Methodology without membership: Comparative philosophy of religion from outside the transmission chain

Abstract

Comparative philosophy of religion routinely confronts a methodological dilemma that is rarely named openly: most of its practitioners write about traditions to which they do not belong. The two dominant responses - comparative theology's insistence on confessional location (Clooney, Cornille) and constructivism's refusal of cross-traditional comparison altogether (Katz, Proudfoot) - each address a real problem but at unsustainable cost. This article proposes a third option, here called structural-comparative method, and codifies it in what I have elsewhere termed the Respect Protocol: a five-step methodological sequence (philological primacy; internal logic first; structural rather than ontological claims; honoured asymmetry; recovery of erased voices) intended to discipline cross-traditional analysis conducted from outside any single transmission chain. The argument proceeds in three movements: (i) a diagnosis of why the insider-outsider binary obscures the actual epistemic problem; (ii) an articulation of the protocol and its five constituent commitments; (iii) a test of the protocol against three concrete cases - the comparison of Islamic baraka and Greek dynamis; the architectural recurrence of the arch as analogue for morphological convergence; and the cross-tradition pattern of female contemplatives systematically present in the historical record yet systematically absent from canonical recognition. The protocol does not authorise comparison; it constrains it. What it secures is not truth but admissibility - comparison's right to be heard in a conversation it has historically been excluded from on legitimate grounds.