History as a body of knowledge, a loose bundle of working routines and writing practices, of genres, memories, imaginaries, and institutions, has struggled with its relationship to “religion” for a long time. In the European tradition, but also elsewhere, historical writing often served to fill the gaps in the knowledge about the past that had been, in the main, supplied by scriptural tradition. At the same time, historical writing also became a competitor with this tradition. The resulting relationship was, and continues to be, uneasy. In its familiar present-day form, for example, the quality of being “historical,” i.e. “historicity,” requires the exclusion of divine agency as a permissible explanation of events in the course of worldly affairs. In what François Hartog calls the modern “regime of historicity,” the culture of historical writing after 1750 became dominated by scholarship and aligned with mechanist understandings of the philosophy of nature. Enlightenment-era historical writing increasingly conceived of the world as a nexus of cause–effect relations that afforded space to the divine agency only in the function of “prime mover.” History then appeared to fall in line with the other forces of reason-driven “secularization” that stripped religious knowledge of the privilege of explaining things in the world, ultimately transforming it into “dogma” and “belief,” both only tenuously connected to reality. Knowledge based on the divinely “revealed” texts and the divinely “inspired” thought of traditionally recognized religious authorities lost its previous epistemic standing. Yet this loss occurred, to the extent that it did, in the form of a highly complicated negotiation, with compromises stacked on top of other compromises, generating a continuously confusing and mobile state of affairs.

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.

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.

Throughout the nineteenth century, most historians preferred not to ask philosophical questions. In their writings, however, they indirectly engaged with problems about the character of the world-historical process, thus confronting what might be called penultimate questions. This article analyzes both the notions and the practices of historical work in Leopold Ranke's writings to consider how his spontaneous philosophy of history came to shape an entire discipline. It argues that Ranke crafted what I call historical figures from archival materials and that these served as equivalents to concepts in G. W. F. Hegel's philosophical world history. The writing of history has not yet escaped the logic of these narrative figures of historical argumentation.

In this article I will discuss various thoughts of a few recent representatives of the tradition of the philosophy of history—Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner, Ulrich Beck, and finally Karl Rahner—and bring them into a conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty's work on the problems of human species history and the Anthropocene. The aim of this undertaking is to gain greater clarity on the question of the work that theology continues to do for historical thought. I argue that Rahner's notions about “inclusivism”—according to which the possibility of salvation is vested in the species history of humanity rather than in the history of Christian revelation—and his related notion of an irresolvable tension between “anonymous” and what one might then call “onomastic” histories signal the continuing significance of a theology of the baptismal sacrament for historical thought. Rereading Rahner's thought sheds light on certain quandaries of the Anthropocene discussion, regarding the way in which species history can be related to other kinds of history writing, and the novel opening for theodicy generated by the breakdown of the culture–nature divide.

Scholars of religion today understand that the scientific basis of religious studies lies in the fact that religion is a multifarious historical phenomenon accessible through empirical research, and that this study therefore differs fundamentally from theology premised on the acceptance of supernaturally revealed truths and faith traditions. Meanwhile, it has been broadly believed that theology once occupied the preeminent position in the medieval university, as expressed by the well-known sobriquet “queen of the sciences.” By surveying the early history of the university, this article shows that most medieval universities did not have a theology faculty until the fourteenth century. With the notable exception of Paris and its immediate offspring (Oxford and Cambridge), the relation between theology and the university was far more tangential and temporizing than is generally assumed—a point worth bearing in mind as we consider the question of the secularization of learning, which is said to have taken place since the early modern period.

In his “Science as Vocation,” Weber equates rational academic conduct with Jewish ethics. For Weber, the Jewish tradition, which separates moral conduct from messianism, is emblematic of scientists’ strenuous distinction of empiricism from metaphysics. The emergence of a Zionist university in Jerusalem, an institute that was positioned as a part of a Jewish nation-building project, complicated this parallel. This article examines Gershom Scholem's activist approach to Jewish studies as a fundamental revision of the Weberian model of scholarship with the significant role that this model destines to the Jewish tradition. Scholem's vision of scholarship at the Zionist university constitutes Jewish eschatology as a pillar of a scholastic national tradition. Scholem's portrayal of Jewish messianism as an insular tradition overturns Weber's portrayal of Jewish ethics as a lesson for Western academia. Reading Scholem with Weber shows that the enterprise of founding a university in Jerusalem ran counter to European liberal conceptions of Judaism. Moreover, reading them together shows Scholem's notion of academic labor to reinstitute a separatist theological ethos as a formative model for scholarship.