oa Friedrich Max Müller en de studie van natuurlijke religie

1Dil artikel is de geannoteerde versie van mijn bijdrage aan het symposium ‘Godsdienstgeschiedenis en de moderne wereld’, gehouden op 27 september 2002 ter gelegenheid van mijn afscheid van de Faculteit der Godgeleerheid en Godsdienstwetenschap van de Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen.

This article deals with Friedrich Max Müller, one of the founding fathers of the comparative study of religion, and his views on natural religion. In order to meet the Victorian crisis of Christianity, he tried to develop an alternative in which the history of religion became the place of revelation. Müller saw a close relationship between the science of religion and the philosophy of religion. A careful study of the history of religions would lead, according to him, to a better understanding of religion and the real destiny of humankind, the realization of true humanity. With his theologically inspired vision of a religion of the future, Müller is also one of the predecessors of those scholars who are nowadays denoted as ‘religionists’ and who champion a theological and religious interpretation of religion.