NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 57, Issue 4, 2003

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.

This paper presents a re-description of the rise of comparative religion between 1870 and 1920. It argues that the reconstructions of the past depended on a critical evaluation of the presence. Using comparative methods, scholars identified elements of ancient, oriental and tribal religions in their own culture – in the beginning as survivals, later as powerful manifestations of a culture not subdued by rationality. Their historical reconstructions implied different diagnoses of the modern world.

How is the history of science of religion to be written? Various recent books on the history of the scholarly study of religion – prominent among them Hans G. Kippenberg’s Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton 2002) – call for further reflection upon the historiography of the field. How to avoid the danger of writing its history in a teleological way, glorifying the present status quo? Is all research on religion to be included in the historiography, or do we have to limit ourselves to the more or less clearly demarcated ‘discipline’ ‘science/history of religion’? Can the narrative of the emergence of the field of the scholarly study of religion in the nineteenth century be related (exclusively) to processes of modernization? What is the role of institutions in the establishment of the field? These questions are dealt with in this tentative essay on – what I would prefer to call – the ‘construction’ of a field, which at the beginning of the twenty-first century is again a somewhat conflicted intellectual endeavour, drawing the attention of many people, who want to understand what is going on in the rapidly changing worlds of late modernity.

Hans Kippenberg’s view of the rise of comparative religion as a response to the current processes of modernization is a highly fertile approach. Yet every gain also carries some losses. This contribution signals four of them and concentrates on (1) the lack of a proper historiographical introduction, (2) the absence of a discussion of the origin and/or significance of important notions, such as myth, ritual and sacrifice, (3) the absence of interest in the institutional side of the rise of comparative religion and (4) the lack of a discussion of the relationship between comparative religion and contemporary Christianity.¹

In section 1 of this article, it is stated that an empiricist frame of reference limits the possibilities of theorising in religion in counterproductive ways. Empiricism has resulted in an ‘obsession with experience’ which philosophers of religion, such as Alston, overlook to the detriment of their own theorising. In section 2, the postmodernist (R. Rorty’s) criticism of empiricism and of realism is discussed. In section 3, an alternative to Rorty is suggested which shares his criticism of empiricism but provides the resources to accommodate stronger realist claims, viz. a coherentist holism (thesis 2). It is argued that such a holistic version of realism can accommodate the strong features of postmodernism, e.g. its criticism of empiricism, while being capable of avoiding its shortcomings, e.g. its antirealism.