DISKUS Vol.4 No.1 (1996) pp.1-10 The Authority of Believers in The Study of Religions Peggy Morgan Westminster College Oxford OX2 9AT, UK ------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT The paper deals with the relationship between scholars' accounts and believers' understandings in the phenomenological study of religion. The discussion draws on the writings of Kristensen and other theorists with examples of interactions between scholars' and believers' understandings, each in their own way authoritative, encountered in Religious Studies teaching and research. ------------------------------------------------------------- It is my intention in this paper to focus on the interface in the study of religions between the work of scholars and the understanding of religious life articulated by the believers in the religious traditions they are studying. I shall concentrate on this interface as it concerns those engaged in phenomenological studies. The complex method in the study of religions that goes under the name of phenomenology of religion has always been as difficult to describe as the phenomenon of religion or more accurately the phenomena of religions that are its focus. There have been and are, as with most methodologies, different kinds of phenomenology of religion <1> and they have come under attack in various ways. They have been seen as advocating 'mere description'; as being inappropriately interested in an essence of religion; as bringing in theological categories and a theological agenda in a disguised form <2>; claiming an objectivity that is not possible for us as historically and culturally located human beings and as using complex words and phrases such as eidetic vision and entecheleia which are rooted in philosophical phenomenology but hardly understood and certanly not used with technical accuracy by the student of religions <3>. When trying to help undergraduates grasp the complexity of phenomenology of religion I describe it not as a rigorous approach distinct from what they might also find in, for example, sociology, but as an accumulation of conventions emerging from the work of Kant, Husserl, Van der Leeuw and many others. This accumulation of conventions adds a distinctive flavour to the way religions are studied but does not exclude inter-disciplinary overlaps with other ingredients such as history, literary studies, aesthetics, sociology or anthropology of religion for example. If there is one of these conventions which predominates and which seems to me to be the most valuable aspect of phenomenology of religion it is that encapsulated in various phrases from the work of W Brede Kristensen who died in 1953. This Norwegian scholar became a naturalised Dutchman and held the chair of History and Phenomenology of Religion at Leiden, Holland from 1901-1937. In his lectures on phenomenology, published seven years after his death in an English translation edited by J B Carman and entitled The Meaning of Religion, Kristensen says that every religion ought to be understood from its own standpoint, for that is how it is understood by its own adherents. Eric Sharpe includes in Comparative Religion: A History (1968) his translation of an important and as yet untranslated passage from an earlier book by Kristensen on the Study of the History of Religion, where Kristensen says: "Let us never forget that there exists no other religious reality than the faith of the believer. If we really want to understand religion, we must refer exclusively to the believer's testimony. What we believe, from our point of view, about the nature or value of other religions, is a reliable testimony to our own faith, or to our own understanding of religious faith; but if our opinion about another religion differs from the opinion and evaluation of the believers, then we are no longer talking about their religion. We have turned aside from historical reality and are concerned only with ourselves." (Kristensen, W.B., Religionshistorisk , 1954 p.17, quoted in Sharpe,Comparative Religion, p.228) In saying this, Kristensen is no doubt reacting against some of the old style 'comparative religion' where the touchstones of description were often the beliefs and categories of another religious community, usually the Christian <4>. Few of us, however, would affirm his term 'exclusively' since most of us, as indicated above, study religions in an interdisciplinary manner and set the questions and answers, the interpretations of believers side by side with the questions and answers of the historian, sociologist and anthropologist who may or may not be listening to believers' voices. Kristensen also makes no reference in this passage to plurality of beliefs, to diversity amongst believers, an aspect of religious life to which I shall return later in the paper. But in asserting that there is no other religious reality than the faith of the believer; that the believer is completely 'right', Kristensen gives us an important challenge, orientation and check on our enterprise as well as the most memorable and controversial phrase in his writing. It is controversial because it is often understood as affirming the moral rightness of the believers' deeds and words, when in fact it is intended to affirm the correctness, the rightness of the believers' interpretation or understanding of his or her acts or beliefs. One short example clarifies this point. If a member of a religious community in Northern Ireland kills a member of another community the scholar or student is not expected to accept the moral rightness of that killing, but is asked to understand and use the reasons the killer gives for his or her act as the raw material for study. Similarly with beliefs. If a Christian believer explains that Christians are monotheists and that the doctrine of the Trinity is a possible way of expressing monotheism, then the scholar