The transmission of an authoritative tradition : that without which religion is not religion

In this chapter I want to revisit a book by Walter Capps, entitled Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline, which now has attained almost classical status amongst students of religion. In particular, I am interested in following Capps’ discussion of what he calls the sine qua non of religion – that without which religion is not religion. He argues that methodologically the scholar “must adopt a kind of reductive analytical technique, probing one’s way …. to ‘that without which the subject would not be what it is’”. He cites examples of attempts to isolate the sine qua non of religion: the Kantian emphasis on morality ; Schleiermacher’s identification of the religious impulse as feeling; Rudolf Otto on religion as the human relationship to the holy, and so on. Capps is relaying what these scholars regarded as the lowest common denominator or the indispensible condition which must be present for anything to fit into the classification ‘religion’. In this chapter, I am taking up Capps’ challenge that scholars locate the sine qua non of religion, as a starting point for my attempt to separate the sacred from religion and thereby disarm the host of recent critics of Religious Studies. I hope to establish a theoretical framework whereby we can lay to rest once and for all the dubious connection between the academic study of religion and theology and at the same time maintain a place for Religious Studies as a broadly based but distinct scholarly discipline.