Jess Navarette, speaking at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga conference in 2025, defined comparative theology as “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and of God’s relation to the world.” Because the capitalized word, “God,” is used and usually identified with the deity of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Navarette undoubtedly used the term as a general placeholder for divinity, whether in the form of a deity or impersonal, as in brahman in Hinduism. This begs the questions: what is divinity and could a definition apply to every religion? Answers to these questions can be fruitfully informed by what Navarette calls “interreligious learning” in theology, which in turn is not exclusively applicable to Christianity. Rather than presuming that I have answers, I want to explore how such learning can be fruitful in advancing knowledge of religion as an arguably sui generis domain.
Navarette, like Geertz, advocates
“putting (one’s own religion’s) doctrines and belief systems aside” when
exploring what we “can learn about God together”. Geertz uses word, epoché,
which means “bracketed,” as applying to what a person should do methodologically
concerning one’s own religion, while studying what Eliade called “the otherness
of the other.” The stance of an Apologetic in supposing that one’s own religion
“is better, more complete, or superior to others” is antipodal, and thus not
conducive to such a project as involves the study of comparative theology. This
is not to deny that religions make such claims of exclusivity or superiority as
regards themselves relative to other religions; rather, Navarette’s point is
that insisting in the course of study that such claims be recognized as valid
upon other religions is not consistent with interreligious study itself.
A “worse-case scenario” would be
for a scholar or practitioner of religion to interlard one’s own religious
beliefs into the interreligious-learning process in order to stop interreligious
learning from occurring at all; worse still, of course, would be such a person
castigating or even killing people who are engaged in the project for “insulting
the religion” from the outside or “being a heretic” from within.
Just weeks before Navarette spoke
at the online conference, I had been accused by an evangelical Christian student
at Yale’s divinity school of being a heretic even though we were discussing Christian
theology in what I assumed was an academic discussion at lunch. That my interlocutor
assumed that the content of my ratiocination (i.e., reasoning) consisted
of my personal religious beliefs stunned me. I was citing scholars, after all, whether or not their theories coincided with my own religios beliefs. Following the logic of reasoning is distinct from having one's own religious beliefs as an anchor. That
even my academic knowledge was suddenly being questioned and doubted, and even at times dismissed, stunned me, for I had not encountered anything but great respect for my ideas by
students of religion at Harvard.
To be sure, “faith seeking
understanding” is an intellectually and theologically valid enterprise even at
a secular university, but even such an orientation, which, by the way, I had in
part when I was a student at Yale because I was considering the ministry,
should not be hyperextended to the extent that the boundary between preaching
and studying is pierced or even dissolved. Because Harvard’s divinity school is
not dominated by the study of a particular religion, that boundary is safe there
even as students do not (and should not) always bracket their own religious
beliefs and assumptions in studying religion. This is not to say that Princeton
Theological Seminary and Yale’s de facto seminary should not focus on Christianity,
for there is value in an organization having a distinct niche. Much would be
lost were either school to mimic the conduciveness to comparative study that is
at both the Chicago and Harvard divinity schools, neither of which is unipolar.
My point is merely to point to a risk attendant to studying religion by studying
one religion, mostly or exclusively, where many of the students and faculty are
apologists, and are thus susceptible to blurring the line.
My own study of religion began
with the assumption that I needed to understand more than one religion to grasp
the phenomenon of religion, so I began with South Asian religions, after which
I studied Christian theology (and philosophy of religion). I must admit that both
my studies and my scholarly output in the academic field of religion have been
delimited not so much by the judgments of evangelical Christians who do not recognize
any boundary between personal belief and academic knowledge, as by something
much more troubling. That some practitioners of one religion in particular, who
interlope their respective personal religious beliefs onto the academic knowledge
of scholars of whatever stripe—not even recognizing the existence of knowledge
as anything but personal religious beliefs—would attempt to kill me even for “insulting
the religion” has kept me from doing much with that religion academically. Even
non-religious ideologies, such as the “woke” ideology in North America, can
have a censoring effect on scholars, by means of intentionally using verbal or
written hostility as a dogmatic enforcer having the force of law—a law unto
themselves.
The value in there being a boundary
between personal religiosity and the study of academic knowledge on religion,
wherein the latter is protected from encroachments (or being overwhelmed) by
the former, applies to scholars themselves in studying religion. The
investigator’s attitude while studying is indeed part of the methodology that
is fitting to interreligious learning. The methodology in turn should not be
conflated with the subject-matter being studied. The output of interreligious
dialogue and learning would be incomplete—and with a subtle bias—if the parts
of religions that claim superiority over other religions are simply ignored and
thus excluded. That a religion’s claims of superiority should not be allowed to
get in the way of the dialogue of interreligious dialogue, whether oral or
written, is not to say that that those claims should be excluded from being studied.
In other words, toleration is implicit in the project of interreligious learning, but this does not mean that only the tolerant belief-claims of religions can or should be admitted and subject to analysis. A useful example of such analysis is asking whether Jesus’ statement, “No one gets to the Father except through me,” in the New Testament of Christianity is a claim that is limited to that religion, as the claim’s anchor is the Father, or does the claim mean that everyone who does not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior goes to hell (even though hell is an Abrahamic religious concept and is not in every religion)? Ignoring the passage altogether because it might make some people engaged in interreligious learning uncomfortable conflates methodology and the subject-matter being studied, and renders the results of interreligious study partial (and biased).
As a scholar of religion, I should not exclude the stances
of the evangelical Christian at Yale from the content of Christianity as a
religion just because he bothered me, but this does not mean that such an
attitude should be allowed to eclipse the process of interreligious knowledge. As
for the possibility that a religionist of another religion might kill me were I
to include a critique of that religion in my analysis of religion, a scholar
should indeed be realistic rather than foolish. Even this text is incomplete as
a result of prudence, for I have not even named the religion. Reaching
completeness of knowledge is a fool’s goal, as we are human, all too human, but
even so, we can and should work to obviate the obstacles as much as we can.
