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Historicism, Religionsgeschichte, and the Rhetoric of Eschatology
Part of:
Forum: History's Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2021
Abstract
The article discusses the central role of the history of religion in the debate on the so-called “crisis of historicism” during the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that the seemingly marginal question of how to write the history of religion informs major debates about the writing of history and history's place in culture. Focusing on Ernst Troeltsch's On Historical and Dogmatical Method in Theology (1900) and Rudolf Bultmann's History and Eschatology (1955), I analyze how theological and historical arguments and concepts interact in their respective histories of religion. According to Troeltsch, the methods of contemporary Religionsgeschichte (history of religion) undermine not only theological dogma but also such common historicist categories as “reason,” “teleology,” or “essence.” Bultmann, using similar methods, develops a similar critique based on the idea of “historicity,” i.e. an anthropological fundament of understanding oneself historically. Here too, the simple and linear understanding of history is called into question by a decidedly religious element, namely eschatology understood as a radically different temporality. Both cases thus show how tightly religious problems, theological arguments, and historical methods are interwoven, and how much our understanding of history, religion, and their mutual relations is informed by this entanglement.
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References
1 Anidjar, Gil, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33/1 (2006), 52–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 62. See also Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003).
2 Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2004), 1–31, at 24; see also Weidner, Daniel, “The Rhetoric of Secularization,” New German Critique 41/1 (2014), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), 1.
4 Ibid., 17.
5 Ibid., 17–18.
6 Ernst Troeltsch, “Was heißt ‘Wesen des Christentums’” (1903), in Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 1913), 386–451. See Hans-Georg Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch: Leben und Werk (Göttingen, 1993), 283–95; cf. also R. Schäfer, “Welchen Sinn hat es, nach einem Wesen des Christentums zu suchen?”, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 65 (1968), 329–47; and Lori Pearson, Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity (Cambridge, 2008), esp. 19–64, who stresses the neo-Kantian background of Troeltsch's arguments and also discusses the different later revisions in the essay.
7 Ernst Troeltsch, “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?”, in Troeltsch, Writings on Theology and Religion, ed. and trans. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (London, 1977), 124–79, at 128–9.
8 Ibid., 133.
9 Ernst Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology,” in Troeltsch, Religion in History, trans. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Minneapolis, 2007), 11–32.
10 Ibid., 15.
11 Ibid., 21.
12 Ibid., 16.
13 See Michael Murrmann-Kahl, Die entzauberte Heilsgeschichte: Der Historismus erobert die Theologie 1880–1920 (Gütersloh, 1992); Gerd Lüdemann, ed., Die “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule”: Facetten eines theologischen Umbruchs (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Berne, New York, Paris, and Vienna, 1996).
14 On Troeltsch's idea of secularization cf. Hermann Lübbe, Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines Ideenpolitischen Begriffs (Freiburg and Munich, 1975); on the ironic structure of Weber's narrative cf. also my “Rhetoric of Secularization,” New German Critique 41/1 (2014), 1–31.
15 Cf. Klaus Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik (Gütersloh, 1970); Johann Michael Schmidt, Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichte ihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden vom Qumran (Neukirchen, 1969).
16 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London, 1910), 396.
17 Troeltsch, Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology, 12.
18 Troeltsch, What Does “Essence of Christianity” Mean?, 151.
19 Ibid., 154.
20 Ibid., 153.
21 Ibid., 155.
22 Ibid., 161.
23 Ibid., 164.
24 Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Gifford Lectures 1955 (Edinburgh, 1957), 12.
25 On the development see Folkart Wittekind, “Eschatologie zwischen Religion und Geschichte: Zur Genese der Theologie Bultmanns,” in Ulrich H. J. Körtner, ed., Die Gegenwart der Zukunft: Geschichte und Eschatologie (Göttingen, 2008), 55–84.
26 See Kurt Nowak, “‘Die antihistoristische Revolution’: Symptome und Folgen der Krise historischer Weltorientierung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Deutschland,” in Horst Renz and Friedrich W. Graf, eds., Umstrittene Moderne: Die Zukunft der Neuzeit im Urteil der Epoche Ernst Troeltschs (Gütersloh, 1987), 133–71; Friedrich W. Graf, “Die ‘antihistoristische Revolution’ in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre,” in Jan Rohls and Gunther Wenz, eds., Vernunft des Glaubens: Wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Wolfhart Pannenberg (Göttingen, 1988), 377–405.
27 Bultmann, History and Eschatology, 17.
28 Ibid., 94.
29 Ibid., 29.
30 Ibid., 36.
31 Ibid., 37.
32 Ibid., 38.
33 Ibid., 43.
34 Ibid., 98.
35 Ibid., 43–4.
36 Ibid., 152–3.
37 See my “Rhetoric of Secularization.”
38 Bultmann, History and Eschatology, 56.
39 Ibid., 59.
40 Ibid., 67.
41 Ibid., 66.
42 Ibid., 120.
43 Ibid., 127.
44 Ibid., 135–6.
45 See Martin Vialon, “Erich Auerbauch und Rudolf Bultmann: Probleme abendländischer Geschichtsdeutung,” in Matthias Bormuth and Ulrich von Bülow, eds., Marburger Hermeneutik zwischen Tradition und Krise (Göttingen, 2008), 176–206, esp. 198–204.
46 Bultmann, History and Eschatology, 108.