08/14/2024 – What is "religion"? Early Stages of Development

Have you ever wondered what is “religion”? I’ve got your back because I’m a former community college professor of religion. We’re going to look at a number of lenses academic scholars of religion use to understand, interpret, and define religion, but… broken down into slightly easier-to-understand bits. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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So, here’s the plan. I’m working on a multi-episode series which I’m simply calling “What is Religion?” This is about understanding the academic field of religion including how it started and ways academic scholars of religion interpret, understand, and define religion. In this first episode we’re going to look at some of the early stages of development and then in later episodes talk about the anthropology of religion, sociology, psychology, phenomenology (or experience of religion), and finally the comparison of religion. To get started with the early stages of development in this episode we’re going to mention people named Schleiermacher, Hegel, Feuerbach, Max Müller, and Troeltsch. Let’s get started.

Much of the early development of the academic field of religion as we know it today started in Germany and then spread out to other areas of Europe, North America, and then finally to other parts of the world. And make no mistake, this is clearly a Westernized colonial endeavor to say the least. Now I’m starting this with Schleiermacher and Hegel who lived from the late 1700’s into the early 1800’s, because you have to start somewhere. I could have gone as far back as Spinoza who lived in the 1600’s, because he was one of the first ones to really openly question the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible as well inquire into the nature of God. But the contemporary academic field of religion didn’t really start with him so that’s why I’m starting a little bit later.

The background of all of this comes from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant who left a huge mark on the entirety of the European academic landscape with his works of immense importance. Kant’s major works came in the late 1700’s, right around the time the United States was forming as a modern nation-state. Kant essentially kickstarted an entire philosophical way of thinking which became known as German Idealism: basically, objects cannot be known in themselves, but only as they appear to a perceiver. This set the stage for things to really get going.

Friedrich Schleiermacher was born in 1768 in Prussia, now Germany, and was one of the first religious thinkers to work within Kant’s system. He was later referred to as the father of hermeneutics because he wanted to develop a system of interpretation which could be applied to all texts, not just biblical ones. He started out by separating grammatical interpretation from psychological interpretation. Grammatical interpretation dealt with the language of the text while psychological interpretation had to do with understanding the author and his or her context or sphere of life in which they lived. To get around the newly developing criticism of religion as well as Kant’s limits on understanding, Schleiermacher referred to the method of understanding God as a feeling of absolute dependence.

Hegel, who lived around the same time as Schleiermacher, produced a number of important works for philosophy and religion, most of which were explanations based on three developments or moments or movements in history. These dialectical moments generally ran from an abstract universal, to a concrete universal, to a concrete particular. Anything universal or general must become particular and concrete. The German word Geist or spirit can be seen all throughout his writings. Freedom is the movement of the spirit for the purposes of finding an adequate objective embodiment of itself. In his philosophy this was Idea, Nature, and Spirit. In religion, it was about the drive towards discovering determinate religion, which was a necessary manifestation of the universal concept in history. He saw religion in history as chronologically elevating itself from the imperfect to the more perfect and this was the development of the spirit as a form of progress. So, for example, it went from what he called the Oriental world to the Greek world to the Roman world and then to the Christian Germanic Age whereby this consummate religion of Christianity corresponded most closely with the concept (or Idea) of religion. He referenced specific religions and cultures as he detailed these three stages when he described the content of determinate religion. Stage 1 was nature religion which included magic, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. This was God as substance, or natural/physical objects taken to be God. After Stage 1 there was a transition phase which was Persian & Egyptian religion. Stage 2 was religion of spiritual individualities which included Greek and Jewish religion and was the beginning of subjectivity, the elevation of the spiritual above the natural. Stage 3 was the religion of external purposiveness which was Roman religion and God as providential purpose in the world both public and private. These stages all led towards the consummate religion of Christianity specifically in its German form.

Hegel’s main principle in his system is the movement of God becoming subject in all of reality. The first moment is God’s self-consciousness is pure activity. The second moment is when once something becomes actualized it is located temporally and thus becomes finite. The third moment is sublation when the finite is sublated into the infinite creating a higher unity. What the spirit is implicitly now will become actual in the future because it is always in the process of becoming. Again, Hegel constantly referred to the absolute spirit which was ultimately responsible for the totality of reality, although this clearly was not the God of classical Christian theism. So that’s Hegel, a complicated philosopher to understand mind you, in a nutshell.

After Hegel, the academic scene in Germany split into two major camps known as Right and Left Hegelianism. The Right felt that Hegel’s philosophy reflected Christian orthodoxy and also felt that politically, European societies were the pinnacle of all civilizations. The Left Hegelians, often referred to as the Young Hegelians, were more liberal and interpreted Hegel’s philosophy as freeing humanity both religiously and politically. This was immediately apparent in one of the Young Hegelians, David Strauss, when he published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined in 1835. This was a shocking work for its time as he was the first one to call into question the historical reliability of the gospel accounts in the New Testament using newly developed concepts in the also now-birthing academic field of history in Europe.

