Reimagining the study of religion

The distinction in the study of religion between "insider" perspectives of theologies and the "outsider" perspective of the so-called "scientific study of religion" has become increasingly untenable. This distinction has been sustained by both the desire of faith-communities to devote academic capital to the study of their so-called "traditions" as well as to the desire of scholars of religion to distance themselves from such parochial endeavors and be properly "scientific". However, as a result of this political carve-up of scarce academic legitimacy, both approaches are equally inapt to grasp the imaginative frame that the study of religion implies or points us.
In this paper, I argue for the abolishment of tradition-based theology from the academy, while at the same time abolishing "the scientific study of religion". Rather, I think that we, as scholars of religion, should work together to rephrase what is at stake in the study of religion. This is fundamentally positional: every scholar of religion enters the field with its own hermeneutical perspective. It is from the encounter of the hermeneutical multiplicity of scholars of religion that we should reimagine our subject of study and why it matters. "Tradition-based" technology is too limited and uncritical in its understanding that religions are "traditions". Though this might be a valid hermeneutical understanding of religious diversity, it cannot justify an entire discipline, since the existence of religious traditions as a social reality is far too questionable. The "scientific study of religion", on the other hand, confounds objectivity and science. By only focusing on "empirical data", the imaginative structures of religion are bracketed and ignored.
I think we should critically review the ontological discourses that legitimize the methods of the respective disciplines of tradition-based or Christian theology, as well as the scientific study of religion. This would enable us to imagine religion for our posthuman future in which metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics are intimately entangled.