Schelling and History (1909–11)

This chapter gathers Tillich’s academic work from 1909 to 11, including two dissertations on Schelling and his lecture on certainty and the historical Jesus. Schelling provided Tillich and his modern-positive tradition with a way of thinking about Christianity in the light of the history of religions, after the challenge of Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) to separate historical and dogmatic method. Tillich notes Schelling’s insistence that humanity is God-positing regardless of unbelief. It is also significant that Tillich affirms the notion of an undoubtable condition of thought, whether as Schelling’s concept of ‘unpreconceivable being’ or Fichte’s I (das Ich). With Schelling, Tillich sees a wider application for justification than the ethical sphere. However, it is first in the Kassel lecture on the historical Jesus that he connects the idealist notion that knowledge is limited to the self-certainty of the subject with the claim that autonomy is justification in the area of thought. This is expressed as the rejection of the misunderstanding that faith is an intellectual work. This could have been the influence of his Lutheran tradition, encouraged by Schelling. The chapter argues it emerged from Tillich’s engagement with Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922).

Titus 1,12: Epimenides, Ancient Christian Scholars, Zeus’s Death, and the Cretan Paradox

Many logicians and exegetes have read Titus 1,12 as an example of the Liar’s Paradox without paying sufficient attention to the nature of ancient oracular utterance. Instead of reading the verse as a logical puzzle, it should be read from its ancient context in the history of religions—a context of which ancient Christian scholars were aware. The Syriac scholars preserved a shocking Cretan tradition about Zeus’s death that probably goes back to Theodore of Mopsuestia. The god responsible for Epimenides’ oracle presumably rejected the Cretan tradition of Zeus’s death and tomb. The truth value of 1,12 consequently depends on the oracle and not the human being (i. e., Epimenides) who delivers the oracle. A reading sensitive to the history of religions preserves the Pauline author’s perspective in Titus 1,13: ἡ μαρτυρία αὕτη ἐστὶν ἀληθής. There is, consequently, a strong analogy between Caiaphas’s words in John 11:49–50 and those of Epimenides in Titus 1,12.

Leven na de dood: het Nieuwe Testament als toetssteen voor enkele contemporaine opvattingen

This article considers the question of the difference between NT documents and their contemporary religious and philosophical thought world on ‘life after death’. Consideration of only a few themes discloses that the NT differs widely from Hellenistic views, and that it is closely connected to some views in early Judaism as far as these stand in continuity with the OT. The NT view on ‘life after death’ stands far more on its own than the History of Religions School suggests. Modern thought on the ‘afterlife’ reveals that the NT is still relevant; theological methods should not blur its original message, nor biblical authority (OT and NT) be minimized.

Interpretation, Comparison, and the History of Religions

This chapter critically examines the work of Jonathan Z. Smith and the Interpretive-Comparative Method for studying religion. It unpacks Smith’s ideas about theory and method and shows how they instantiate the guild’s ascetic ideal in the study of religion. It describes three signature ideas in his approach, noting in particular Smith’s silence about matters of purpose when theorizing about method. It then describes how he mobilizes his ideas in his treatment of the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana with the aim of overcoming incomprehension surrounding that event by invoking a method of interpretive and comparative reasoning. Drawing on the ideas of Peter Strawson, the chapter shows what a critical humanistic assessment of Jonestown would look like in contrast to Smith’s reading of them, focusing on the experience of indignation at injustice and the tragic loss of life at Jonestown.

Reimagining Religious Imagination, in Theory and in Practice

Jack Miles, Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020). T.M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2019). Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

We are all institutionalized: Three works to challenge the conceit of a generically ‘academic’ study of religion

This essay encounters and considers together three very different recent works by scholars of religion, each one with strong Canadian connections: Maureen Matthews, Aaron Hughes and Donald Wiebe. The primary purpose, however, is to illuminate more broadly the importance of institutional dynamics in the formation and operation of the academic study of religion (i.e., not just in Canada). This stands in contrast to a well-established pattern of debating supposedly loftier questions of naming, disciplinary identity, idealized mandates and limits, etc. Furthermore, this essay suggests that scale of investigation matters – with a local, single-institution study revealing more, perhaps, about how we really do our work than either national or transnational efforts. In the end, reading these three books together suggests a tremendous diversity, including dynamic institutional diversity, in academic approaches to religion: scientific and non-scientific (predictably) but also, disciplined or expert and non-expert or academic administrative. Thus, the essay enjoins readers to take seriously a distinction between domains of ‘distributive’ and ‘concentrated’ expertise within the academy (e.g., Religious Studies versus, say, Civil Engineering), as well as the development of patterns of ‘altero-piety’ across the expert/nonexpert divide. In the end, such murky institutional dynamics appear to be shaping and impelling our field from the local institutional level (e.g., at the University of Winnipeg as documented by Matthews) to the transnational institutional level (e.g., in the International Association for the History of Religions as documented by Wiebe). Ultimately, one must conclude that stipulating that Religious Studies entail the academic study of religion is meaningless. ‘The academy’ is no more universal and unique ( sui generis?) than ‘religion’ itself. Rather, academic institutions are diverse and particular; and yet a variety of factors, ranging from deep colonial histories to the current global political economy of postsecondary higher education, all work to conceal the importance of the institutional basis of Religious Studies. Put another way (and pace Jonathan Z Smith): religion certainly is a creation of the scholar’s study – yet, far from imagining this scholar’s study as a place set apart (as it were), we must start imagining it as a historical, social and institutional location. That would take us one small but further step towards the all-important goal of disciplinary ‘reflexivity”.