Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Religious historyâ 71â

Robertson, W. (1996b), The History of America, London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press (reprint of 1792 edn).

Robertson, W. (1996c), Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press (reprint of 1791 edn).

Robinson, C.F. (2003), Islamic Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenthal. F. (1968), A History of Muslim Historiography, Leiden: Brill.

Sachau, C.E. (1879), trans., The Chronology of Ancient Nations, London: W.H. Allen & Co.

Sarkar, S. (2002), Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History, Delhi: Permanent Black.

Seager, R.H. (1995), The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1895, Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press.

Stanley, A.P. (1861), Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church with an Introduction on the Study of Ecclesiastical History, London: John Murray.

Stanley, B. (1990), The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Leicester: Apollos.

Stark, R. (2001), ‘Efforts to Christianize Europe 400–2000’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 16:105–23. Sterling, G.E. (1992), Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephus, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography,

Leiden: Brill, 1992.

Stout, H.S. and Taylor, R.M., ‘Studies of Religion in American Society: The State of the Art’, pp. 15–47 in H.S. Stout and D.G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History, New York: Oxford University Press.

Thapar, R. (2003), The Penguin History of Early India, London: Penguin. Thapar, R. (2005), Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History, London: Verso.

Thomas, K. (1971), Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Thompson, E.P. (1963), The Making of the English Working Class, London: Victor Gollancz.

Thrower, J. (2004), The Religious History of Central Asia from the Earliest Times to the Present, Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press.

Tweed, T.A. (2000), The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (first published 1992).

Van der Veer, P., ed. (1996), Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, London: Routledge. Van der Veer, P. (2001), Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain, Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

Walsh, J.D. (1959), ‘Joseph Milner’s Evangelical Church History’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 10: 174–87.

Watt, W.M. (1953), Muhammad at Mecca, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

White, D.G. (2006), ‘Digging Wells While Houses Burn? Writing Histories of Hinduism in a Time of Identity Politics’, History and Theory 45: 104–31.

Williamson, G.E. (2006), ‘A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany’, Church History, 75: 139–56.

Wolffe, J., ed. (2004), Religion in History: Conflict, Conversion and Coexistence, Milton Keynes and Manchester: The Open University/Manchester University Press.

Wright, N.T. (1992), The New Testament and the People of God, London: SPCK.

Suggested reading

This section highlights items surveying the methodology and development of religious history: for examples of the genre in practice see the references.

Brooke, C. et al. (1985), ‘What is Religious History?’, History Today, 35 (August 1985): 43–52. Cameron, E. (2005), Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches’ Past, Oxford: Blackwell.

72â Religious history

Conser, W.H. and Twiss, S.B. (1997), Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Studies in Traditions and Cultures, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Cox, J., Howard, T.A., Kselman, T and Williamson, G.S. (2006), ‘Modern European Historiography Forum’ (survey articles on Britain, France and Germany), Church History, 75: 120–62.

Kent, J. (1987), The Unacceptable Face: The Modern Church in the Eyes of the Historian, London: SCM. Shaw, D.G. et al. (2006), Theme issue on history and religion, History and Theory, 45:4 (December 2006).

Part I

Key approaches to the study of religions

Chapter 5

Theories of religion

Robert A . Segal

Theories of religion go all the way back to the Presocratics. Modern theories come almost entirely from the modern disciplines of the social sciences: anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, and economics. Pre-social scientific theories came largely from philosophy and were speculative rather than empirical in nature. What John Beattie writes of modern anthropological theories of culture as a whole holds for theories of religion, and for theories from the other social sciences as well:

Thus it was the reports of eighteenthand nineteenth-century missionaries and travellers in Africa, North America, the Pacific and elsewhere that provided the raw material upon which the first anthropological works, written in the second half of the last century, were based. Before then, of course, there had been plenty of conjecturing about human institutions and their origins; to say nothing of earlier times, in the eighteenth century Hume, Adam Smith and Ferguson in Britain, and Montesquieu, Condorcet and others on the Continent, had written about primitive institutions. But although their speculations were often brilliant, these thinkers were not empirical scientists; their conclusions were not based on any kind of evidence which could be tested; rather, they were deductively argued from principles which were for the most part implicit in their own cultures. They were really philosophers and historians of Europe, not anthropologists.

(Beattie 1964: 5–6)

Origin and function

A theory of religion is an answer to at least two questions: what is the origin and what is the function of religion? The term ‘origin’ is confusing because it can refer to either the historical or the recurrent beginning of religion. It can refer either to when and where religion first arose or to why religion arises whenever and wherever it arises. According to convention, nineteenth-century theories focused on the origin of religion, whereas twentieth-century theories have focused on the function of religion. But ‘origin’ here means historical origin. Nineteenth-century theories in fact sought the recurrent origin of religion at least as much as any historical one, yet no more so than twentieth-century theories have done. Conversely, nineteenth-century theories were concerned as much with the function of religion as with the origin, and no less so than twentieth-century theories have been. Furthermore, the historical origin proposed by nineteenth-century theories was not that of a single time and