Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There are many different theories of religion both within Christian thought and outside it. The very use of the word ‘religion’ implies a theory of religion, and we can see this by looking at two theorists who have cast doubts upon the word religion from different viewpoints. For Karl Barth religion is a human being's upward search for God which is discontinuous with revelation, which is God's downward revealing of himself to human beings; therefore religion has negative connotations amounting to unbelief. For Wilfred Cantwell Smith the word religion also has negative vibrations because it has been used in many conflicting ways, most of which depersonalize religion, which he considers to be basically personal piety (in the sense of having a warm religion or a cold religion). He goes so far as to claim that three theories of religion should be dropped: the view that religion is an overt system of beliefs, practices and values seen as an ideal, as in ‘true Christianity’; the view that religion is an overt system of beliefs, practices and values seen as a sociological and historical phenomenon, as in the ‘Christianity of history’; and the view that religion is a ‘generic summation’ distinct from other spheres of life such as politics and economics. Indeed he claims that the word religion should be abandoned, at least in all but the first personalist sense, because ‘the term “religion” ... log in or subscribe to read full text