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Document Details :

Title: Religietheorie en/als cultuurtheorie
Subtitle: Een paradigmaoverzicht & een kritische vraag vanuit het monotheïsme
Author(s): DE KESEL, Marc
Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie
Volume: 49    Issue: 3   Date: 2009   
Pages: 255-272
DOI: 10.2143/TVT.49.3.3203473

Abstract :
The twentieth century study of religion as a cultural phenomenon can be divided in three trends, each of them operating from a different paradigm. There is the phenomenological paradigm, the structuralist one and the one of natural sciences. A critical overview of these three paradigms shows how each of them can be considered as a proper answer to two of modernity’s central problems, the one of imagination and the one of the subject. Once modern, the West lost its ontological ‘subjectum’ (foundation or ground), and had to invent a new ‘subjectum’ by means of a similarly de-ontologized imagination. The remarkable promotion of the concept of ‘culture’ from the eighteenth century onwards has to be understood within this perspective. And so has the promotion of the ‘cultural’ study of religion as well. Studying religion as cultural form, modernity always gives an answer to its own problematic foundation. Yet, things get more complicated when one does not treat monotheism simply as a religion among others but as a ‘religion critical religion’. For, indeed, monotheism owes its origin to a severe and incessant criticism vis-à-vis ‘normal’ religions, which it accused of worshipping idols and false, non-existing gods. This implies that modern religion critique – including ‘cultural study’ of religion in its three paradigmatic forms – shares with religion it most of the time examines (monotheism), precisely its critical core. In the confrontation of current critical theory (including cultural study) with monotheist religion, the former recognizes in the latter its most ‘modern’ condition: being forced to criticize all what is false, it is itself unable to promote an entirely true alternative. This is similar to what is the case in monotheism which has to criticise the typically ‘religious’ aspect of any religion, including its own, without being able to put itself outside, confessing it is itself ‘religion’.

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