THE PRESTON A. WELLS JR. GUIDES TO THE MAJOR DISCIPLINES

GENERAL EDITOR

JEFFREY O. NELSON

EDITOR

JEREMY BEER

PHILOSOPHY Ralph M. McInerny

LITERATURE R. V. Young

LIBERAL LEARNING James V. Schall, S.J.

THE STUDY OF HISTORY John Lukacs

THE CORE CURRICULUM Mark C. Henrie

U.S. HISTORY Wilfred M. McClay

ECONOMICS Paul Heyne

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Harvey C. Mansfield

PSYCHOLOGY Daniel N. Robinson

CLASSICS Bruce S. Thornton

AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT George W. Carey

A Student’s Guide to Religious Studies

D. G. HART

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

A Student’s Guide to Religious Studies is made possible by grants from the Lee and Ramona Bass Foundation, the Lillian S. Wells Foundation, Barre Seid Foundation, and the Wilbur Foundation. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute gratefully acknowledges their support.

Copyright © 2005 by Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Design by Sam Torode

ISBN: 978-1-4976-4513-4

Published by ISI Books

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CONTENTS

Introduction

I. The University’s Religious Roots

The Myth of Christian Higher Education in America

The Era of the Christian College

The University Gets Religion

In Search of an Academic Niche

The Professionalization of Religious Studies

II. The Academic Problem with Religion

Why Study Religion?

A Plausible Rationale

III. Religion in the West

Before the Christian Empire

The Rise of Christendom

Western Christendom Divided

Christianity and Modernity

Take What You Can Get

Notes

STUDENT SELF-RELIANCE PROJECT:
Embarking on a Lifelong Pursuit of Knowledge?

For understanding is the recompense of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand so that you may believe, but believe that you may understand; for unless you believe, you will not understand.

— Saint Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John

INTRODUCTION

“BELIEVE THAT YOU MAY UNDERSTAND.” Over the centuries Saint Augustine’s assertion about the relationship between religious belief and knowledge has inspired much reflection on faith’s cognitive aspects. But his wisdom could prove frustrating to students hoping to understand religion better through the field of religious studies. As much as faith may benefit academic inquiry in many subjects, within the religion departments of most colleges and universities religious commitment is generally regarded as a barrier, rather than an asset, to understanding and wisdom. Believers are generally considered narrow- or close-minded and therefore incapable of investigating religious subjects in a neutral, objective, scientific manner.

Such prejudice against belief reflects not only the triumph of secularism in American higher education. Many factors have contributed directly to the suspicion with which personal faith is regarded in religious studies departments. Some of these factors will become apparent in the pages that follow. Certainly both the dominance and findings of the natural sciences during the last century have contributed to religion’s decline in the university. Yet the rise of religious studies as an academic discipline also shaped the role that faith is usually allowed to play in the study of religion. Consequently, to understand the history and aims of the academic study of religion is important for students desiring to use such instruction and research for their own edification. Religious devotion is not likely to take one very far in most religion courses. At the same time, if students’ expectations are appropriately modest in such classes, they may actually acquire tools that nurture both belief and understanding. After all, Saint Augustine’s conviction about the priority of faith in knowledge does not exclude the necessity of acquiring wisdom through the kind of reading, critical thinking, and writing involved in the contemporary study of religion.

Of course, “faith seeking understanding” is not the only motivation for studying religion. Because Western civilization is unthinkable without the contributions of Judaism and Christianity, a desire for greater insight into the thinkers, artists, statesmen, and historical events shaping the West may also lead many students to take courses in religion departments. But disappointment may result even with this motivation, for the field of religious studies has generally followed the lead of other humanistic disciplines in adopting the view that Europeans—especially males—are responsible for the oppression of minorities, sexism, and an endless list of other cultural ills. In other words, the dominant perspective is that because Western civilization’s most important religious texts and institutions were oblivious to contemporary notions of race, class, and gender, those texts and institutions should be approached with skepticism, if not outrage. Thus, if one enrolls in a religion course hoping to better understand and appreciate the religious ideals that fueled the West’s artistic imagination, provided the basis for its philosophical insights, and informed its institutional and associational life, one should have realistic expectations about the probable prejudices of the professor.

Despite the disappointments that religious studies is sure to yield to the idealistic student, the academic discipline of religion nevertheless possesses resources that will truly benefit those hoping to acquire greater wisdom about the human condition or the contribution of faith to the West’s development.

This guide is designed to help students navigate the study of religion in American higher education, to discover the best that our universities and colleges have to offer. First, we will explore the history of religion in American higher education, the rise of religious studies as an academic discipline, and several characteristic features resulting from this complicated history. Then we will recommend the best ways to approach the West’s greatest religious thinkers and most significant texts. If students approach the academic study of religion understanding this background and with realistic goals, religious studies may prove a hospitable environment for faith and understanding not only to coexist, but to flourish.

