In saecula saeculorum

Long-term perspectives on religious history *)

Fred van Lieburg

Whoever knows what has been casts light on what is and possibly on what will be. A book
was published in 2009 with the intriguing title: A History of Christianity: The First Three
Thousand Years.1 Three millennia, however, seems far too much for a religion that had not
yet seen the light of day two thousand years ago. At first glance, one might think that this
book was written by an enthusiastic Evangelical who anticipated the future and accorded
Christianity the assurance of another thousand years of existence. But the author did not refer
to himself as a Christian; rather, he described himself as a skeptic with respect to belief and
worldview, a “friend of the church” outside the church who, as the son of an Anglican vicar,
had an insider’s understanding of his topic. Because he wanted to write in a neutral way, he
did not use the usual Christian dating system, i.e. A.D. or B.C. but that of the Common Era.
Thus, Jesus of Nazareth was born not in 4 B.C. (before Christ) but 4 B.C.E (Before the
Common Era).
This book on the long history of Christianity was written by Diarmond MacCulloch,
professor of church history at Oxford University, at the theological faculty that at present
explicitly refers to itself as a faculty of religious studies. MacCulloch is a professional
historian who does not avoid the grand themes and time periods. In 2003, he made a name for
himself with a thick volume on the Reformation in the context of the history of Europe
between 1490 and 1700.2 His survey work on Christianity also earned a great deal of praise
from academics and other readers. The table of contents quickly reveals what his long-term
perspective involves. The author first discusses the millennium before the advent of the new
religion in the Middle East of that time. Without its roots in the Greek, Roman, and Jewish
cultures, the growth of the Jesus movement – not to mention its expansion into one of the
world religions – would have been inconceivable.
Not only did MacCulloch want his readers to ask themselves if Christianity had a
future; he also wanted them to understand that Christian ideas were linked to ideas of those
who had lived earlier than Jesus and to those of many generations after him. That
consideration can, I should add, just as well be applied to other local religions that have
attained a supraregional or even global status. Without beginning to talk immediately about
Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, I want to look at the stable character of religious traditions,
,which is not the same as the stabilizing character of religion itself. Nobody really knows what
religion is, but religious ideals, practices, and movements can be observed through history, at
any time and anywhere. The great traditions have certainly lasted through the centuries. They
are possibly part of the mystery of resilient and meaningful societies, a theme that has
recently been placed on the Dutch National Research Agenda as an “example route.”3

*) Inaugural address, delivered at the acceptance of the chair of religious history at the Faculty of
Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, on April 1, 2016, in the Dutch language, under the title: De
eeuwen der eeuwen: religiegeschiedenis op lange termijn. Translation of the unrevised text of speech by
Henry Jansen, Cambridge. Annotation updated and adapted to an international audience.
1
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A history of Christianity: The first three thousand years (Londen 2009).
2
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s house divided, 1490-1700 (Londen 2003); vertaling:
Reformatie: het Europese huis gedeeld 1490-1700 (Utrecht/Antwerpen 2005).
3
Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research, Portfolio for research and innovation: cooperation, creativity, game
changers (The Hague 2015), 67-69. Even more explicit is the report by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences on Dutch theology and religious studies in their plea for a national research programma about
‘lived religion’: ‘Vragen kunnen bijvoorbeeld zijn hoe een pluriforme religieuze beleving bijdraagt aan een

1
 Setting the agenda of large-scale research to look at factors that contribute to the
flexibility, vitality, and coherence of cultural, social, and economic systems should speak to
historians in particular. Some years ago, two American colleagues launched a History
Manifesto, in which they called on their colleagues to focus on studying the long term, the
longue durée, to use the lofty term of the historian Fernand Braudel (1902-1985).4 They assert
that historians should not study small slices of the past but larger periods: macrohistory is
more important than microhistory. The great world problems – such as climate change,
globalization, and social inequality – demand that we actively reflect together on the basis of
historical knowledge. For such research into long-term processes, the digital age is, moreover,
exceptionally suited, given the increasing availability of large data files that can be analyzed
by computer.
This History Manifesto also contains good news for the field of religious studies. At
any rate, the authors point to religious institutions, together with universities, as bearers of
traditions and keepers of deep knowledge.5 But we could say more about the significance,
scope, and influence of religion over the centuries, and that is what I propose to do in this
programmatic look at the history of religion in the long term and consequently on a global
level. Whoever accepts such a dizzying task in 2016 Anno Domini should provide some
explanation of the conceptual background of the academic teaching and research that is
entrusted to me and intended that I carry out. For me, this has to do with determining the
place of the history of religion in relation to doing general history. I will approach this issue
that via a detour that, by way of some subtopics, ends with my response to the question of the
subject, method, and relevance of the history of religion as a subdiscipline.6

