Triadic Religious Studies

Religious teachings deal with supposed gods, goddesses, and other entities apart from human beings. From their “inside” perspective, religions derive ideas about the world, human beings, the meaning of life, and much more from these assumptions. Religious scholars with a pragmatic approach explicitly differentiate their terms and reflections from such religious self-thematizations. They develop heuristic meta-linguistic terms that describe religions from an outside observer’s perspective.

In this way, religious scholars develop categories to describe concepts, practices, and materialities that play a major role in the social reality of religious actors. Good examples of this are religions' ideas and promises of salvation, their concepts of imagined otherworldly worlds, entities, or orders, offers of obtaining this-worldly and otherworldly benefits, or rituals and statues. With the help of these categories, religious studies describes the social reality of religious actors in the past and present.

The study of religious ideas, practices, and materialities spanning a wide range of epochs and regions constantly produces new findings that make it necessary to rethink, adapt or redesign previous categories. Work in religious studies thus constantly moves back and forth between heuristically defining concepts and critically reflecting and readjusting them. The provisional definition of concepts is based on the current state and context of research and, at the same time, is aware of ongoing changes. It is characterized by its courage to selectively determine specific terms. A willingness to take risks while at the same time acknowledging vagueness - since, in the long term, the terms cannot be fixed - is also characteristic of this approach. For this reason, this approach - both in everyday language and epistemologically - can be characterized as pragmatic.

In recent decades, the theories of postmodernism and the subsequent debates on identity politics have called into question the pragmatically oriented approach to the study of religions. Following postmodern and identity-political maxims, claims to power and domination are expressed in the categories used by religious studies. These maxims were developed primarily by postcolonial approaches. Accordingly, categories are seen as means, embodied in language, with which positions of power are created and reinforced. Good examples are the concept of religion itself, the category of ritual, and the concept of materiality. Postmodern and identity-politics postulate that a supposed superiority of Western rationality is expressed in these and other religious studies terms. The study of religions influenced by postmodern and identity-political thinking subsequently refrains from defining the concept of religion and other concepts of the study of religions more closely regarding their content. This approach even goes so far as to demand that the concept of religion be left undefined or even abandoned altogether.

Pragmatic religious studies assume that our categories derive from the world and its social realities. Consequently, it is confident that we can grasp social reality with the help of these categories. Since social realities and our findings are constantly changing, it is also essential to continuously review and adapt the categories.

In contrast, postmodern approaches postulate that it is not the social realities surrounding us that shape our categories but that these categories emerge as products of the dynamics of power and domination. Thus, using the categories to convey an adequate picture of social realities is impossible. While postmodern approaches do not deny that social realities exist, they argue that our view of them is always clouded by the dynamics of power and domination, which run through our categories. Consequently, postmodern approaches aim to deconstruct these categories. This means, on the one hand, revealing the power dynamics they embody and, on the other hand, renouncing their use.

Thus, the pragmatic and deconstructive approaches to the study of religions stand in opposition to each other: Either - from a pragmatic perspective - reality shapes language and thus our categories. Or - from a deconstructive perspective - it is the language that constructs social reality in the first place, and therefore, it cannot provide us with information about social realities. As a result of this insight, approaches that rely on queering and disruption are also gaining ground in religious studies.

TRIADIC religious studies offer a solution to this confrontation. Its initial aim is to apply both methods alternately. As demanded by postmodern approaches, the systematic discourse-theoretical deconstruction is thus not played off against the pragmatic formulation of working concepts. In addition, religious studies is enriched by the dimension of dialogue competence. Thus, the triadic study of religion comprises the following three components: critical epistemology, work with provisional definitions of religion, and dialogical competence. With the help of the fruitful combination of meta-theory, heuristics, and dialogue, it is possible to produce differentiated findings about the social realities of religions in the past and present.