SHARPE, ERIC J.

SHARPE, ERIC J. Eric John Sharpe (1933–2000) was born in Lancashire, England, into a family of straitened circumstances during the Great Depression. The first in his family to undertake tertiary studies, he was fortunate to secure a studentship at the University of Manchester. Sharpe seemed destined for the Methodist ministry, yet, when choosing between two eminent supervisors for his masters thesis, evangelical New Testament specialist F. F. Bruce and the more adventurous liberal scholar of comparative religion S. G. F. Brandon, he chose the latter, researching "the Doctrine of Man" in New Testament and early Vedic thought. Thereafter Sharpe's primary attention was on the business of analyzing and comparing different religions. In 1958 a World Council of Churches award took him to Uppsala, Sweden, where he began doctoral studies within the Faculty of Theology. Interestingly, he did not opt to study under Geo Widengren, a continental equivalent to Brandon, but under the brilliant historian of mission and church in southern Africa—Bengt Sundkler. Sharpe's doctorate, published under the title Not to Destroy but to Fulfil (1965), centered on the missiological approach to Indian religions by John Nicol Farquhar (one of Brandon's predecessors). With the rise of the Uppsala school of New Testament criticism at the time, with its stress on oral transmission, young Sharpe also accepted the honor of translating works by such scholars as Birger Gerhardsson (on the remembrance of the rabbi Jesus' sayings) and Bertil Gärtner (on the Jesus logia in the Gospel of Thomas ).

By the time he returned to Britain with his Swedish wife Birgitta in 1966, Sharpe had become extremely well-informed in the history of different Western approaches to the critical study of the world's religions. The traditions of particular interest to him were the Hindu and the Germanic, but he kept abreast of studies in the history of ancient and modern Christianity (with special concern for ecumenics). Brandon wanted him back in Manchester, and the Sinologist Howard Smith deferred his retirement until Sharpe returned from a temporary appointment in Indiana. Consolidating his research interests in the encounter between Christianity and Hinduism (and other traditions), Sharpe was eventually enticed into a research and lecture tour to India itself during 1969. The next year he secured a senior lectureship in religious studies at the new University of Lancaster, collaborating with Ninian Smart in the public forum for a better understanding of religious diversity in Britain and for the teaching of world religions. Visiting professorships to North America came his way (Northwestern; Manitoba), and in 1975, serving his last year as the organization's acting general secretary, he and his wife organized the Thirteenth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions. After Brandon's unexpected death in Egypt, Sharpe reconnected with Manchester. There he kept up a close collegial friendship with John Hinnells, leading to the co-authored book Hinduism (1972).

Ambitious for a professorship, Sharpe was forced to look to Commonwealth countries for opportunities, and in 1977 he won the Foundation Chair in religious studies at the University of Sydney, the first of its kind on the Australian continent. This success was mostly due to the publication of his finest book, Comparative Religion: A History (1975)—on modern theories and methods in the study of the world's religions. After recovering from ill health, Sharpe settled down at Sydney. While being allowed to test the waters in Sweden, where for a time he held the coveted professorship in the history of religions (within the humanities faculty) at Uppsala, Sharpe committed himself to Australia, and was bent on consolidating a vigorous (if small) department at Sydney until his retirement in 1996. His weakening condition restricted his role in public life during his last years.

Sharpe was one of the world's leading methodologists in the comparative and historical study of religions. If one admits a certain competition between his claims and those of other doyens (e.g., Mircea Eliade, Ninian Smart, and Jacques Waardenburg) at least Sharpe emerged as the world's foremost authority on how one should best orient oneself for understanding other religions. His personal academic experience gave him a distinct advantage in accounting for British evolutionist and diffusionist theories, the myth and ritual school in both English and Scandinavian scholarship, continental phenomenology, and the German Religionsgeschichtliche Schule associated with Wilhem Bousset and Richard Reitzenstein. Other books confirming this status were Understanding Religion (1983) and Nathan Söderblom and the Study of Religio n (1990), even if both exposed his flanks to theorists of a different bent.

Although Sharpe primarily self-inscribed as a historian of religions (and religious ideas), and remained loyal to the historically rooted agenda followed in Manchester and Uppsala, he was always intrigued by Christian and Western images of the East (thus Faith meets Faith [1977] and The Universal Gita [1985]), and he was concerned with understanding Christian missionary interpretations of the "other" (e.g., Karl Ludwig Reichelt [1984]). These missiological interests could be misunderstood, and, in the last stages of his career, Sharpe fell subject to criticism by younger methodologists that his work carried a hidden theological agenda. In Understanding Religion, admittedly, he appeared strident in separating the new discipline of religious studies from divinity (because at Sydney his department was initially launched through the Board of Studies in Divinity). Yet in his critics' eyes he looked to be a man with plenty of theological proclivities himself. Had he not received a doctorate in theology from Uppsala? And had not he occasionally engaged in Christian theology?

These questions were brewing at the so-called Sharpe Symposium, hosted by the American Academy of Religion in Chicago in 1988. If some wanted to accuse him of "closet theology," however, Sharpe could maintain against his detractors that only a warped methodological orientation would arise if a theorist had rejected his own natal tradition. In any case, Sharpe's approach to theology was more nuanced than met the eye. Certainly, he denied the possibility of eluding theological values. The phenomenology of religion, in his view, could never be an act of pure objectivism per se; it inevitably involved "charity," or the concession of goodwill that gave someone else the chance to voice their commitments. He also held that studies in religion should not be willfully secularized, and that the scholar of religion did best with a "dual citizenship" between his or her own and another's tradition. In private notes, however, Sharpe recognized how, "professionally speaking, [theology] may be one of the narrowest and most inbred [disciplines]." Only when one's attitudes were broadened, "Faith could best meet Faith" in generous interreligious dialogue; yet dialoguers would lack integrity and demean the other if they did not represent their own faith (or faith background) existentially, so that believers, including willing theologians, are essential in the dialogical process.

Bibliography

Eric Sharpe's most important theoretical works are Comparative Religion: A History, 2d ed. (London, 1986), and Understanding Religion (London, 1983). For reflection on his work, see Annette Aronowicz et al., "Doing the History of Religion" (the Sharpe Symposium), Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 1, no. 1 (1989): 40–114; followed by Sharpe, "On the Sharpe Symposium," Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 1, no. 2 (1989): 213–226. See also Arvind Sharma, ed., The Sum of Our Choices: Essays in Honour of Eric J. Sharpe (Atlanta, 1996), which includes a portrait (p. v) and a curriculum vitae with a full list of publications (pp. 409–417), and Sharma's "Portrait: Eric J. Sharpe," Religion 31 (2001): 63–66; Carole M. Cusack and Peter Oldmeadow, eds., This Immense Panorama: Studies in Honour of Eric Sharpe (Sydney, 1999); and Garry W. Trompf, "Eric John Sharpe," Svensk Missions Tidskrift 89, no. 2 (2001): 176–182.

Garry W. Trompf (2005)