The discovery of the long term

What is actually the long term from the perspective of supernatural reality? We all know the
prayer of Moses, or at least the Hebrew psalm ascribed to him: “Before the mountains were
born, or You brought forth the earth and world, from everlasting to everlasting, You are God”
(Psalm 90:2, NIV). A thousand years in God’s sight are like a day that has passed, a watch in
the night, or a sleep in the morning. This notion of a divine and timeless space reinforces the
linear view of world history, an idea that has had great influence on the Western view of
history via Judaism, Christianity, and Islam right up into the modern period. God created
heaven and earth and humankind and is held to determine not only the beginning but also the
end of time by the Last Judgment, the division of humanity into two groups, and the renewal
of the universe.
The genealogies in the Torah, with the improbably advanced ages of the people before
the Deluge and after it as well, provided a basis for attempts to establish a continuous
chronology. At the same time, they became a means for dividing history into successive

duurzame en vreedzame maatschappij, waar en in hoeverre zij een helende of juist ontwrichtende kracht is, waar
en hoe zij bijdraagt aan de cultuur en waar zij motor of rem is.’; Klaar om te wenden… De academische
bestudering van religie in Nederland: een verkenning (Amsterdam 2015) 101.
4
Jo Guldi & David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge 2014); cf. David Armitage & Jo Guldi, ‘The
return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American perspective’, Annales histoire sciences sociales 70 (2015) 289-
318 (special issue ‘La longue durée en débat’).
5
Guldi & Armitage, The History Manifesto, 5: ‘Universities, along with religious institutions, are the carriers of
traditions, the guardians of deep knowledge.’
6
Earlier essays were written upon request: Fred van Lieburg, ‘Religiegeschiedenis versus kerkgeschiedenis’,
Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis 9 (2006) 103-105; ‘De toekomst van de religiegeschiedenis’,
Ellips: tijdschrift over bijbel & wetenschap 33/282 (2008) 18-21.

2
periods, in any case, since Adam – via Noah, Abraham, and David – up until the time of the
Babylonian captivity. It was from that, along with the coming of Christ and in analogy with
the number of days of creation or the stages in human life, that the Church Father Augustine
(354-430) deduced his doctrine of six periods of world history. The Church Father Jerome
(347-420) chose rather to basis his division on the four empires found in the prophecy of
Daniel, understood to be the empires of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the
Romans. We are thus already in the fourth century after Christ, as we refer to that on the
authority of medieval monks, disregarding the Jewish scholars who had already established
chronologies that began with the creation of the world, more than 4,000 years ago.
Whatever view of religious history we endorse here, the European dominance in the
development of modern science ultimately led to the disentwining of salvation history and
world history or sacred and profane history. The French humanist Jean Bodin (1530-1596)
gives us a snapshot of the transition phase with a book he published in Paris in 1566 and
which published anew in Amsterdam in 1650, containing a lovely frontispiece on which
angels blow trumpets above the globe.7 Bodin offered a simple method for studying history,
explicitly rejecting the biblical division into four empires and argued instead for a more
political, juridical, or secular interpretation of the past. A pioneer in his field, he distinguished
between human, natural, and divine dimensions in history, that is, between historical
processes of general, geological, and theological natures.
Slowly but surely, this secularization of the view of history became common in the
humanities and in public thinking. This development could be seen as the discovery of the
long term. The idea of a relatively short timeline gave way to a larger view, and sacred books
began to be understood primarily as revelations about salvation history, not sources for
historical knowledge. For “real history,” secular texts of various kinds would suffice. That
also relativized the date the world was thought to have come into existence, which the Irish
archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) had carefully calculated in 1650 to be Sunday, 23
October, 4004 B.C. Europeans learned to accept that whole continents and peoples did not fit
into the biblical depiction of history. The Chinese dynastic lists that spanned millennia could
not be combined with the usual understanding of history. The world and humankind had to be
much older, which in itself was no reason to doubt belief in God as the creator of all things.
What is more interesting is that the generally accepted timeline was lengthened not
only with respect to the past but also with that of the future. That the world would end sooner
or later continued to be a widespread belief in the early modern period. Calculations of the
final moment by theologians, prophets, or other exegetes of mysterious writings continue to
be proposed in our time. Christian expectations of a thousand years of peace, the decline of
Roman Catholicism, or the conversion of the Jews have been part of those calculations, right
up to the present time. Islamic acts connected with end-time expectations are all too often in
the news. Nevertheless, the collective support for concrete announcements or calculations
about the end of the world has slowly decreased in all societies and religious traditions. Most
believers as well experience their eschatology at most on the individual level by being more
concerned about their personal destiny after death. They leave the future of our planet both
unconsciously and vaguely to God.8

7
Joannis Bodini Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Parijs 1566 en 1572; Amsterdam 1650; reprint
Aalen 1967); translation: Method for the easy comprehension of history (New York 1945).
8
Cf. Manfred Jakuboswki-Tiessen et al. (eds), Jahrhundertwenden. Endzeit- und Zukunftverostellungen vom 15.
bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 1999); M. Goldish & R.H. Popkin (eds), Millenarianism and messianism in
early modern European culture (4 dln., Dordrecht/Londen 2001). Crawford Gribben, Evangelical millennialism
in the Trans-Atlantic world, 1500-2000 (Basingstoke 2011).

