theology vs. religious studies

To the layman, there might not seem to be much of a difference between two seemingly related fields: theology and religious studies, but these two pursuits are markedly different.

As one of my profs put it, going back to the Greek roots of the word, theology is "ordered discourse [logos/λογός] about the Absolute [theos/θεος]." Most people who "do theology," so to speak, engage in it because they have a vested interest: they're believers of some sort. They accept certain basic premises such as the existence of God, and that God has specific properties. So theological statements are generally about the divine and its implications. But because such statements are about the divine, it's important to note that one can be an atheist and make theological statements, the quintessential atheistic-yet-theological pronouncement being, of course, "There is no God." (Or, as a further denigration, "There is no god," losing the capital G.)* For the most part, though, theologians are believers: they're invested in their work, and for them, something is at stake. If there appear to be logical contradictions as one teases out a description of the divine, a theologian either attempts to resolve the contradictions or relegates them to the mental shelf labeled "Mystery." Some theology is about the further description of divine attributes; some theological efforts fall into the category called apologetics, in which one forms logical theological arguments (called apologies or apologia) in defense of a doctrine or of divine attributes. Theology also plays a role in homiletics, the construction of sermons (and a field unto itself).

To understand religious studies, it might be good to go back to the term's German roots: Religionswissenschaft. In French, this translates to science des religions, which is literally "science of religions," but in English, we use the more cautious term religious studies and not religious science. But where the word studies tends to obfuscate things, the German Wissenschaft—science—makes clear that this field is about the scientific study of religion as a psychological, sociological, anthropological, historical, cultural, cosmological, and even biological phenomenon. This field is, then, necessarily comparative and interdisciplinary, and one doesn't have to be a believer to have an interest in it. One of the essential questions in this field is "What is religion?", a question I've attempted to answer on this blog (2006). One's definition of religion informs one's approach to religion.

So basically, a theologian tends to be personally invested in the question of God, whereas a student of religious studies has a more scientific interest in the phenomenon of religion. 

This brings me back to the definition of theology given above: ordered discourse about the Absolute. The term Absolute is about as neutral as one can get when dealing with all the different religious traditions' views of ultimate reality. Taoism's Absolute is the Tao. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, it's God or Allah. In Buddhism, its sunyata (emptiness). And so on. So now, it's easy for you to see that my prof, in defining theology, came at the term from a religious-studies angle. A theologian wouldn't define theology quite that way: s/he'd be more likely to use God-language instead. Which reminds me: once you move the concept of theos beyond the meaning of an Abrahamic God, you open the word theology up to some interesting uses, such as in the phrase Buddhist theology. Academics have, in fact, used that phrase, even while some scholars would argue (wrongly, I think) that Buddhism has no gods.

I hope that clears up the essential difference between these two pursuits.

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*This should be further unpacked. The atheist is saying there is no God, so from the theist's point of view, this is a theological claim because it says something significant about God. For the atheist, though, saying there is no God is an affirmation that a certain X never existed to begin with. One might as well be denying the existence of the tooth fairy. From the atheist's point of view, then, the claim "There is no God" is simply a way of refuting the possibility that a certain concept might be instantiated in reality. It can't be a theological claim because the label theos has no referent.