Around the same time as Strauss was Feuerbach, who inverses Hegel with his view that the consciousness of God is actually the self-consciousness of humans. The main idea is that the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. This means that consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. Whatever religion consciously denies in reality, it unconsciously restores in God. What he calls “Man” – a specific, individual essence – projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject. Do you get it? He thinks of himself not as an object to himself, but as the object of an object, of another being than himself. Thus, “Man” is an object to “God.” Our realities are therefore the realities of “God.” In us they exist with limits, but in “God,” they are without limits. The personality of “God” is the personality of “Man” freed from all the conditions and limitations of Nature. This is why Feuerbach talks a lot about anthropomorphisms, or resemblances between “God” and “Man.” “God” exists not as a metaphysical reality, but rather as a reflection over and against us. Feuerbach influenced the early Karl Marx and a host of other thinkers as well. Now stick with me and trust the process.

Next up is Max Müller, born in Germany but whose career was largely in England, spanning from the mid to late 1800’s. I should start out by mentioning that his full name is Friedrich Max Müller. Max Müller is actually his surname, or last name. This dude was hugely important in developing what we now refer to as the world religions paradigm. He studied both Kant and Hegel and also another German philosopher named Schelling, but the main things he was super interested in were languages, mythology, and religious texts. He became a specialist in the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, for example, and also learned a number of other ancient languages. In 1870, Max Müller delivered a lecture series on the science of religion and not long after wrote an essay titled Introduction to the Science of Religion which many scholars cite as the beginning of religious studies as its own discipline. Back then, the word “science” referred both to the scientific method as we understand it today and also to “knowledge” which was its original meaning from the Latin word scientia. The science of religion was often also called comparative religion and with the influence of Max Müller it was now an emerging new discipline. Like the German philosophers which came before him, he held that there was a connection between the finite and the infinite and religion was the method by which one could apprehend this. In this apprehension there was always something tangible involved which back in the day was often some personification of the natural world such as the sun, moon, rain, wind, rivers, mountains, and so forth. Mythology then arose to provide symbolic meaning which gradually became more abstract. After that, the religions of the world followed a pattern of natural development.

By far the most important contribution of Max Müller to the development of the world religions paradigm was a book series that he initiated and became the key architect of titled the Sacred Books of the East. The series ended up ballooning to a 50-volume set published between 1879 and 1894 with the last index volume coming ten years after his death in 1910. This simply was one of the first major collections of religious texts ever compiled in the modern world. Max Müller argued that to understand religions one needed a translation of the primary texts of the ancient traditions of the world. His classification system contained eight main religions: the Vedic, or Hinduism; Buddhism; Zoroastrianism; Confucianism; Taoism; Mosaism or Judaism; Christianity; and the followers of Mohammed or what he termed at the time as Mohammedan religion, now more correctly termed as Islam. There were ultimately twenty translators for the series, including Max Müller himself. A “sacred book” was one that was formally recognized by religious communities as possessing the highest authority for religion, which was not surprising as a definition because it had a striking similarity to a Protestant Christian understanding of scripture and, of course, Max Müller was a Protestant Christian. Also, the “East” was anything on the other side of the Bosphorus Strait in modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. Since Christianity and Judaism were already widely known and practiced in Europe for over a millennium despite having originated in the “East,” they were considered Western traditions and thus their sacred texts were not included in the book series.

As Max Müller’s career was ending an important new line of thinking was developing in Germany which would have far-reaching effects for the academic field of religion. This was what became known as the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule or the History of Religions School which was a small group of professors at University of Göttingen and later their students. These mostly German Protestant scholars applied the historical-critical method to religion including a deeper appreciation and utilization of the comparative history of religions, especially to explain the essence of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. One of the main figures in this movement was Ernst Troeltsch. I already have an episode dedicated to Troeltsch so if you want a deeper dive, go check it out, but here’s a synopsis. Troeltsch’s discovery of historicity and development of historical consciousness had a profound levelling effect on truth claims and values, especially truth claims concerning religion. These all flowed from his principles of criticism, analogy, and correlation. Troeltsch wrote that the problem of the origins of Christianity became a problem in the history of religions because of all of the various influential factors in the development of the earliest narratives and texts. Human religion exists only in multiple individual forms and these forms develop into complex relations of mutual interaction and influence. This made Christianity one religion among others because the same historical method could be applied equally to all of them. Other groups, living under entirely different cultural conditions may experience the divine in a different way and thus might be absolute validity “for them.” As each religion strives to get closer to the divine, each religion will simultaneously get closer to each other. Troeltsch’s introduction of a principle of plurality denies relativism and indicates that religious tolerance is necessary and meaningful.

And that’s how we start to answer the question “What is religion?” Schleiermacher, Hegel, Feuerbach, Max Müller, and Troeltsch. So, what do you think about the early stages of development of the academic field of religion? Which figure did you find the most interesting and why? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Next up, the anthropology of religion. It’s gonna be good! Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.