Relating Theology and Religious Studies: Reflections on the German Academic Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ongoing decrease of membership and influence of the mainline Christian churches in Germany provokes the question of whether Christian theological departments should continue to have a predominant position at state universities guaranteed by the constitution and state-church treaties. This situation is exacerbated when universities refuse to hire competent candidates for theological departments because they lack the required denominational profile. Further, there is a widening gap in student numbers between denominationally driven theological departments, and religious studies departments that also cover non-Christian religions, despite the fact that they share methodologies and theories, especially in philological and historical research. So this article tries to describe the relation between the disciplines of theology and religious studies in a more complex way. It uses a system-theoretical approach to show that theology addresses the problem of self-application, which religious studies cannot solve alone. Why do religious studies focus on religious studies? It argues that the discipline of theology can be integrated into religious studies departments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".