Citizen Columns
Citizen Columns >> Answer (September 11, 2008)
Question
Do religious studies sometimes make students question their faith?
Answer
I would hope so. Building strong faith, like building a strong body or mind, requires testing. Believers should welcome such questioning as opportunities to grow in their faith. If their faith can’t stand the questioning, then it was built on sand and not on rock, as Jesus said (Mathew 7:26-27).
Here I would distinguish religious studies from theology. Both require students to question assumptions, to look at evidence and history, to do critical analysis and consider alternative points of view. But theology comes at this from a stance of commitment to faith; religious studies does not. Theology questions from within, religious studies questions from outside. Theology, at least from an Eastern Christian perspective, also requires the desire to seek communion with God as an active participant in the process of doing theology. “The true theologian is one who prays, and one who prays truly is a theologian” is the guiding principle.
Yet theology and religious studies need each other to stay honest, to ask the questions the other might miss. Indeed, religious studies can be a refuge for prejudice as much as theology can be. The apparent objectivity of religious studies often masks a pre-determined anti-supernatural bias, that revelation, miracles and divine intervention can’t happen. Religion is all about myth and meaning, not historical truth. Religion in this view deals not with reality, only with perceptions of reality, “truth claims” and “regimes of truth”.
Theology says there is a wider perspective, that there is more to reality than religious studies alone can describe and that the “foolishness” of commitment to God is the way to an ever deepening communion with this reality. “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding; he stores up sound wisdom for the upright; he is a shield to those who walk blamelessly…” (Proverbs 2:6-7). Now that’s a challenge students of religion need to take seriously.
Father John Jillions
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