3
 The discovery of the open future

In the meantime we have become familiar with astronomical information about the universe
that has been expanding for 13 billion years and a solar system in which life on earth will
become impossible in seven billion years barring the occurrence of natural or human
intervention before then. We can barely conceive that only a few centuries ago, the cautious
expansion of the long term perspective was also a radical discovery of an open future. The
apocalyptic-seeming year of 1666 was perhaps the last time in which large parts of the
European population together fell under the spell of an end time. As the deadline receded
further into the future, people could more consciously orient themselves to a future they
themselves had influence over. Precisely in the religious sense as well, passivity as a result of
an imminent end gave way to activity directed at building a good society. The hope for better
times motivated people to act, plan, and organize.9
Out of this changing view of history, first in intellectual circles and then slowly among
the general public, something like a specialized study of the history of religion emerged. One
example in the prelude to that development is the work of the Leiden professor Gerardus
Hornius (1620-1670).10 Trained as a theologian, he taught in the faculty of arts, the basic
program for all students. He was a true polyhistor, the type of scholar who was at home in
every field, the ideal humanities scholar. Hornius was the first to write a history of the world
in which he replaced the ancient schema of the four empires with a reasonable alternative. He
spoke of ancient history and modern history and of an intermediary transition phase in
between. The idea of an intermediary period – indeed the renowned Middle Ages – was not
new as such, but the systematic working out of this, which we still follow at present, dates
from the seventeenth century.11
Hornius, however, did not occupy himself just with secular history, i.e., with political
and cultural history, but he also studied sacred or sacral history. Remarkably enough, here he
followed a Christian, more specifically Protestant, structure. First, he discussed the history of
the “people of God” under the Old Testament, then the period from Christ to the Antichrist,
by whom he meant Gregory the Great (540-604), then the centuries from Gregory to Martin
Luther (1483-1546) and finally the period from the Reformation to his own time. To do
justice to the importance of church history alongside general history, Hornius promoted the
establishment in Leiden of a chair in ecclesiastical history or church history. That chair was
placed in the theological faculty, something that happened more often elsewhere in Europe as
well. Church history was no longer a form of the Christian study of history but a theological
specialization.12

9
Lucian Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main 1999); Andrea Brady & Emily Butterworth
(eds), The uses of the future in early modern Europe (New York 2010).
10
Georgius Hornius, Brevis et perspicua introductio ad universalem historiam & Historia ecclesiastica et
politica (Leiden/Rotterdam 1665).
11
Christoph Cellarius, Historia universalis. Breviter ac perspicue exposita, in antiquam, et medii aevi ac novam
divisa, cum notis perpetuis (Jena 1702, summmary of pre-publications from 1675, 1688, and 1696). Cf. P.G.J.M.
Raedts, ‘When were the Middle Ages?’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 76 (1996) 9-25. Critically:
Necmettin Alkan, ‘Trilogy – Ancient Age, Middle Age and New Age – in the dividing history into ages and the
Eurocentric history construction’, Journal of International Social Research 2 (2009) 23-42.
12
For the international backgrounds, see Adalbert Klempt, Die Säkularisierung der universal-historischen
Auffassung: zum Wandel des Geschichtsdenkens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 1960; reprint Göttingen
2001). Leading work for the history of church historiography is still Peter Meinhold, Geschichte der kirchlichen
Historiographie (2 vols., Freiburg/München 1967).

4
 It is interesting that doing church history in the theological faculties was gradually
adapted to the method of general historiography. Thus, the division between Antiquity, the
Middle Ages, and the Modern Period was used more and more often in church history. Even
more fundamental is that the understanding of general history was adopted, something that
could even be detected in the Jewish and Islamic variants of doing sacred history. This is not
surprising because thinking on the basis of religious traditions as typical long-term
perspectives and eschatological models were preludes to the modern understanding of history.
The awareness of past, present, and future as separate, equal, and comparable entities formed
the basis for the grand idea of progress in the Enlightenment. The distinction between the
field of experience and the horizon of expectation, to cite the philosopher of history Reinhart
Kosselleck (1923-2006), made history a process whose end was both unattainable and
undesirable.13
Doing church history was thus open to more secularization, pragmatization, or
profanization. In connection with this, the Lutheran theologian Johann Lorenz of Mosheim
(1693-1755) was called the “father of modern church history.” It would be better to point to
his student Johann Matthias Schroekh (1733-1808), who, as a literary scholar, argued strongly
for both secular history and church history. Moreover, he formulated a theory and method for
the history of the Christian religion and the church.14 He considered religion to “the most
powerful engine of human activities,” which found its organizational form in a church. He
made short shrift of the Reformed periodization of church history into centuries, as had been
the practice since the sixteenth-century Magdeburger Centurien. In a way that was very
typical for the individualizing approach of the Enlightenment, Schroekh was mostly oriented
to special personalities that embodied the spirit of a certain period.

