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CHAPTER 7 "My Theory of the Brontosaurus . .. ": Postmodernism and "Theory" of Religion The words of everyday language, like the concepts they express, are always susceptible of more than one meaning, and the scholar employing them in their accepted use without further definition would risk serious misunderstanding. -Emile Durkheim (1952: 41) THE PROBLEM OF DEMARCATION As suggested in earlier chapters, one of the more perplexing things about postmodernism is the manner in which this critical perspective is often called upon to relegitimize theological discourses in the academy. I say "re"-legitimize, for the history of the study of religion over the past one hundred years is generally conceived as a clash between naturalist approaches to the data over against overtly or implicitly theological approaches. As most everyone knows, theological discourses were, at least in publicly funded institutions, disallowed from participating in the effort to explain human religiosity, for they were generally considered to be not so much one among other explanatory options but, instead, to be one aspect of the data under study. As interesting as the work of theologians may be, such writers' sophisticated interpretations of religion's meaning and value-as opposed to its historical, economic, psychological , sociological causes-are but one more item in need of study and explanation. Even though effoffs to demarcate the practice of religion from its nonreligious study and analysis have been quite successful, with the rise of the postmodern perspective in such related areas as literary criticism and philosophy, the privilege naturalists have accorded their social scientific theories and methodologies has itself become the focus of much 103 104 DISPATCHES FROM THE THEORY WARS critique. More specifically, the rhetorical and even ideological strategies by which the social sciences have traditionally demarcated their domains and acquired their authority in the first place have become the target of some devastating, destabilizing, and long-needed criticisms. Indeed, the very possibility of a social science has become an item of debate. Given the questionable nature of the social sciences' authority for definitively studying human behavior and beliefs-an authority that was previously the main criterion for excluding the practice of theological discourses from the public university-the relativizing brought about by the postmodern turn has provided what some theologians see to be the means for reclaiming lost ground. We now find theologians arguing that they too, along with those who practice rationalist or naturalist discourses, have a place in the work of the public university (for example, see Marsden 1994, 1997). In the past, arguments on the relations between (or lack of relations between) the academic study of religion and theology have rightly focused on this issue of demarcation-methodological, theoretical, and institutional.l However, in the postmodern university many of the rather successful arguments formerly used to distinguish what some conceived as the objectivist or value-neutral science of religion from confessional theology seem to have lost much of their punch. No longer can one so easily argue that science is neutral: as Darlene Juschka put it recently, "Marxist, feminist, and postmodern critiques of Western ideology have noted that an identity lays at the core of Science along with English, History , and Philosophy: male, white, western, and middle or upper class" (1997: 9). It is precisely this formerly undisclosed identity, this system of culturally entrenched values, to which some critics now appeal in their attempts to reauthorize theology in the university curriculum. Therefore , today the challenge is for those who maintain that there is a utility in demarcating the academic study of religion from religious practices and institutions to find a way to do so while acknowledging and even using the methods of postmodern critique. I for one believe that this is entirely possible: one can be a postmodern naturalist who studies human behavior in a way different from that of the theologian. In an effort to critique the manner in which theology has been reauthorized in the postmodern university, in this chapter I would like to tackle issues of definition and discursive boundary maintenance by examining the use of the very terms postmodern and theory. Specifically , my critique focuses on Garrett Green's odd proposal that Karl Barth's 'theory' of religion ought to be included in the religious studies canon (1995). As I will demonstrate, as in the case of Roberts's essay on the World's Parliament of Religion, the reasoning behind Green's proposal is an example of the suspect nature of much scholarship on reii- [3.149.250.1] Project MUSE...

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