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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2021
Much recent scholarship has shown just how indebted the secular sciences of religion were to the Protestant world from which they grew. Yet this “Protestant world” is typically described schematically, as if Protestantism offered a coherent worldview or even a consistent set of doctrines. A different picture emerges if we deepen our historical horizon, and explore the reflexes, aspirations, and norms that have found a home in the Christian (in this case, Protestant) theological imagination. This “Christian archive” was a heterogeneous place, with room for many things that we would now call secular or even profane. Protestant reform in fact began by condemning this heterogeneity, insisting that much of what the church had come to see was sacred was, at best, only and all too human. Yet centuries of conflict in Europe over the truth of Christianity only pluralized this archive further. The nineteenth-century history of religion grew less out of “Protestantism,” in other words, than out of the sedimented mixture of theological, historical, philological, and anthropological materials inherited from these earlier moments. It was, moreover, also an intellectual project that discovered new uses for these materials and thereby opened new horizons of humanistic inquiry. This article makes this argument with reference to sacrifice—a theological challenge for Christian thinkers from the outset of the tradition, but especially for Protestants; a magnet for diverse historical, anthropological, and theological reflections; and a productive zone of inquiry for the nineteenth-century German philosophers, philologians, and “higher critics” of the Hebrew Bible who together helped create the modern history of religion.
1 Anne Carson, “Beckett's Theory of Tragedy,” in Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York, 2005), 15.
2 Nancy Levene, Powers of Distinction: On Religion and Modernity (Chicago, 2017), 101.
3 See, inter alia, Almog, Yael, Secularism and Hermeneutics (Philadelphia, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Masuzawa, Tomoko, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yelle, Robert, Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion (Chicago, 2019)Google Scholar; and more distantly Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar.
4 David Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, 2017).
5 I will defend this argument at greater length in a forthcoming book entitled Sacrifice: A History of the Secular Imagination (Princeton, forthcoming).
6 Christoph Meiners, Allgemeine kritische Geschichte der Religionen, 2 vols. (Hannover, 1807), 2: 39–40.
7 On the Göttingen school see Martin Gierl, Geschichte als präzisierte Wissenschaft: Johann Christoph Gatterer und die Historiographie des 18. Jahrhunderts im ganzen Umfang (Stuttgart, 2012).
8 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, 2: vi, my emphasis.
9 Ibid., 1: 18, 20.
10 Ibid., 2: 1.
11 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), 432, 434, original emphasis. Hegel's interest in sacrifice began early. See e.g. his “Tübingen Essay” (1793), in Hegel, Three Essays, 1793–1795, ed. and trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, 1984), 30–58.
12 See Jonathan Sheehan, “Comparison and Christianity: Sacrifice in the Age of the Encyclopedia,” in Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd, eds., Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion, and Anthropology (Leiden, 2019), 186–7.
13 Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains, comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps, vol. 1 (Paris, 1724), 151.
14 Ibid., 178.
15 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, Introduction in the Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Berkeley, 1984), 353.
16 Hegel, Phenomenology, 492, original emphasis.
17 See Sheehan, “Comparison and Christianity.”
18 David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford, 1993), 159.
19 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen, 2: 1.
20 Ibid., 2: 1–100.
21 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 356–7, 446, original emphasis.
22 See Kristine Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2011); Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005); Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: WML de Wette, Jacob Burkhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge, 2000); John W. Rogerson, W. M. L. de Wette, Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography (Sheffield, 1992); and Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1985).
23 Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Einleitung ins Alte Testament, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1787), 1: vi. See also Thomas Römer, “‘Higher Criticism’: The Historical and Literary-Critical Approach with Special Reference to the Pentateuch,” in Magne Saebø, ed., Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 3/1 (Göttingen, 2013), 393–423.
24 Eichhorn, Einleitung, 1: iii, iv, 15, 22, 21.
25 Ibid., 2: 466. See also Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 30.
26 Eichhorn, Einleitung, 470.
27 Wilhelm de Wette, Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Halle, 1806), 4.
28 Ibid., 4–5.
29 Ibid., 14–15.
30 Ibid., e.g. 50–51; more generally on de Wette and myth see George Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago, 2004), 152–5.
31 De Wette, Beiträge, 6.
32 Solomon Schechter, “Higher Criticism—Higher Anti-Semitism,” in Schechter, Seminary Address and Other Papers (Cincinnati, 1915), 35–9.
33 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, trans. Terrence N. Tice (Richmond, 1966), 53 n. 2.
34 See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998).
35 Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 2010), 32. More generally on this impulse in the early nineteenth century see Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009), 63.
36 De Wette, Beiträge, 53.
37 Ibid., 184. For the various ways de Wette discusses this see ibid., 55, 89, 99, 103–4, 107–9, 112, 184–5, 195, 227, 248–9. Here see Römer, “Higher Criticism,” 398–9. Also John W. Rogerson, “Protestant Biblical Scholarship on the European Continent and in Great Britain and Ireland,” in Saebø, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, 203–22, at 206.
38 De Wette, Beiträge, 255.
39 More generally on the decline of typology see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974).
40 Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 68.
41 De Wette, Über Religion und Theologie (Berlin, 1815), 144.
42 For an admittedly jaundiced view of this see Karl Barth, Protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1947).
43 Heinrich Ewald, Die Alterthümer des Volkes Israels (Göttingen, 1848), 5; published separately as an appendix to his Geschichte des Volkes Israels, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1848).
44 Ernest Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford, 2002), 3. On Wellhausen see also Rudolf Smend, “The Work of Abraham Kuenen and Julius Wellhausen,” in Saebø, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, 424–53.
45 Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin, 1883), 3, 4. All citations will be to this text, technically the second edition of the Geschichte Israels (1878), though published with a new title.
46 Jon Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism (Louisville, 1993), 14.
47 Julius Wellhausen, Letter 65, dated 9 Feb. 1879, in Wellhausen, Briefe, ed. Rudolf Smend (Tübingen, 2013), 55.
48 Julius Wellhausen, Letter 239, in Wellhausen, Briefe, 185, original emphasis.
49 Julius Wellhausen, Letter 133, in Wellhausen, Briefe, 107.
50 Henning Trüper, Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World (London, 2020), 197–8. For Wellhausen as ironist see esp. Ch. 4.
51 See especially his Letter 419, to Smith, in Wellhausen, Briefe, 296–7.
52 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 64, 65–6, 72, 74, 75, 79, 81.
53 Some of the most trenchant recent versions of this argument would include Yelle, Robert, “From Sovereignty to Solidarity: Some Transformations in the Politics of Sacrifice from the Reformation to Robertson Smith,” History of Religions 58/3 (2019), 319–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heschel, Susanna, “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Tool for De-orientalizing Judaism,” New German Critique 39/3 (2010), 91–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Milbank, John, “Stories of Sacrifice: From Wellhausen to Girard,” Theory, Culture, and Society 12/4 (1995), 15–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 58, 61.
55 Ibid., 62.
56 Ibid., 37.
57 Ibid., 105, 106.
58 Ibid., 422, 427, emphasis added.
59 See Andreas Urs Sommer, Kommentar zu Nietzsches Der Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Dionysos-Dithyramben, und Nietzsche contra Wagner (Berlin and Boston, 2013), 129–36.
60 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London, 2003), 150 (§26), original emphasis.
61 Ibid., 146 (§24), original emphasis.
62 Ibid., 165–6 (§41), original emphasis.
63 On the ironies of philology, Nietzschean and otherwise, see Trüper, Orientalism, Ch. 1.
64 See, e.g., Yelle, “Sovereignty to Solidarity,” 328, 344.