who works phenomenologically presents it as such, as the Christian view, and does not describe it as polytheism or tritheism without this Christian explanation. But, of course to be fair to other Christian believers, it has also to be said that this is not the, but rather a, Christian view. The scholar will seek the believers' responses to further questions. Is monotheism expressed in Trinitarian terms rather the majority Christian view, not 'the' Christian view? Are Unitarians, for instance, to be counted as Christians? Were Christians Trinitarians in the first century? I particularly like to use a Christian example here as a sharpening of our sensitivities. Western scholars have often been less than sensitive and more simplistic in relation to believers when handling the Hindu articulation of the One and Many, monotheism versus polytheism. Another reason for using Christian examples in our contexts is that these may challenge Christian students who have a strong sense of injustice if they hear what they know and love being misrepresented. Kraemer, who succeeded Kristensen at Leiden, wrote the introduction to Kristensen's The Meaning of Religion and, in the light of the views we usually associate with Kraemer, is surprisingly sympathetic to Kristensen's emphasis. His introduction is well worth reading for its expression of Kristensen's ideas. He applauds Kristensen's attempt to understand 'the phenomena of religion as the believer in a religion understood them' and says that Kristensen succeeded in 'making the subject of study speak, as it were, with its own authentic voice' <5>. Far from involving us in a 'merely descriptive' and an uncritical enterprise, implementing this principle is a constant check on and challenge to the data we collect and the ways we present it. Last January when I mentioned to George Chryssides the proposed title of this paper while we were putting in place arrangements for the 1995 BASR conference, he immediately quoted an occasion in Cairo when he had heard a preacher on Palm Sunday refer to the day as Passion Sunday. This shows, he said, that believers are sometimes just plain wrong. Believing this kind of factually inaccurate information is not of course what Kristensen is advocating we accept as right. Phenomenology is not neutral in this sense. But that does not mean that we dismiss this believer's statement either. What is interesting to the student of religion is whether this coalescing of the names of these two Sundays is common amongst Egyptian Christians, an alternative ecclesiastical tradition to that in the west, and where and when the preacher had been told that this is the name of the day. It immediately introduces us to plurality within the Christian tradition which may in this case be related to popular over against classical, local over against global understanding. It may also be an interesting example of clerical ignorance. The above illustration shows how sophisticated might be the drawing out of the believers' understanding, of the why and how of their position which belies the connotation of phenomenological study as 'mere description'. As I have already indicated, the acknowlegment that some authority inheres in believers' perspectives questions our use of terms and categories in some very fundamental ways. This is healthy for our discipline. For example the 'believer' may indicate to us that belief itself is not primary in his or her tradition and so challenge the very terminology that we are employing in our attempts to be empathetic. We may need to adjust Kristensen's famous phrase to 'the belonger is always right'. The belongers' perspectives might similarly challenge the term 'faith', used by Kristensen and brought to the fore in the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith who suggests that along with cumulative tradition it provides a better terminology than 'religion' for what we are describing<6>. A Jewish friend of mine recently stated that he found the language of 'faiths' and 'faith studies' just as inimical to Judaism as the word 'religion' understood as 'belief in'.<7> He said that the word 'faith' does not capture Judaism as doing and being; a way of life and birthright, any more than the term 'religion'. He went further and said that this use of the words 'faith' and 'religion' in the study of religions is not only very Christian but even Protestant Christian in its derivation. Those who know of Barth's use of 'faith' as a term over against 'religion' can only agree with this Jewish criticism. It is often said that Muslims reject the term religion in a similiar way and I have certainly been told by Muslims that 'Islam is not a religion, it is a way of life' if religion is taken to mean 'believing'. But in the text of the book on ethical issues in religious traditions I have just finished editing, Mashuq Ally writes 'Islam's first requirement then is belief'.<8> Another Muslim friend of mine recently began a talk on Islam by saying that Muslims have a faith with certain articles of faith. Another attempt to be sympathetic to religious contexts is to be found when people teaching about Indian or Islamic practice in respect of women, for instance, separate what is 'culture' from what is 'religion'. They think that by doing so they are being truer to the perceptions of believers / belongers and not associating what may seem in a Western context to be unsympathetic attitudes or practices with a 'purer' religious position. But the separation of 'culture' from 'religion' may seem to the believers / belongers themselves to be similiar to seeing religion as 'belief' as opposed to way of life, and be unacceptable. We need to proceed cautiously and distinguish the issue with which we are dealing very carefully rather than suggest blanket approaches. Female circumcision may present very different culture-religion relationships than dress