intelligence. Explaining other people, a very popular activity in contemporary scholarship, is always a condescension and, therefore, inhumane. I submit that it is false to the very nature of the university. A position that is ludicrous in the study of physics is no less so in the study of religion. I submit further-and I set this off for emphasis:

In faithfulness to the university and to our responsibilities as scholars, we are not permitted to bracket out the question of the "theos"-god, or the gods, or God, or the sacred. We are required to bracket the question of the non-existence of the "theos" and work as though it existed. Not to do so offends the humanity of those we study.

This does not require personal commitment, which may distinguish us from the physicists and the chemists. It requires, at a minimum, what Coleridge and Eliot called "the willing suspension of disbelief." If we aren't willing to make that suspension, we belong in some other business. In common courtesy, we have to be willing to admit that the people we study just might have known what they were talking about, at least as much as we do.

V

What are the merits of doing this? What do we gain as a discipline? Most immediately, in acquiring a subject matter of our own, we acquire disciplinehood, which we don't have at present. No body of study that does not have an agreed object for its study and at least a cluster of accepted methods can claim the name of a discipline. This would at least establish a subject matter for us that would enable us to identify ourselves.

As it is, we are historians, psychologists, sociologists, phenomenological anthropologists, anthropological phenomenologists, art historians, literary critics, philosophers, and the like. We somewhat arbitrarily apply the name "religion" to the several ways of studying an assortment of activities that are in a general way bound to each other in the lives of the people who perform them. Increasingly, even the name illustrates my case; Departments of "Religion" now become Departments of "Religious Studies." Grammatically, this name defeats its purpose since it asserts that the studies are religious but the intent is perfectly clear: the emphasis is to be on the ways of studying religion, not on religion itself.

With a common subject we would acquire a common purpose, which is the apprehension of the "theos." The "theos" cannot be known directly; we are not mystics. The "theos" can be known only by saying it is that which elicits this and that kind of response. In this it is much like psychology which can know the psyche only by human acts. Even physics can know certain phenomena only by their effects.

In turn, this would have considerable effect on the intent of teaching. As it is, a primary pedagogical effect of the program is to teach the

370 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

student that truth is in the systems of study, or, in more recent systems, that there is no reality and no meaning. The actual effect is far more muddled than that, simply because so much of the material we study is more powerful than the prejudices of the methods we apply to them, and many teachers are exceedingly respectful of the integrity of their subject.

For the university, it will remain true that religion is a matter of choice. What I am proposing would have the advantage of teaching something about the nature of choice, that it is not a matter of subjective preference but of discovering and conforming to the order of things, that there is a reality that generations of people have responded to.

Does this suggested approach make any difference in the ordinary work of a religion department or only in its overall effect? The answer is "no" and "yes."

It is "no" because interpretation depends absolutely on the accuracy and comprehensiveness of observation and description, on the most scrupulous analysis of every aspect of the works studied, on the most careful attention to all those things uncovered by the explainers. When this is done by an able scholar and teacher, then the reality of the human experience embodied, manifested, in the work often emerges with great clarity.

It is also "yes." It makes the material studied into serious and responsible human action rather than simply evidence for some other intellectual system. Interpretation requires us to listen to the other, hear and see the work of the other as an attempt to come to terms with the order of things that faces us as well.

It is not the function of a department of religion to serve the interests of the church; it is responsible to the university only. Yet this conception of its work would be a major service to the church in clarifying the relation of faith and belief and making faith no longer dependent on belief. At the same time, it would provide both materials and methods for serious, consequential thought about faith, which could generate responsible belief. Explanation is rightly the servant of interpretation, not its master.

Equally, this would serve the best interests of the university by making possible the recognition of the kind of unexamined faith, that, in obvious fact, underlies the present work of the university. It is fashionable today to repudiate all dogma in the name of tolerance and charity. But suppose a dogma is true? And, too, the repudiation of dogma is itself a dogma, one of the most rigidly fixed in the modern mind.

VI

I indicated earlier that I intended to consider religion departments only as part of the evidence. This has involved me in matters that are the rightful concern of scholars in religion quite apart from whether they themselves are religious. If I have done that work properly it should now

371 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

be possible to say something about the Christian conception of truth, which is the basis for all work of the mind.

The objectification of the word "truth" creates real problems for the Christian intellectual. How is it possible to be faithful and also devoted to the truth of inquiry? This carries with it the related, and humane, question: how is it possible to claim truth for the Christian faith without sitting in judgment on the committed faith of other people? Our problem is fidelity to the faith, to the canons of investigation, and to the humanity of other people.

