The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy by Donald Wiebe (review)

300 letters in canada 1999 material advances. Methodologically it demonstrates how to read particularistically and yet with full confidence in the normativity of one's claims. Materially it reconceives natural law (and perhaps the concept of`human nature' itself) as more negative than positive, suggesting ànegative anthropology,' whose root lies, not in any human capacity or characteristic, but rather in God's decision to know and value humans B thus radically decentering our sense of the locus of value in reality. Novak only shows natural law's legitimate and operational place in Judaism; he does not aim to settle all debates about the ultimate validity of natural law reasoning. But such eschatological expectations are improper for us; the Torah is not in heaven, and so we are responsible for bringing wisdom forth from it on earth. By establishing how something like natural law emerges from within the dynamics and ongoing inquiry of Judaism, he leaves open the question of what further insights (and perhaps reversals) future rereadings will uncover. Whatever that future does bring, we are all in Novak's debt for this work. (CHARLES T. MATHEWES) Donald Wiebe. The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy St. Martin's. xx, 332. US $49.95, US $19.95 For a quarter of a century Donald Wiebe has served the academy well by doggedly identifying and challenging the presence of theology, hidden and overt, in the academic study of religion. No one should claim to understand the options and arguments about methods in the academic study of religion if they have not read Wiebe carefully. The sixteen articles and papers gathered in this volume, from the last fifteen or so years, from different contexts and in response to different assignments, share a core conviction. This is that Max Müller set the academic study of religion on roughly the right path, to study religion scientifically, rather than to seek to preserve or promote religion. The articles and papers in this volume make a cumulatively powerful case that religious scholars have continuously strayed from that path. As one has come to expect from Wiebe, this is not a vague or general charge. In each of the chapters he painstakingly reviews the specifics of positions taken by Thiele, Eliade, Kitagawa, Sharpe, Smart, Wach, van der Leeuw, and many others, to show in detail how they have evaded the requirements of what Wiebe calls a properly scientific approach to the study of religion. The major evasive strategies are familiar. One is the claim that the object of religion is sui generis, whether it be called the transcendent or the sacred. Another strategy is a phenomenological approach that permits no scepticism about religious belief. A third is to exempt humanistic elements of religion from the reach of any scientific approach. Most re- humanities 301 cently, postmodernism calls into question the validity of scientific approaches altogether. On one or more of these grounds scholars of religion justify placing theological suppositions at the core of their work. Wiebe's chapters constitute an excellent review and critique of these many theologies parasitic on the academic study of religion. Many of my colleagues in a religious studies department complain that the American Academy of Religion is too secular. Wiebe provides perspective on this also. He shows ongoing support for theological presuppositions in the history, practices, and atmosphere of the AAR, represented in various ways such as by presidential and other plenary lectures, and in the distance the AAR keeps from the International Association for the History of Religions and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religions. Wiebe's detailed analyses provide the scholar with a sound basis for a judgment about the scholar's own options in her or his analysis of religion, in writings and in the classroom. Wiebe leaves me convinced that the goal should be to analyse both naturalistic and theologically oriented general interpretations of religion and the theologies of specific traditions as well, but then to review all of these with the same critical or `scientific' tools: the arguments and evidence for and against each of them. One can respect the transcendent orientation of religious believers, understand and describe...