Religious Studies: A Global View

Prehistory of the study of religion

The non-confessional study of religion did not fall from heaven any more than

the books of revelation it studies did. Its pundits have devised several competing

accounts of its origins.

According to Eric Sharpe (1986: 1), the emergence of ‘comparative religion’

‘represented the germination of seeds planted and watered over many centuries

of Western history’. Sharpe even suggests that ‘the entire history of the study

of religion in the Western world... [i]s an extended prelude’ to modern

comparative religion. While that may seem like an illegitimate teleological

reconstruction, Sharpe is probably right when he claims that ‘[t]he antecedents

of comparative religion were far more numerous, and far more diverse, than

is commonly realized’. At the same time, he attributes the eventual emergence

of the academic subject to theories of evolution as the ‘one single guiding

principle of method which was at the same time also able to satisfy the demands

of history and science’ (Sharpe 1986: 26).

Searching for the roots

Scholars have identified virtually every major epoch of Western history as the

‘real’ origin of the modern field. In a recent book the Swiss historian of ancient

religions, Philippe Borgeaud located the roots of the comparative study of

religion in antiquity (Borgeaud 2004). He also argued that the modern history

of religions required an act of liberation from religion that resulted from

adopting an outsider’s perspective (Borgeaud 2004: 207).

In a review of Borgeaud’s book the Israeli Jewish scholar, Guy Stroumsa

(2006: 259), claims that contacts between Christians, Muslims, and Jews have

contributed to ‘the genesis of our modern categories for understanding religion’.

Jonathan Z. Smith (2004: 364) attempts to re-describe ‘our field... as a child

of the Renaissance’, given that the practice of the history of religions ‘is, by

and large, a philological endeavor, chiefly concerned with editing, translating

and interpreting texts’.

Together with the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, Stroumsa (2001: 89)

had earlier identified the seventeenth century as laying the foundations for a

critical, impartial study of religion. Nevertheless, the study of religion practiced

by learned scholars such as John Selden and Samuel Bochart was confessional,

often polemical, almost always religiously and apologetically motivated, and

deeply immersed in religious worldviews and frames of reference.

The Enlightenment is a more traditional candidate. In his Haskell Lectures

the German historian of religions Kurt Rudolph summarily calls the history

of religions ‘a child of the Enlightenment’ (cf. Hutter 2003: 3), citing that era’s

‘scientific curiosity and religious tolerance’ (Rudolph 1985: 23). J. Samuel Preus

credits David Hume’s Natural History of Religion(1757) with the ‘paradigm-

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MICHAEL STAUSBERG