or marriage for a Muslim. Such fundamental criticism of terminology such as 'religion', 'belief' or 'faith' and challenges to the separation of religion and culture, believing, doing and belonging, is a valuable part of the intellectual enterprise of studying religions. Any suggestion that we employ the term worldview more widely, not only because it includes a wider spectrum (humanists, Marxists etc.) but also to avoid some of the criticisms raised above, is in my experience no help, as it smacks of secularity / secularism to many believers. Having made these points I shall continue in this paper to use the terms 'believers', 'religion' and 'faiths', but with the acknowledgement already indicated to the limitations therein. Believers' voices not only challenge the single terms that are used in our field, but also the organisation of the material. In Van der Leeuw's famous phenomenological study translated in 1938 as Religion in Essence and Manifestation, he used the categories of 'the object of religion', 'the subject of religion' and 'object and subject in reciprocal relation' with a final section on 'The mediator' which, Pye points out, is not far from the standard organisation of Christian doctrinal studies into God, man and salvation <9>. Further qualifications that are raised when we are listening to believers' or belongers' voices can be dealt with by the triangulation method advocated in the work of Malinowski and by those involved in participant observation in anthropology. Our believer might not say the same thing on two or more different occasions, and his or her statements have to be a focus for discussion and the reasons for the differences worked out. Different believers may also say different things about a rite, belief or custom and one has then to handle the variety of reasons and explanations that are given. The potential for tensions between the scholars' explanations and the believers' presentations is not the only one with which we have to work. Believers' voices add to the tensions by giving us a variety of views and perspectives. We are automatically being very post-modern by listening to these different perspectives in believers' voices. Two examples illustrate this point. When I was in South India two years ago the young Hindu woman talking to the group I was with in front of a shrine containing a Shiva lingam passionately denounced what she described as Western scholars' insensitive and inaccurate description of the lingam as a phallic symbol. As a South Indian she said that she had always been taught that it expressed the idea that God is beyond form. I now tell my students about this encounter, which they place alongside a discussion between Ronald Eyre and Shivesh Thakur in the Long Search TV programme on Hinduism <10>. The Long Search series was set up as a phenomenological exercise, which is why Ninian Smart, who was the advisor for the series, does not himself appear as the 'expert' filter and interpreter of the material. Ronald Eyre very sensitively asks open-ended questions and enables believers to articulate their faiths in their own terms. He and Thakur are in a Hindu Temple where a Shiva lingam and yoni are a focus of puja when this conversation takes place. Thakur: In there is Shiva and Shakti. Eyre: You wouldn't be wrong to see something remotely sexual in this? Thakur: No, you won't be. Without needing to assert that one is right and the other wrong, we can ask many questions about the differences between these two perceptions. Is Thakur influenced by the many years he has spent in the west and the western interpretations of the lingam which my South Indian guide repudiated? Is there here a difference between the South Indian Dravidian tradition and those of the north? These are important areas of research for those engaged in the study of religions. My second example concerns the colour of the robes worn by Theravada Buddhist monks. When I teach any course on a religion I always try to enable meetings with believers. Ideally these should be in different contexts, for example with Buddhism in mind meetings might be arranged by inviting speakers into college or we might visit monasteries and Dharma Centres. They should also be with different kinds of believers such as householders and monastics, women and men, British, Sri Lankan or Tibetan. When students ask questions as we go through the course I frequently suggest that they store some of these up for their face-to-face encounters. When I suggest, for example, that as well as asking me they ask the Theravada Buddhist monks why monks wear saffron robes, they sometimes look at me as if to say 'she has been doing this for a long time, you think she would know by now'. But what I suggest is that each group ask a different monk and then we collect the answers. 'Will they be different, then?' the students ask. 'Who will be right?' Once the answers are collected they begin to see the way that the variety of believers' perspectives might all add up to the total picture. For example there is the historical / cultural response that saffron is the colour of 'the holy life' in India. Historically this may be linked with the wrapping of dead bodies in saffron-dyed cloth as having anti-septic qualities. This may be the kind of answer they would get from me. But monks may respond in a less historical and more experiential way. It all depends, of course, on the monk! One monk commented that saffron reminds monks of autumn and it is therefore a good colour to wear in the UK because of autumn's message of change and decay. Another monk has said it is not a fashion colour which highlights beauty and is therefore suitable (like shaving the head) for renunciates. Without the believers' input students might well have only an historical / cultural answer which does not bring the lived experience of religious life into their work. What