Historical-Critical Analysis of the Bible and the Rise of Science of Religion

Abstract

The main intellectual developments discussed in this chapter are the rise of the historical-critical study of the Bible and the science of religion in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both developments concern the historization of the field of theology itself, the use of historical and comparative methods to study religions. The influence of the natural sciences and Darwinism on theology was not particularly strong in the Netherlands. The first section addresses the ground-breaking work of the Old Testament scholar Abraham Kuenen, especially in relation to the publications of Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith. The second section is devoted to the Dutch Radical School, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The third section focuses on the new 1876 Higher Education Act, which introduced history of religions and philosophy of religion (often considered to be the two main branches of the ‘science of religion’) as part of the theological curriculum. The fourth section briefly introduces the work of two Dutch ‘pioneers’ of the science of religion and their views on theology in relation to it. Cornelis Petrus Tiele originally hoped for a complete transformation of theology into a science of religion that could fulfil the tasks of theology in a scholarly fashion, whereas Pierre Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye aimed at a new phenomenology of religion that would remodel the study of religion, including Christianity.