It is a popular recourse of many to say that all truth is Christian truth. It is not at all clear what "truth" means in this context; it appears to be something we hold valiantly but that is open to correction in dialogue with others, something that is always faithful to Christ because Christ is the truth; we need not fear dialogue that changes our minds for everything that is true is Christ.

To say "Christ is the truth" is one thing. To say "the truth is Christ" is very different. If truth is whatever emerges from dialogue, then Christ would be what we make in our dialogue. It is not clear to me that the proper focus of our faith should be the product of a divinity school inter-faith conference.

The principle of truth in the Gospels has nothing to do with this sense of ideas held as beliefs. If the word "truth" has any significant use, it must have some reference to the ultimate order of things, the way they are, not the way I think they are. When Jesus says, "I am the truth," he does not mean "I am whatever set of ideas you and your fellows decide is truth." What he says is "I am the truth and no one comes to the truth (the "Father") except by me." Truth is in discipleship, not in argument.

Many years ago, in a discussion of the responsibilities of the Christian in the university, one man said, sententiously, "We mustn't go into the university making any claim to special access to the truth." Another responded passionately, "That is not true. We can offer them the truth on a plate."

The "search for truth" is a romantic idea; Christian truth is what we start from, not search for or move toward. This, which sounds like "exclusivism," is precisely the clue to the rightness of the dialogue which so many so humanely seek. If the truth is not in me, I cannot identify it with the ideas I have about it, which are just as confused as everybody else's. Ideas are best held in community and one of the communities is certainly all serious people, professing whatever faith they profess. But what is the measure of these ideas? The only proper measure is the nature of the ultimate order of things.

Truth is what we know in discipleship, in obedience, but this "knowing" is not an intellectual act. As we all learned at our theological mother's knee, this knowing is carnal, somatic, a state of being. It is the shape given our imagination, the structure and the processes of our symbolic systems. This truth is what we are in, not what we think, which can only, in some halting and imperfect way, be a representation of, an

372 - What Should Religion Departments Teach?

expression of, a manifestation of, the state we are in. Discipleship is clearly defined: it is not those who say "Lord, Lord" (those who affirm correct doctrines and theology) but those who are obedient. Obedience is not correct ideas about Jesus but the doing of his will, whether they have ever heard of him or not.

VII

Is this a claim to special wisdom that precludes dialogue? It is not. As individuals and as an institution we are subject to the same measure and live under the same judgment as all people do. Neither our history nor our personal characters nor our intelligence give us any right to sit apart from our fellows as though our faith makes us superior or wiser. Dialogue is a human obligation, but it is in the faith only so long as it is not understood as a "search for truth." We learn from others because they know things we don't know. They are as pious, as moral as we are (and as tittle), and they can teach us modes of both piety and morality we don't learn otherwise. We learn from others their way of being human in the world.

This definition has consequences for theology. Theology, in its present usage, is rightly understood as a working out of the consequences of truth. But it became a means for establishing the nature of truth. Since this is obviously futile, the authority of theology ebbed away. If truth is in the human intellect, it is subject to all those corrosive criticisms that so usefully characterize the work of the modern mind and we have, therefore, theologies built on the foundation of every intellectual fashion (formerly known as "whoring after false gods").

This definition can be the foundation for a lost Christian intellectual life and scholarship. If truth is prior to the work of the mind and the foundation of it, then it is the starting point for a distinctive scholarship, not as a claim to a special wisdom and knowledge but as bringing to bear on the work of the mind the special stance that is that of the Christian. The Eucharist is not a pleasing devotional exercise, but it emerges from an order of things that can be the foundation for a distinctive work. This is "the truth"; my ideas are not the truth. I can be false to the truth in my thinking and in my scholarship, because I am as limited as all people are. My ideas are corrigible but the truth isn't.

There is an instructive historical dimension to this. Some years ago a significant group of university professors (working under the badly named "Faculty Christian Fellowship") proposed just such an enterprise. Scholars in "secular" disciplines were perfectly willing to work on the assumption that religious commitments have intellectual consequences. Those with divinity school or religion department background generally opposed this principle. They persuaded the relevant officers of the National Council of Churches to destroy this movement and its companion, that excellent journal The Christian Scholar. The loss was considerable. The work still needs to be done.