I encourage is the collecting of answers to questions and an examination of the different perspectives. This enables a rounded understanding of religious life which more accurately reflects how things are. It shows, for example, how traditions are constantly developing and adapting to new environments. The comment about Autumn leaves is particularly rooted in places which have a saffron-leaved fall and gives the sense of a lived and very personal symbolism in an ancient practice. Not only do different believers give different answers to questions, and sometimes the same believer reacts differently at different times, but it is also possible for a different researcher to evoke different answers to questions put to believers. For example Richard Gombrich comments on his work in a Sri Lankan village <11> that an outsider, a visitor, a stranger, a guest, may in all politeness be given an answer that the believer thinks he or she wants to hear, since it may be bad manners to do any other. A researcher with the same cultural background as the believers - for instance an anthropologist's translator or field assistant - may have quite a different experience and gain different insights. So presenting the believer's answer as right and as having authority involves an analysis of the context in which it is given. There is nothing absolute about any reported material. In this way checking the times, the sources and the methods used will demonstrate the possible variety in the material gathered. The phenomena with which we are dealing are many-faceted and the believers' input makes this diversity apparent. It may produce a clash with scholars' desire to articulate clear-cut and easy-to-understand models of a religion, or even, paradoxically, descriptions of religions designed to break down prejudice, an attitude often associated with phenomenology. An example of this was given to me recently by a friend who was teaching about the Hare Krishna movement with a group of Open University students. He was trying for structured empathy, planned a visit to Bhaktivedanta Manor and described ISKCON as a new religious movement deriving from the Hindu religious tradition and now gaining more and more acceptance by the UK Hindu community. However, he found that in the group of students he was teaching was a past member of the movement who was very critical of it. He had left in very bad circumstances and knew the organisation inside out but that meant he knew its corruption. Which authority was to be believed by the other students? Did the person who had left count as a believer? My friend, as an experienced teacher, tried to balance what they were hearing with the human possibility for corruption and disenchantment in all religious traditions, using newspaper articles to show this dimension elsewhere. On the one hand the presence of his disenchanted Hare Krishna devotee was a challenge to his phenomenological exploration of the movement, but on the other hand the central flavour of phenomenology when it focuses on the believers' perspectives makes it possible to work with this kind of variety and enables thereby a more sophisticated handling of religious life. This means that access to categories that are now well-used in our discipline; the distinctions between great and little traditions, between official and popular religion, geographical and cultural (synchronic) and historical (diachronic) diversity, and differences between men and women (gender diversity) is facilitated by attending to the authority of believers' perspectives. But there still remain areas where there are tensions between scholars and believers in interpreting a religion. Members of Soka Gakkai may not like to be seen as a Buddhist New Religious Movement, even when members are reported as believing that they have the correct and final Buddhist practice. The Brahma Kumari perception of themselves is not as a 'religion' at all and certainly not as a Hindu new religious movement. They signed the 1993 Chicago Parliament of Religions Global Declaration separately from the Hindu groups. I have been working recently on the movement, or rather group of movements, that comes under the name of Socially Engaged Buddhism. This is rooted particularly in the work of the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and Sulak Sivaraksa, the Thai (or Siamese as he prefers) lay Buddhist. It includes the work of the International Network of Buddhist Women, the International Buddhist Peace Movement and more local enterprises such as the Buddhist Hospice Movement, with its excellent journal Raft, and The Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy group (Angulimala). Richard Gombrich wishes to see a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Socially Engaged Buddhism and the teaching of the Buddha than that often presented by believers. He puts his position in a very carefully worded passage in his book Theravada Buddhism. It is important to note, as we read it, that the basis for his opinion is the textual voice of the believers and his sense of how that textual voice has been interpreted through most Theravada Buddhist history. He sees Buddhism as a soteriology. "My interpretation puts me at odds with those who see the Buddha as a social reformer. Certainly, in consenting to preach and then in establishing the Order of monks to do likewise, he showed his great compassion and concern for mankind. Moreover, he was supremely kind and understanding towards everyone, so far as we can tell. But his concern was to reform individuals and help them to leave society forever, not to reform the world. Life in the world he regarded as suffering, and the problem to which he offered a solution was the otherwise inevitable rebirth into the world. Though it could well be argued that the Buddha made life in the world more worth living, that surely was an unintended