| I begin with a consideration of some of Ninian Smart's remarks on the possible reactions to the plurality of world religions. This discussion serves to moot the notions of truth and falsity in religion and the crucial issue of the religious insider's point of view--all accomplished through the introduction of salient views espoused by Donald Wiebe and Robert Segal, and the endorsement of Hans Penner's criticism of the phenomenology of religion.;After drawing attention to the problems of theological pluralism and specialization in areas relevant to constructing a theology, and the resultant privileged status of the specialist, I argue for the existence of a gulf between specialists and nonspecialists. My conclusion rests on three pillars: (1) a commonsense argument; (2) empirical evidence; (3) the considered views of various scholars.;Next, I analyze the Christianity of a specialist, J. Philip Wogaman, using my framework as a guide. I undertake this analysis because my line of argument has led me to conclude that a Christian specialist would be in the best position to present an account of what Christianity is. I conclude that Wogaman's knowledge of Christianity, the religious insider's point of view, is in a ruinous state. This conclusion undermines arguments that charge social scientific approaches to religion with ignoring the believer's point of view and that, at the same time, maintain that the believer's point of view is beyond the reach of criticism.;Wogaman does, however, reinforce my arguments concerning the importance of knowledge of the world, his work in ethics vigorously stressing that love without knowledge goes astray. My analysis of the knowledge of the world in his thinking also provides ample illustration of Wogaman's high regard for social science.;I set forth a conceptual framework that captures prominent features of contemporary Christianity neglected by religio-theological approaches, features that are preeminently social and psychological, and thus lending themselves best to social scientific study. My framework employs the concepts of the knowledge of Christianity, which picks out what one says Christianity is, and the knowledge of the world, which designates the knowledge one has of the social and physical world, this latter knowledge being shown as conducive to successful action.;And it is social science that deals with the social and psychological aspects of knowledge production, dissemination, and appropriation, that is, with the gulf between specialists and nonspecialists, the tendency toward increasing specialization, the differential understanding of belief systems. Since these phenomena are inescapable features of contemporary Christianity, any study of contemporary Christianity purporting to give a true picture of contemporary Christianity and neglecting these features will quite probably be defective. In the study of religion, social scientific approaches are to be preferred over religio-theological approaches that disassociate religion from actual human beings, with all their cognitive capabilities however acquired, and from the actual social world, with its division of labor, structural constraints, and social processes.;To reinforce my conclusion, I return to the issue of pluralism and concur with Wogaman that not all versions of Christianity can be true. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
