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Cross Cultural & Historical Study of Religion

ws the world and it is created by the intersection of personal, social, and cultural stories. As he put it, the standpoint:

. . . is a sense of who. Who specifies the direction in which the theory looks, establishes the way of perceiving required for it, supplies the imaginative context and the uneasiness out of which the theory grew, shapes the judgments and actions which follow. Who is to a theory what blood and air are to a human being. A standpoint is the who at a given point in time. (Novak, 1978, p. 53)

Since the who of the ancient Hebrews, the modern American Baptist, the Muslim of the Middle Ages, and the Chinese scholar writing before the common era are quite different, the theories which they constructed about the nature of the universe are likely to be quite different too. In addition, our viewpoint in contemporary times, looking at each of these perspectives also constitutes a particular standpoint, and this influences how we assess, judge, and value what we see.

The problem with our viewing a given religious tradition or practice through our own filters, from our own standpoint, is that we are then unable to understand what that tradition or practice meant to the people who believed it and practiced it at their time and in their context. We may be appalled by what we see, because we are viewing it from a different perspective. Or we may fail to understand the full meaning of the religious tradition, because the categories and assumptions that were meaningful to the people of that time are no longer meaningful to us.

As an example of the radical changes that can occur over time, Malina (1981) noted that at the time when the main texts of the Christian canon were created, the people who wrote them down were not "psychological" people in the sense that we are accustomed to thinking. They were not as concerned with the same categories that have meaning to us, such as our feelings, our motivations, and our p...

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Cross Cultural & Historical Study of Religion. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:17, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691756.html