This is interesting, given that all kinds of secular constructs, e.g., the Constitution, democracy, culture, even science, are unquestionably man-made; yet this does not seem to detract from their authenticity or the degree to which we deem it proper to hold others to their dictates.

At any rate, speaking of the monotheistic, Abrahamic traditions, religion as I understand it is fundamentally a relationship. On one side is God. On the other side are those who are joined in a communal effort to understand, prioritize, deploy and defend the contents of God’s self-disclosure, i.e., scripture. While God is absolutely essential to this relationship, so is the community of believers/interpreters. For without them, there would be no relationship and thus no religion, certainly not in the form of a concrete, lived reality.

In this context, one might say that there is no Christianity without Christians, no Judaism without Jews and no Islam without Muslims. For neither the Bible nor the Qur’ân can prioritize and deploy its own contents. This is, rather, the work of human beings working in real space and time.

This corporate effort to negotiate the meaning of scripture is often the source of deep conflict and of immense intellectual riches, as different times and places produce different interpretive perspectives and thus different understandings of scripture’s true intent. Faced with this competition, most parties will incline towards the position that their understanding transcends secular influences – invoking, indeed, the religious version of the adage, “the less man-made, the more authentic.”

In the end, however, there is no getting around the human element. But this is no more to say that the efforts of the follower/producers of religion are necessarily wrong, fraudulent or mis-representative of God’s intent than the efforts of the Supreme Court are necessarily mis-representative of the Constitution, or the efforts of the followers/producers of liberalism or democracy are mis-representative of these ideals. For, in the end, whatever s/he is, man is not man-made, presumably one of the unspoken assumptions underlying our unswerving belief in modern science.

But neither is s/he infallible, which brings us to the real challenge facing religion: how to detect and rid itself of interpretive error.

Religions may seek to resolve this problem through the institutionalization of infallible bodies, e.g., Islam’s Unanimous Consensus (ijmâ‘) (or maybe the Catholic church), based on the ‘democratic’ principle that, while individuals are not infallible, groups, especially extremely large groups, can transcend the individual backgrounds and personal biases and limitations that inform human understanding.

In the end, however, both the task of determining the meaning of God’s self-disclosure and of detecting error are emphatically intramural: only the followers/producers of a religion can produce views that are representative of that religion. For, again, Christianity, Judaism and Islam are essentially what Christians, Jews and Muslims say they are, not what others may understand from the Bible or the Qur’ân.

This brings me to my closing point. There seems to be a mildly contradictory assumption afloat to the effect that the “man-made” deductions of the followers of a religion are doomed to error or misrepresentation while the “man-made” readings of the critics of a religion tell us the real deal. Thus, for example, critics of Islam take to quoting the Qur’ân ad nauseam in order to tell us what Islam really teaches, despite what the Muslims say.

When I read some of these renderings, all I can say is, “Boy, I’m glad we are the Muslims and not you.” These understandings may be what these critics get out of the Qur’ân and or hadith. But this does not make them “Islam,” any more than my reading – my “man-made” reading -- of the Bible equals Judaism or Christianity. In sum, yes, there is a “man-made” element in all religious understandings. But so is there in the understandings of all the critics of religion.