complex act of recognition. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I have
not undertaken the task of differentiation here and it is not necessary
for the understanding of historical developments and theological
positions. I have, however, included it as a separate section (1.5).
The reader has certainly noticed that my‘concepts and concep-
tions’ do not lay out any religious or theological position. These
concepts and conceptions, which express some very general semantic
and structural features regarding various issues of recognition, do not
have proper religious content. This is a conscious decision based on
the following rationale. In Chapters 2 and 3, religious and theological
texts are investigated with the help of these very basic‘concepts and
conceptions’. The theological content that emerges should result from
the historical sources, not from the assumed basic features of religious
recognition. Only after historical study will we thus have positions of
religious recognition that employ these concepts and conceptions as
well as historical theological content.
In the systematic Chapter 4 we start to speak ofparadigms. Para-
digms are long-term currents of religious recognition which can be
defined as a fusion of relevant conceptions with the prevailing con-
tents of religious thinking. The discovery of such paradigms is the
main achievement of this study, claiming that there is an intellectual
history ofreligious recognition that can be described in terms of
content-specific paradigms. In order to keep the historical investiga-
tion as sound as possible, I will not introduce the paradigms in
Chapters 2 and 3. Obviously, the historical results achieved in these
chapters already establish the religious content; the paradigms intro-
duced in Chapter 4 are little more than summaries of this content.
However, the manifold historical evidence can be treated in sufficient
detail and diligence if we leave out the macro-history of paradigms in
Chapters 2 and 3.
In addition to concepts and conceptions, the processes of recogni-
tion appear in historical texts aspractices. The area of practices that
allegedly express recognition is vast, extending from hospitality and
gift exchange to sacramental rituals of initiation and cleansing. This
important and fascinatingfield needs to be left for other scholars to
elaborate.^92 We will only exceptionally (as in 2.3 and 4.2) note the
(^92) The doctrinal issues discussed by Hoffmann 2013 contain many such practices
(e.g. with regard to the eucharist or to neighbourly love). For practices of recognition
in current anthropology, see Robbins 2009.
34 Recognition and Religion