The discovery of religious history

While the religious interpretation of secular history went its own way, doing general history
acquired its own subfield of religion and everything connected with that. As long as the
history of Christianity attracted the most attention, the study of non-Christian religions – not
to mention the study of Christianity as(only) one of the many religions – was in its infancy
and marginal. There were several indications circulating of the interest in the diffuse interface
of the history of theology: religious studies, history of religion, comparative history of the
religions, phenomenology of religion, etc. In each area, the researchers were concerned with
an objective study of the phenomenon of the “worship of God,” be it within the framework of
the history of humankind or individual peoples or within the framework of the Christian
tradition with its roots in the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and other ancient cultures.15

13
Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main 2003).
However, see the important commentary by Daniel Fulda, ‘Wann begann die “offene Zukunft”? Ein Versuch,
die Koselleck’sche Fixierung auf die “Sattelzeit” zu lösen’, in: Wolfgang Breul & Jan Carsten Schnurr (eds),
Geschichtsbewusstsein und Zukunftserwartung in Pietismus und Erweckungsbewegung (Göttingen 2013) 141-
172.
14
Mainly in the introduction to his Christliche Kirchengeschichte (35 dln., Frankfurt/Leipzig 1768-1803), see
the critical edition by Dirk Fleischer (ed.), Johann Matthias Schroeckh: Kirchenhistorik oder Einleitung in die
christliche Kirchengeschichte (Nordhausen 2015). Quote vol. 1, 98, about religion as ‘mächtigste Triebwerk der
menschlichen Handlungen’.
15
Hans G. Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte. Religionswissenschaft und Moderne (München
1997); translation: Discovering religious history in the modern age (Princeton, N.J 2002); see also Arie L.
Molendijk, The emergence of the science of religion in the Netherlands (Leiden 2005).

5
 The Enlightenment turned religion into an object of anthropological research. What
was the case before the Enlightenment? For that, we have to look at the knowledge of the
antiquitates, the knowledge about age-old cultures or peoples who constituted the sources of
Western civilization. Ancient cultures were taught both in history and in theology. Knowledge
of Jewish antiquities was indispensable in the study of the Bible, whereas the Greek and
Roman antiquities threw light on political, military, and juridical affairs. The collection and
presentation of ancient history was invariably directed at government institutions and
jurisdiction, religion (the world of the gods and religious customs), the army , and home life.
For polyhistors, religion was indeed only one part of the whole, not a subject of specific
research. Chronological depth was lacking entirely.16
Thanks to the rediscovery of classical culture in the time of the Renaissance,
humanism, and the Reformation, interest in the ancient cultures flourished. At the same time,
this knowledge was increasingly taken up into what is now known as cultural studies avant la
lettre. Various unexpected developments helped. The travels by explorers brought new
continents and strange peoples into view. Trade contacts and mission activities opened
people’s eyes to unexpected ideas and rituals in America, Africa, and Asia. New material and
literary sources in the Mediterranean world enriched Europeans’ knowledge of ancient culture
and the world of the gods. Philosophical ideas based on rational thought, the results of
empirical research, and technological innovations called into question much of the ancient
book wisdom in the fields of philosophy, medical practice, and physics. The scientific
revolution paved the way for political and social changes.
Christian intellectuals were greatly challenged to combine their existing knowledge
with supplementary facts, without – if possible – questioning the revealed truth. The English
court chaplain Alexander Ross (1591-1654) published an overview in 1652 of all religions in
the world from creation until his own time, which he immediately presented as an unveiling
of all heresies of all times and places that he knew of.17 A little under half a century later, the
Puritan minister William Turner (1653-1701) published a similar encyclopedia, which he
followed up immediately with a collection of remarkable providences, that is, a number of
examples of divine intervention in daily life.18 This double enterprise clearly shows not only
how faith wrestled with heresy and idolatry but also how the rising skepticism of the time was
branded as atheism. Religion and science, whatever those categories might stand for, were
still completely intertwined.19
The Enlightenment view of religion as a universal human phenomenon was shown
very concretely in the famous atlas by Bernard Picart (1673-1733). His print collection
breathed the spirit of an impartial comparative glance at what could be found on earth with

16
J. Roelevink, Gedicteerd verleden: het onderwijs in de algemene geschiedenis aan de Universiteit te Utrecht,
1735-1839 (Amsterdam 1986) 233-238; Sandra Langereis, ‘Antiquitates: voorvaderlijke oudheden’, in: Frans
Grijzenhout (ed.), Erfgoed. De geschiedenis van een begrip (Amsterdam 2007) 57-83.
17
Alexander Ross, Pansebeia: or, A view of all religions in the world: with the several church-governments,
from the Creation, to these times. Together with a discovery of all known heresies, in all ages and places,
throughout Asia, Africa, America, and Europe (Londen 1652). See in general: Dmitri Levitin, ‘From Sacred
History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European historiography from
Reformation to “Enlightenment”’, The Historical Journal 55 (2012) 1117-1160.
18
William Turner, The history of all religions in the world: from the creation down to this present time (Londen
1695); idem, A compleat history of the most remarkable providences, both of judgment and mercy, which have
hapned in this present age (Londen 1697). Cf. Fred van Lieburg, ‘Remarkable providences. The Dutch reception
of English wonderstories’, in: Arie-Jan Gelderblom et al. (eds), The Low Countries as a crossroads of religious
beliefs (Leiden 2004) 197-219.
19
Vgl. Eric Jorink, Reading the book of nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575-1715 (Leiden 2010); Rienk
Vermij, De geest uit de fles : de Verlichting en het verval van de confessionele samenleving (Amsterdam 2014);
Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago 2015).

