chapter 3

Interreligious Studies: A New Academic

Discipline?1

Oddbjørn Leirvik

Interreligious Studies—What’s in a Name?

The term ‘interreligious studies’ is a relative novelty and hard to trace before
the late 1990s. Since then, the term has been used to designate an increasing
number of chairs, centres, research projects, and study programmes in various
academic contexts. To cite some examples from the first decades of the new
millennium, from different parts of the world: The Claremont School of Theol-
ogy in California offered an ma in Interreligious Studies and the University of
Birmingham in the uk another in Inter-religious Relations. In Yogyakarta, the
Indonesia Consortium for Religious Studies—a joint venture of one secular,
one Christian, and one Islamic university—offered an international PhD pro-
gramme in Inter-Religious Studies.
In 2005, on the initiative of Henk Vroom of vu University Amsterdam, a Eu-
ropean Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies ­(esitis)
was formed. As the name indicates, esitis connects the well-established no-
tion of intercultural theology with the relatively new one of interreligious
studies. A related notion is ‘interreligious hermeneutics,’ which was also the
title of the Society’s biannual conference in 2009.
My own theological faculty at the University of Oslo has had a chair called
‘Interreligious Studies’ since 2005. As an academic discipline, interreligious
studies is related to the praxis field of interreligious (or interfaith) dialogue
as reflected, for instance, in a new chair in ‘Comparative Theology and the
Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue,’ established in 2013 at vu University
Amsterdam. But the scope of interreligious studies is broader, as interfaith re-
lations may just as well mean confrontation and conflict as dialogue and coop-
eration (diapractice).
As for the notion of interreligious studies, precise attempts to define the
term are hard to find. The easiest thing to define is the prefix ‘inter,’ which refers
of course to something in between. But between what, or whom—between

1 This paper is largely identical with Chapter 1 in Leirvik 2014. It is included in this book with
the permission of Bloomsbury Academic.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004325807_004

34 Leirvik

texts, traditions, or people? The phenomenon of intertextuality is relatively

easy to analyse since we are dealing here with a relation between relatively
stable entities, namely texts. When living traditions and people come into the
picture, everything becomes more complicated. People cannot be separated
into neatly defined religious camps, with a certain ‘relation’ or ‘space’ between
them. At the level of individual identities, the phenomenon of double religious
belonging (to Christianity and Islam, Buddhism and Christianity, etc.) adds to
the complexity.
In pluralistic societies marked by fluidity and constant change, it is hard to
see how Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or anything else could ever be fixed as
stable points in the landscape, with corresponding spaces in between. Faith as
represented by people means a complicated mix of religion, culture, and (iden-
tity) politics, and the fields of tension are just as often to be found within the
religions as between them. A salient example is gender models, as acted out in
gendered practices that vary strongly across cultural and religious traditions.

Interreligious or Transreligious?

Such recognitions have led some theorists to suggest that the prefix ‘inter’
should be replaced by ‘trans’ and that constructs such as ‘transreligious’ better
capture the fluidity and multi-polarity of current religious encounters and mu-
tual influences across religious boundaries. For instance, in a course descrip-
tion from 2008, Roland Faber defined ‘transreligious discourse’ as “an approach
to interreligious studies that is interested in processes of transformation be-
tween religions with regard to their ways of life, doctrines, and rituals.”2
Building on the German theologian Anders Nehring’s (2011) critical discus-
sion of the notions of ‘intercultural’ comparison and encounter, which might
seem to imply that cultures are static entities, the Norwegian theologian Anne
Hege Grung suggests that the expressions ‘intercultural’ and ‘interreligious’
should be replaced by ‘transcultural’ and ‘transreligious.’ In her analysis of a
dialogue group of Christian and Muslim women she notes that

2 http://faber.whiteheadresearch.org/theme-transrel-disc.html (accessed 27 May 2013); cf.

Faber 2003. Faber goes on to define ‘transreligious discourse’ as follows: “Theoretically, it
studies the possibility of such a transfer, not by comparison but by following the trajectories
of mutual influences and traces of one religion (way of life, doctrine, or ritual) in the other
or by examining their reflection in diverse theologies. Practically, it studies matters and ways
of transfer.”