TheBible and Religion in the Century of Genius: Part I: Religion on the Margins:Conversosand collegiants

✍ Scribed by J.Samuel Preus

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 101 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0048-721X
• DOI: 10.1006/reli.1997.0115

✦ Synopsis

In these essays, the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century provides the proper historical context for understanding the emergence of both the study of the Bible and the study of religion as critical, historical and comparative enterprises. Since Benedict Spinoza and his circle are the central focus in this account, the first essay explores relevant aspects of context: Holland in its so-called 'Golden Age', and religious alienation and marginality, both Jewish and Christian. The approach taken here attempts to get behind the threadbare and distorted image of 'warfare' between abstractions such as science (or 'scepticism', or 'rationalism') and religion by examining the actual intellectual relations between Spinoza and his contemporaries.

1998 Academic Press Limited

Our Agenda

Something in our culture that nobody has quite figured out is this: why is the modern study of religion an invention of the West; why is it not done anywhere else quite like the way it is done here? Why does it not even seem to make sense in other cultures? For some reason, in the West people had motive, learning and opportunity to make a distinction between doing religion and studying it, or between doing theology and analysing it. Westerners had motive, that is, to criticize, compare and historicize religion, at length all religion, in the same way, without privileging any; to explain them all in ways other than devotees would explain themselves. Westerners were intellectually equipped, knowing not only their own religious traditions but also a second system of knowledge-namely, philosophy-grounded in the Greek discovery of the Logos. That universal reason gave them a perspective from outside the several religious cultures, a perspective universal enough to provide categories that could embrace and transcend the particular local perspectives, at least the Western ones, that religions provided. And Westerners had opportunity, when they became free, not only to think but to write and publish what they pleased about it.

There is no consensus about what the 'study of religion' exactly entails, but I see its fundamental distinction from the theological enterprise in the way that it explains religion. In short, the study of religion operates with an explanation of religion that does not appeal to divine, transcendent or holy realities to account for it. I do not mean that you have to have developed an alternative 'theory of religion' before you can be a licensed practitioner in the field, although such theories are welcome and needed! I mean this more as a critical principle, a sort of absence, because I believe that approaches based on things like the Transcendent are theological and seem laced with apologetic intent. Apologetics may have its place. The practice of constructive theology surely has its place-but not in the university. Now religion has no essence, only historical manifestations from which we can try to abstract nominal definitions. It is a product of history, and so is its study, as we practice or consider it here and now-a peculiar product of Western historical experience *These four assays are adapted from the Mircea Eliade Lectures in Comparative Religion delivered at Western Michigan University in October 1995.