6
respect to rituals.20 In the spirit of tolerance and optimism, rationalistic theologians practiced
their innovative form of church history, and radical thinkers, starting with David Hume (1711-
1776), offered their views of the natural history of religion.21 We should not, however,
entertain any illusions about the detachment of the Enlightenment. The issue between truth
and lie was replaced by the distinction between faith and superstition.22 There is no room here
to explain how themes like sorcery, magic, popular belief, folklore, myths and sagas were left
to hobbyists for a long time. Only in the twentieth century did they, along with the classic
canon of saints’ lives, sermon samples, and miracle stories, find their place in a complete
history of culture, mentality, and religion.23

The integration into general history

With the Enlightenment, the academic study of religion lost its innocence for good.
Consequently, studying the history of religion did not become any simpler in the nineteenth
century. Theologians taught the history of ancient Israel and the Greco-Roman world, the
latter in collaboration with classicists in faculties of literature. Theologians took the history of
the Christian church under their wing. Sometimes, they specialized in the Church Fathers
(patristics), doctrine (history of dogma), or church life (“Christian archaeology”). In addition
to the historical disciplines related to the Bible and the church, the new field of religious
studies was forming, with its comparative study of non-Christian and non-Western religions.
The influence of this on how theology was done was unstoppable, not least because of the
application of purely literary, so-called historical-critical, methods to the exegesis of the Old
and New Testaments. Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), the representative of the significant
history of religion school, applied the sociological approach to the history of the modern
period.24
The scientification of theology also influenced the traditional way of doing church
history. As far as the name is concerned, modern church historians opted for the term “history
of Christianity.”25 This reformulation clearly brings to the fore the position that religion, as a
human experience of belief with all its doctrines and practices, precedes church organization
and doctrinal consolidation. The subdiscipline of the history of dogma demanded, over
against any confessionalism, the freedom to reconstruct and reflect. In this period, pioneering

20
Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob & Wijnand Mijnhardt, The book that changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s
‘Religious Ceremonies of the World’ (Cambridge, MA 2010).
21
David Hume, The natural history of religion (Edinburgh 1757).
22
To stick with Hume: see his essay Of superstition and enthusiasm.
23
Apart from mostly speculative scholarship about ‘Die Entzauberung der Welt’ (Max Weber), there is the
strongly descriptive classic of Keith L. Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic: Studies in popular beliefs in
sixteenth and seventeenth century England (Londen 1971). Less linear perspectives are offered by e.a. Stuart
Clark, Thinking with demons: The idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe (Oxford 1997) and Jürgen Beyer,
Lay prophets in Lutheran Europe (c.1550-1700) (Leiden 2016).
24
Arie Molendijk, ‘Ernst Troeltsch’s lasting contribution to the historiography of Christianity’, Mitteilungen der
Ernst-Troeltsch-Gesellschaft 18 (2005) 16-37.
25
Topics of inaugral addresses of new professors in church history after the reorganisation of academic theologie
in 1876 are illustrative: J.J. van Toorenenbergen, Het wetenschappelijk karakter der geschiedenis van het
christendom (Amsterdam 1880); J.G.R. Acquoy, Kerkgeschiedenis en geschiedenis van het christendom (Leiden
1882); H.G. Kleyn, De christelijke archaeologie in hare verhouding tot de geschiedenis des Christendoms
(Utrecht 1888); S.D. van Veen, Het academisch onderwijs in de geschiedenis van het christendom (Utrecht
1896); F. Pijper, De geschiedenis van het godsdienstig-zedelijk leven (Leiden 1897); H.H. Kuyper, Het
gereformeerde beginsel en de kerkgeschiedenis (Leiden 1900). See for the historical backgrounds: Arie L.
Molendijk, ‘That most important science. The study of church history in the Netherlands in the nineteenth
century’, Dutch Review of Church History 84 (2004) 358-387.

