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I think a lot about the relationship between theology and religious studies and the subjects we study and the complexities of a field like theology where you are supposed to care for one's subjects in a way that other disciplines allegedly don't, including RS.
this thread is long and bumbling and has no single point! I guess the theme would be complicating a simple opposition between theology and other disciplines, chiefly RS, be it on lines of belief or the relationship of a scholar to their community
~I missed a lot of the discourse yesterday, so I'm not sure how this relates to all of it.~
There are ways of construing the RS/theology relationship that relegate confession/belief to practitioners of one (theology) and not the other, and thus make theologians a stand-in for the believing subject studied by religious studies, even from within religious studies.
There are of course RS people who hold various beliefs! But there isn't a presumption that their beliefs and practices inform their work in the same way theologians' beliefs presumably inform theirs.
People in RS and theology alike make this distinction. Thus, religious studies is uniquely situated to sneer at believers and, be they in the academy or outside it, and theology. (this is re: @benjamindcrosby's tweet) (I don't think he'd disagree with much in this thread?)
I've experienced this more in English classrooms tbh. One English grad student said Thomas Merton's use of "we" was violent and proselytizing, which to me isn't how authority and genre were working, or proselytization. I said something about that and she wasn't like, THRILLED lol
Or another time an English prof was like, you're a Div school student, describe the 19th-century American Calvinism at play in this work. I was like ... I don't study that? But clearly there's something predestinationy going on? and like, work ethic? hahaha
I've also been in rooms where the presumed gap of belief between theology/RS has led to a respectful curiosity to understand how people can actually believe something and how studying that works.
So I'm not saying that non-theology don't sometimes ~other~ believing subjects in various ways AND/OR that believing people don't feel othered by non-theology people by assuming that me myself is the one being spoken about when it isn't always necessarily some times.
Some within disciplines like sociology, queer studies, and religious studies have found that they need a vocabulary to speak of something like the metaphysical traces or remainders that have no rational or scientific explanation but nevertheless appear.
So you get debates in queer theory that sound an AWFUL LOT like debates about Christian eschatology, sometimes with a traceable trail of citations between the two. I spoke about this in my Q&A at the HIV conference briefly and there seemed to be genuine interest?
Whether or not those things (hauntings, utopias, etc.) will be put at odds with theological counterparts or whether some other relationship between them is possible seems to me to be a choice.
Anyway, theologians are not immune from looking down upon those they study. Theologians are supposed to be immersed in communities of faith and also to be able to assess/critique the language and logic they/we find there.
This inevitably leads to discussions of who does theology and what theology is. Theological methodology feeds on the distinction between the theologian and the lay person, and some articulations of that relationships are classist!
I think of Lindbeck's statement that "most Christians through most of Christian history have spoken their own official tongue very poorly," which means "they cannot... be part of that consensus fidelium against which doctrinal proposals are tested."
No, "The linguistically competent, to recapitulate, are to be sought in the mainstream, rather than in isolated backwaters or ingrown sects uninterested in communicating widely.” You're not a theologian, you're a bumpkin!
Theology has specialized language, but that language shouldn't be either collapsed into "Xn speech" in a way that finds the theologically uninitiated to be lacking Xn fluency or separated from it in a way that... finds the theologically uninitiated to be lacking Xn fluency.
At least in 1959, when Thielicke published A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, the phenomenon that newly trained theologians would go back to their home churches and be absolutely insufferable was apparently bad enough for him to devote the first half of his talks to it.
At the time, the young men would go off to school, learn German criticism and theological jargon, and then go back and scoff at their simple parishioners and friends. To him, this is a symptom of spiritual maturity not matching up to the acquisition of theological knowledge.
"Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed. . . . It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before a church as a teacher."
I don't think this same thing happens in the same way today—e.g., young theologians/seminarians/biblical scholars are often wanting more than source criticism—but it's important to acknowledge that the social structure of theology produces susceptibility to its own arrogance.
Theology isn't unique in its self-awareness around its relationship to those for whom it purports to speak. Those in Black, decolonial, women's, gender, queer studies, etc., have produced some of the best work on the relationship of a scholar to those they study...
and they often remain hyper aware of the relationship of their work to the communities they're accountable to and the activism and practices that have fueled their fields' institutionalization.
I don't know how to close this thread so the end.
