The History of Religions School

At first glance, Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) was no friend of the History of Religions School. He criticized it publicly and, unlike his successor to the university chair and in the “Church Father’s Commission” of the Prussian Academy, Hans Lietzmann (1875-1942), was hardly interested in religions in the environment of ancient Christianity. But what was his exact relationship with prominent representatives of this group? How did he treat their publications in the Theologische Literaturzeitung he founded and edited at a specific time? What place did he give them and their long-term editorial projects in the academy? How did this relationship change under his successor, Lietzmann, at the university, academy, and in the review journal? The paper will draw a new picture from previously unpublished sources.

This paper explores anew the theological questions and perspectives on religious experience that informed and emerged out of the work of the History of Religions School. While the School’s legacy for historical study of religions in a comparative mode is generally acknowledged (especially in the field of biblical studies), the theological orientation of the School is often regarded with more ambivalence. For scholars such as Ernst Troeltsch, however, the methods of an historical approach to the study of Christianity opened new pathways for thinking about the nature of faith that might resonate with “ordinary devout people,” as he wrote in his book on The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religion. Troeltsch and other figures such as Rudolf Otto sketched models of religious experience that bear re-examination in relation to methodological trends in the field today. 

The pioneering work of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in the study of ancient Judaism and formative Christianity garnered considerable attention from contemporary French scholars of religion. The efforts of figures such as Gunkel, Bousset, and others to extricate Judaism and Christianity from the historical-religious vacuum in which they had long been studied, paralleled the comparative approaches of liberal Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish scholars in France. However, the institutional and ideological contexts for conducting comparative religion in France and Germany were markedly different, with the French Histoire des religions closely intertwined with the laicization agenda of the Third Republic. This paper explores the scientific and theological responses of three key figures—liberal Protestant Jean Réville, Catholic Modernist Alfred Loisy, and liberal Jewish scholar Salomon Reinach—who engaged with the methods and theological underpinnings of the Schule. It also situates their work within the broader historical contexts of the Dreyfus Affair, the Modernist crisis within the Catholic Church, and the solidification of the principle of laïcité through the 1905 Separation of Churches and State.

At the turn of the twentieth century Adolf von Harnack was among the most influential theological figures in the United States. But by mid-century, his influence had seemingly declined due his role in World War I and the rise of alternative historiographical methodologies such as the History of Religions School. Did Harnack’s influence actually disappear, or did it adapt to the intellectual and social context of the United States? This paper examines how two of Harnack’s students – William Adams Brown and Arthur Cushman McGiffert, both leading figures at Union Theological Seminary – were responding to and accommodating the challenges brought by the History-of-Religions School, focusing on how they re-imagined the relationship between descriptive and normative approaches. In what ways were they reconceiving the relationship between ‘historical’ and ‘systematic’ theology? To what extent did Harnack’s influence persist? And how might this alternative account transform our understanding of the development of theology in twentieth-century America?