7
church historians concentrated fully on the presupposed objectivity of the historical method,
not to mention the relativizing hermeneutic of historicism. The only thing that these modern
church historians could claim as a specific theological point of Christian uniqueness was that
they, because they were Christian themselves, were better able to understand the subject of
their research than unbelievers were.26
Not all church historians by far went along with this what seemed to be a liberal shift
in their discipline. In any case, the call for a “history of Christianity” smelled of the denial of
the mystical significance of the church as the body of Christ, which was more or less
identified with the confessional or national identity of one’s own denomination. Certainly in
the Roman Catholic tradition, a great deal of energy would go into defending church history
as a theological science.27 Among Protestant opponents of modernism, Abraham Kuyper
(1837-1920) occupied a unique position. His robust defense of a confessional history of the
church over against a neutral history of Christianity is obvious. Less well known is that he
also argued for a historia pietatis or history of piety in his palette of theology.28 Thus, on
balance, he sided with the typical religious studies focus on the religious virtuous life as the
heart of religious reality.
Things were not as bad in academic research as they were made out to be. Church
historians still researched their sources and, both in and outside the university, maintained
contact with historians in faculties of letters. The latter in turn calmly left the specialization in
religious topics and themes to their colleagues in theological faculties. General historians
simply had their hands full of the “real” history of revolutions, cabinets, and battles, and they
felt specifically called to the task of promoting the history of the fatherland. If historians
showed any interest in the history of religion and the church, it was often a matter of personal
preference. Only the medievalists found it difficult to get around a thorough understanding of
Christianity in teaching and research.29 For the modern and contemporary period, religion was
one factor in a larger whole of political, social, and economic circumstances.
The rise of an interdisciplinary history of religion had to wait until the cultural
revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The Institute for European History did indeed have a
department for the history of Western religion already in 1950, but that was actually
ecumenical church history.30 The anthropological elaboration had a chance primarily in the
historical, literary, and social sciences. The new history of religion emerged under various
national flags, such as religious history in the Anglo-Saxon world, histoire religieuse in
France, abendländische, europäische or transatlantische Religionsgeschichte in German-
speaking areas.31 These terms even found their way to the titles of book series, journals, and

26
Cf. J.G.R. Acquoy, Kerkgeschiedvorsching en kerkgeschiedschrijving (’s-Gravenhage 1894; revised edition F.
Pijper,’s-Gravenhage 1910) 163-164, with referencing to the introduction in J.C.L. Gieseler, Lehrbuch der
Kirchengeschichte (6 vols., Bonn 1824-1857).
27
See for example: Bernd Jaspert (ed.), Kirchengeschichte als Wissenschaft (Münster 2013).
28
A. Kuyper, Encyclopaedie der heilige Godgeleerdheid (3 vols., Amsterdam 1894) III, 318-322. Cf. the dies
oration at the University of Amsterdam by S. Cramer, De godsvrucht voorwerp van historisch onderzoek
(Amsterdam 1900).
29
See about this problem: C. van de Kieft, ‘De mediëvistiek en het christelijk geloof’, Theoretische
Geschiedenis 11 (1984) 239-250.
30
See the Festschrift for the director of this department: Rolf Decot & Rainer Vinke (eds.), Zum Gedenken an
Joseph Lortz (1887-1975) (Stuttgart 1989).
31
An actual overview of international historiography is offered by: Jean-Dominique Durand (ed.), Le monde de
l’histoire religieuse. Essais d’historiographie (Lyon 2012). See also: Jacques-Olivier Boudon, ‘L’histoire
religieuse en France depuis le milieu des années 1970’, Histoire, économie & société (2/2012) 71-86. For the
British tradition, see: Hugh McLeod, ‘The long march of religious history: where have we travelled since the
sixties, and why?’, in: Per Ingesman (ed.), Religion as an agent of change: Crusades – Reformatrion – Pietism
(Leiden 2016) 31-52.

8
manuals.32 The Netherlands joined this trend in 1979, when the Paris-educated historian
Willem Frijhoff argued for a change in course,33 or actually in 2002, when the concept
“religious history” began to make its appearance via the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.34

Serial history

Now that we have seen that the history of religion has grown from an exotic experiment by
indecisive theologians and overconfident philosophers into a sober and plain specialization by
well-meaning humanities scholars, we can build on the theme of the long term. Just as the
History Manifesto again made clear, Braudel’s idea of the longue durée still retains an iconic
function for thinking about the ages of ages. In his huge 1947 dissertation on the history of the
Mediterranean Sea, this French historian distinguished three layers of time: (1) that of the
almost immovable physical-geographical structure, (2) that of the slowly advancing
socioeconomic conjuncture, and (3) that of the daily changing stage of events.35 Braudel and
his followers included cultural, mental, and religious processes in the time layer of the
conjuncture, although others, because of the interwovenness of religion and politics – not to
mention church and revolution – opted for the level of events.
Braudel’s theory comes across as somewhat speculative. His model, however, gave an
important stimulus to methodological renewal on the intersection of history and the social
sciences. Braudel was, after all, the standard bearer of the influential Annales school, named
after the historical journal that made the coherence between the economy, society, and culture
central. The use of statistical methods was thus, to put it mildly, not scorned. Annales
historians – following American pioneers in New Economic History – were extraordinarily