I. THE UNIVERSITY’S RELIGIOUS ROOTS

THE MYTH OF CHRISTIAN HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA

America’s most prestigious universities have their origins in the colonial era (roughly 1600 to 1775), a time when religion held a prominent place in the nation’s public and intellectual life. Harvard and Yale, for instance, were founded under the auspices of New England’s Puritans, while Princeton started chiefly with the support of mid-Atlantic Presbyterians. Thus, the best universities in America emerged for explicitly religious reasons, with the training of clergy a primary rationale for undergraduate education. Even after the American Revolution and ecclesiastical disestablishment, the needs and beliefs of religious bodies continued to shape higher education in the United States. As the new nation spread across the continent, denominational colleges sprang up everywhere Americans sought higher learning. These colleges featured a liberal education with a decidedly Christian ethos. The church’s influence was felt, for example, in the standard senior-year capstone course in moral philosophy. The college president—invariably a minister—would integrate the entire undergraduate curriculum while also vindicating Christianity’s truth and the necessity of religion for the good society.

If American undergraduate education was intentionally Christian during the colonial and antebellum (1800 to 1860) eras, it appeared to diverge considerably from its historic character with the advent of the research university, a development that significantly altered American learning during the post–Civil War decades. This “revolution” in higher education severed America’s colleges from their Christian roots and established as the goal of learning training in the methods and specialized research of the natural and social sciences.

Big business—as opposed to the churches—was responsible for the founding of most of the new research universities. Cornell (1865), Johns Hopkins (1876), Stanford (1885), and the University of Chicago (1890) were made possible only by drawing on the fortunes of leading industrialists. At the same time, older institutions started to abandon the religious rules that governed their procedures for hiring and recruiting in order to attract the funding that the new learning required. Higher education became more expensive in part because of the new subjects it incorporated; to keep pace colleges needed to add courses and faculty in the natural and social sciences. Additionally, the specialization of academic disciplines created the need for even more courses and faculty; the course in moral philosophy, for instance, had covered ground that would later require courses in philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and ethics—at least. Suitable faculty became harder to find because of the increased demand for specialists in concentrated areas of study.

Indeed, one of the most significant changes wrought by the rise of the research university was the professionalization of knowledge. Unlike the previous era, when the learned gentleman (most often a minister) could teach a variety of subjects in the undergraduate curriculum, in the research university (and in the colleges that sought to emulate them) scholars specialized in narrow fields of study as experts. What the colonial and denominational colleges may have lacked in cutting-edge scholarship they made up for in their attempt to integrate a whole range of knowledge from a religiously informed perspective. Thus, curricular integration was now sacrificed for the sake of intellectual expertise.

These changes in American higher education have fueled the plausible notion that colleges and universities began to secularize after 1870. To be sure, the place of religion at the new research universities (and at those liberal arts colleges that tried to keep up with them by following the path of academic specialization) was noticeably different. Chapel usually became voluntary, religious tests for faculty hiring generally faded away, and the sense that the churches were the rightful proprietors of higher learning gradually evaporated thanks both to the new ideals to which administrators and faculty adhered and to new sources of funding. What is less credible in this generally accurate portrait of late-nineteenth-century American higher education is the notion that the denominational colleges undermined by the research universities had been bastions of Christian higher education in the first place. As friendly as the colonial and denominational colleges were to faith—and it should be remembered that since the churches were their patrons the colleges did not really have a choice—the explicitly religious content of their undergraduate curricula was minimal. Those who maintain that our colleges and universities need to return to an older pattern in which religion was central to higher learning need to revise their arguments. Formal religious study has always been more or less marginal to American higher education. To look, then, to religious studies as a means of recovering an older Christian-centered vision of higher education is both to misunderstand the achievements of the past and to constrain the possibilities of the future.

THE ERA OF THE CHRISTIAN COLLEGE

Many of the difficulties faced today by those who study religion in American higher education stem from the English and Protestant precedents that the British colonists in North America followed when establishing colleges in the New World. For the British Protestants who founded colleges in Massachusetts (e.g., Harvard) and Virginia (e.g., William and Mary), formal instruction in the Christian religion—that is, the study of Scripture and theology—was almost exclusively reserved for those training for the Christian ministry. Such theological education was not part of British university instruction even for those who would become clergy. (Not until the nineteenth century did British colleges and universities establish faculty posts in explicitly religious subjects.) Prospective ministers needed to have university training, but their education was a primarily literary one that provided a familiarity with ancient languages, texts, and authors. For theological instruction, students would supplement their university education with apprenticeships completed under the supervision of settled ministers. Here is where future pastors would become better acquainted with church teaching, biblical interpretation, and ecclesiastical polity, and where they would gain firsthand experience of parish life. This same pattern prevailed in the New World, where the colonial colleges included religious training sufficient to maintain a godly society but insufficient to prepare students for the ministry. For the formal theological education necessary for ordination, prospective ministers typically needed training beyond college.