APPROACHES TO DEFINING RELIGION BY WESTERN SCHOLARS

For hundreds of years religion had been defined on the basis of doctrine, and primarily on whether the doctrine in question exhibited the same characteristics as Christianity. The earliest attempts to go beyond the confines of the doctrinal test occurred in the early 1800s when scholars began considering intuitive and experiential factors in order to give more emphasis to man’s inner religious feelings, which was fundamental to Asian religions but missing from the Western modes of analysis. This resulted in a more inward approach exemplified by the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as a “feeling of absolute dependence"—as opposed to a feeling of “relative” dependence on something else, something divine.

For many years religions were interpreted by methods such as this which often were based more on speculation than actual knowledge of the true facts, particularly of Eastern religions. Eventually, in the 1860s the Oxford scholar Max Muller called for the creation of a “science of religion” that would interpret religion through an objective test based on actual facts and fair and accurate methods of comparison.

Anthropologists and sociologists in the 1900s argued that religious belief and practice could be understood only within the cultural context from which they grew. Led by sociologists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, they posited that religion should be analyzed on the basis of its component societal factors, and they reduced religious belief to its social, economic, political, psychological and cultural components. But many of the approaches they advocated were subject to criticism on the ground that they did not address what many considered the essential element of religions: transcendence.