32
For example Peter Dinzelbacher (ed.), Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum (6 vols,
Paderborn 2000-); series Bausteine zu einer Europäischen Religionsgeschichte im Zeitalter der Säkularisierung
(2003-2010 with Wallstein in Göttingen) resp. Beiträge zur Europäischen Religionsgeschichte (as from 2013
with Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen). The Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Kirchengeschichte, dating from
1907, changed its name into Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte in 2004. See also
John Gascoigne, ‘The Journal of Religious History 1960–2010: The changing face of religious history over fifty
years’, Journal of Religious History 34 (2010) 262-271. An interesting reflection after decated of (New )
Religious History, offered by the President of the American Society of Church History: Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp,
‘The Burdens of Church History’, Church History 82 (2013) 353-367, followed by a debate in this journal.
33
W. Frijhoff, ‘Van “histoire de l’Eglise” naar “histoire religieuse”. De invloed van de “Annales-groep” op de
ontwikkeling van de kerkgeschiedenis in Frankrijk en de perspectieven daarvan voor Nederland’, Nederlands
Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 61 (1981) 113-153. About the ‘Frijhoff network’: Goffe Jensma, ‘Van
kerkgeschiedenis naar godsdienstgeschiedenis? Enkele opmerkingen naar aanleiding van Peter van Rooden,
Religieuze regimes’, Kerk en theologie 49 (1998) 124-133. The term ‘religiegeschiedenis’ was used in the
Netherlands before 2002 only in Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (15 vols., Haarlem 1977-1983),
especially by the Amsterdam medievalist J. Roelink, ‘Religiegeschiedenis 1480-1780: inleiding op de delen 5 tot
en met 9’, in volume 5 (published in 1980), 436-442.
34
In the future a Ngram-viewer of Dutch media will confirm this observation (see also the interview with Joris
van Eijnatten and Fred van Lieburg in: Reformatorisch Dagblad, 3 October 2002). Much debate arose in
traditional journals of church history and theology: Willem Frijhoff, ‘Religie, geloof en kerk’, Tijdschrift voor
Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis 6 (2003), 3-13; Jan Dirk Snel, ‘Kerkgeschiedenis, religiegeschiedenis,
godsdienstgeschiedenis: Enige noodzakelijke begripsmatige verheldering’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse
Kerkgeschiedenis 6 (2003) 54-64; Jan Jacobs, ‘Kerkgeschiedenis of religiegeschiedenis? Een bijdrage aan het
debat over de religie en haar wetenschappen’, Tijdschrift voor theologie 46 (2006) 209-219. Een terugblik en
vooruitblik bood Willem Frijhoff, ‘Lang leve de kerkgeschiedenis!?’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse
Kerkgeschiedenis 17 (2014) 142-149.
35
Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (Parijs 1949). Cf.
idem, ‘Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 13 (1958) 725–753
resp. Réseaux 5 (1987) 7-37.

9
fond of tables and graphs in combination with theories on economic wave movements, the
secular trend, or the demographic transition. In 1964, Pierre Chaunu (1923-2009) introduced
the concept of “serial history” as an argument for the reconstruction of time series of
homogenous, mutually comparable givens, figures, or facts.36 Quantitative methods were
increasingly used to study qualitative developments.
The history of religion also fell within the crosshairs of serial source research. The
iconic figure here is Michel Vovelle, the standard bearer of the history of mentality, In good
Braudelian fashion, he also spoke of the “history of resistance” and considered collective
mentalities to be “the dungeons of the long term.”37 Vovelle earned his doctorate in 1973 with
an analysis of numerous testaments and church registers as sources for understanding popular
religiosity in eighteenth century Provence.38 He interpreted his curves as de-Christianization,
the loss of baroque piety that had characterized Gallic Catholicism up until then. In this
context, the religious conjuncture was not so much associated with the brevity of events as
with the slow movement of the long term and with the firmness of soil and nature. German
historians would later even draw a line to the Little Ice Age, which entailed so much disaster
for the European population that the climate between 1300 and 1800 literally and figuratively
was susceptible to experiences of the divine and visions of the future.39
We will not philosophize further about the place of religious developments in the
Annales universe. The fact is that in recent decades a great deal of painstaking work has been
done everywhere to make the conjuncture of historical developments more precise and to test
current concepts or periodizations. Thus, the historian Koen Goudriaan, using graphs of the
declining finances for devotional practices around 1520 suggested that this could be the end
of the Middle Ages.40 One could just as easily see it as the start of the Reformation, at least of
the space that had come to exist for this radical European renewal movement. To give a
completely different example, the German historian Olaf Blaschke collected all kinds of data
for a “career curve of religion” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to illustrate his thesis
of a “second confessional age” – after that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and
thus to proclaim “farewell to the secularization myth.”41
In the meantime, the methodology of the humanities brings us once again into a new,
fascinating phase. After the old-fashioned text criticism and the added value of squared paper,
adding machines, and computers, the digital revolution offered unprecedented possibilities for
large-scale data processing. Qualitative and quantitative approaches now flow easily into each
other. The more texts from the past are digitalized, the more insight into long-term processes
can be generated. A basic image should suffice here to take seriously the possibilities of
historical trend analysis by means of digital tools. Whoever sets the frequencies of certain key
words in the gigantic textual mash of Google Books on the timeline of the last two centuries
can, with the German sociologist Steffen Roth, formulate intriguing hypotheses on

