Pensare il luogo degli studi delle religioni e della teologia nella contemporaneità

Abstract

The paper locates the actual trend in theology and religious studies within the changes of the epistemological paradigm which characterize modernity. The claim to replace the traditional theology with phenomenology and comparativism or philology and positivism, which has its most characteristic expressions in the history and sociology of religion, has given way to a multi- and transdisciplinary approach. The idea of secularization has been contradicted by post-secular societies, therefore relaunching the cognitive value of religion as an interpretative rationality of constitutive anthropological dimensions. Theology is no longer replaced by the science of religion as a key to the truth on the religious phenomenon but is recognized as an indispensable tool for reconstructing the truth of the religious phenomenon. A pluralistic and open model of religious studies emerges in the present situation, in which the paradigm of substitution is converted into a paradigm of collaboration and complementarity, and from the epistemological point of view theology is accepted as legitimate expression of a peculiar rationality, which is indispensable in the reconstruction of the truth of the religious experience.