consequence of his teaching. To present him as a sort of socialist is a serious anachronism. He never preached against social inequality, only declared its irrelevance to salvation. He neither tried to abolish the caste system nor to do away with slavery... ... To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I should add that the fact that the Buddha did not hold certain views or have certain concerns which we now think desirable should not, in my view, inhibit any modern Buddhist from holding those views or having those concerns. My concern is merely with historical accuracy. For example if followers of Dr Ambedkar, leader of India's untouchable community at Independence, propogate a Buddhism which refuses to recognise the institution of untouchability, they have all my sympathy. While they are wrong if they claim to be saying no more than what the Buddha said, they can claim with some justice that Buddhist doctrine allows Buddhists to innovate in this way, and indeed that, were the Buddha alive today, he might do the same. Such flexibility is certainly in the spirit of Gautama Buddha. In a famous extended simile, he compared his doctrine to a raft. Just as one makes a raft to cross a river, but only a fool, having crossed, would carry the raft further, so his preaching was to take men accross the ocean of rebirth; once they were accross they could go their ways without clinging to his words." <12> Socially Engaged Buddhists such as Dr Ambedkar, Sulak Sivaraksa and Thich Nhat Hanh have not seen and do not see their work only 'in the spirit of Gautama', but use both Theravada and Mahayana texts to support their activities. Here the question is whether lines of interpretation amongst believers have the same or more weight than those of scholars such as Gombrich. What is imperative for the phenomenologist is that the debate takes place between the scholar and the believer. This, of course, brings textual and historical material further into the debate. Kristensen himself was concerned about historical study (he had done a considerable amount of work on Egyptian religion) and advocates that the historian also needs to investigate 'what religion meant for them (Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians etc.). It is their religion that we seek to understand, and not our own'.<13> He particularly criticises the evolutionary theories of his time for imposing evolutionist structures and theories on the religious life of the past. Textual and historical hermeneutics as well as anthropology and sociology should take the phenomenologist's orientation to heart and aspire to enable us to think the thoughts of believers after them. My focus on the believers'/belongers' authority seems to me to highlight many important aspects of the study of religions not just as a descriptive but as an analytical enterprise.The phenomenological style of listening to believers / belongers in their texts and histories, but most especially in their contemporary expressions of religious life, is in keeping with a shift from truth as propositional to truth as parabolic, from authoritarian statement to story. Advocates of phenomenology such as Ninian Smart have long said that the novel which facilitates imaginative participation in a culture is a particularly good tool and Chris Arthur has illustrated this idea from the work of William Golding <14>. Emphasis on the narratives of religious experience (which includes texts and histories) as well as the stories of the community and individual believers/belongers, gives us a particularly effective way to enter imaginatively into the material that we study in a style advocated by phenomenologists such as Kristensen, and also gives a more modern sense of where authority lies. ------------------------------------------ Footnotes 1. A selection of authors and works in phenomenology of religion includes: Bleeker, C.J. (1963) The Sacred Bridge. Leiden Eliade, M (1969) The Quest. Univesity of Chicago Press Kristensen, W.B. (1960) The Meaning of Religion. Mouton Smart, N (1973) The Phenomenon of Religion. Seabury Van Der Leeuw, G. (1938) Religion in Essence and Manifestation. Allen & Unwin 2. There are good discussions of this in Pye, M (1972) Comparative Religion. David and Charles pp.25ff 3.There is a good short overview of the historical development of phenomenology in Sharpe, E. (1986) Comparative Religion: A History. Duckworth. Chapter 10. The recent study which has put phenomenology of religion very fully into its historical and philosophical context, explored the implementation of phenomenological skills and discussed criticisms of its methods is: Cox, J.L. (1992) Expressing The Sacred. University of Zimbabwe 4. For a discussion of the way that this is still present in the organisational schema of phenomenologists see Pye, op. cit. 5. Kristensen, op. cit. p.xi and xxi. 6. Smith, W.C. (1978) The Meaning and End of Religion. Harper Row 7.Clive Lawton, the Director of Jewish Continuity, was in discussion with students I was teaching at a University of Oxford Department of Continuing Education Summer School in August 1995. 8. Morgan, P. & Lawton, C (1996) Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions. EUP, p.222 9. Pye, op. cit, p.29ff. Pye attempts other organisational categories than those he criticises. 10. The programme is called 330 Million Gods and is one of the series made by the BBC between 1974-1978. It can be obtained on video through BBC enterprises. 11. Gombrich, R (1971) Precept and Practice. OUP, p.37 12. Gombrich, R (1988) Theravada Buddhism. RKP, pp.29-31 13. Kristensen, B from the extract in Waardenburg, J. (1973) Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion. 2 Vols. Mouton. 14. Smart, N. (1973) Chapter 2 Arthur, C.J. Phenomenology and The Art of Story-Telling' in Twiss, S.B. & Conser,W.H. (1993) Experience of the Sacred. Brown Univ. Pr. END