36
Pierre Chaunu, ‘Histoire quantitative ou histoire sérielle’, Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto 2 (1964) 165-176.
37
Michel Vovelle, ‘Histoire des mentalités, histoire des résistances, ou les prisons de longue durée’, in: idem,
Ideologies et mentalités (Parijs 1982) 236-261.
38
Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle: les attitudes devant la mort
d'après les clauses des testaments (Parijs 1973).
39
Wolfgang Behringer et al. (eds), Kulturelle Konsequenzen der ‘Kleinen Eiszeit’/ Cultural consequences of the
‘Little Ice Age’ (Göttingen 2005).
40
Koen Goudriaan, ‘Het einde van de Middeleeuwen ontdekt?’, Madoc 8 (1994) 66-75; idem, Het einde van de
Middeleeuwen? (farewell address Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam 2015).
41
Olaf Blaschke (ed.), Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970. Ein zweites
konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen 2002); idem, ‘Abschied von der Säkularisierungslegende. Daten zur
Karrierekurve der Religion (1800-1970) im zweiten konfessionallen Zeitalter: eine Parabel’, Zeitenblicke 5
(2006) nr. 1.

10
globalization, politicization, economization, and still other “ations” in societies and language
areas – including, and not least, on the religious requiem that has commonly come to be
known as “secularization.” Or does it mean nothing on balance that the mention of God has
decreased dramatically in millions of English books since 1800?42

Religious long-term narratives

The term so feared in the history of religion has thus nevertheless taken root. Secularizing or
secularization – who can still the hear the s-word? Of course, these and related concepts have
a legitimate meaning that refers to the secular or political domain of society. But, as a
historical theory that religion is becoming superfluous, with a rather generalizing, linear, and
imperative character, this concept that has been imposed by sociologists has dominated
academic discourse too long. That also obtains in the meantime for the oft-repeated wisdom
that the secularization theory is passé.43 We have gradually come to recognize that religion, in
whatever form, has not disappeared at all from the modern world. Even Peter Berger, the
influential American sociologist of religion, has retracted his earlier conclusions about
secularization. In his most recent book on the pluralization of worldviews, he speaks of a
double pluralism, with mutual competition between religious beliefs on the one hand and that
between religious and secular value systems on the other.44
Theologians always believed that people were incurably religious but have not been
able to communicate that adequately in public debate. Perhaps the jargon of classicists,
medievalists, and scholars of the early modern period was too much aimed at ideal
characterizations and distinctions. Fortunately, historians are catching up. Calibrated,
primarily nationally limited concepts are being increasingly integrated on the basis of the
simultaneity and commonality of religious traditions. For that matter, the patriarchs of
sociology – in particular Max Weber (1864-1920) – were the first to do this. They
experimented with comparisons between religions, churches, and individual groups using
ideological, typological, and organizational features. Among historians, Herbert Grundmann
(1902-1970) was ahead of his time by trying, in his studies on religious movements in the
Middle Ages, to understand both the orthodox pious and heretical perfectionists from the
perspective of their similar motives in their own contemporary context.45
The historiography of the traditional Reformation era has also undergone radical
revisions. We need to be careful that the gains that resulted from this do not become lost when

42
Steffen Roth, ‘Fashionable functions. A Google ngram view of trends in functional differentiation (1800-
2000)’, International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction 10 (2014) 34-58.
43
A footnote full of references on the secularization thesis would not fit. It would suffice to honor the (church)
historian who first critized in the Netherlands from a long-term perspective: Peter van Rooden, Religieuze
regimes: over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland, 1570-1990 (Amsterdam 1996), and to encourage the
(history) philospher who want to overcome earlier stages of secularization research (establishing, adjusting, and
historization): Herman Paul, ‘De erfenis van Wickham: naar een nieuwe fase in het secularisatieonderzoek’,
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 127 (2014) 107-127. On the frequent used concept of postsecularism: Arie L.
Molendijk, ‘In pursuit of the postsecular’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 76 (2015) 100-115.
44
Peter L. Berger, The many altars of modernity: Toward a paradigm for religion in a pluralist age (Berlijn
2014).
45
Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen
Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13.
Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik (Berlijn 1935; Darmstadt 1961);
translation with preface by Robert Lerner: Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links
between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth
Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism (Notre Dame/Londen 1995).

11
the 500th anniversary of Luther’s debut will be extensively celebrated.46 Who will still keep in
mind the slowness of the European Christianization process, which in the sense of deep
Christianization lasted from the early Middle Ages right up into the nineteenth century?47
Who will still have an eye for the series of conciliar attempts at the thorough reform of the
church or the notion, which still lives on in world ecumenism, that the Reformed church is in
constant need of reform?48 Who will pluck the fruit of the research into confessionalization,
state and nation forming? A number of European studies have made clear how early modern
governments in collaboration with the public church of whatever variant in Christianity –
Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Calvinism – attempted to guide societal life on to moral paths.49
Even more important is the revisionism in the area of the post-Reformation history of
religion. In the wake of the continuing debate on the nature and scope of the Enlightenment,
the Western history of piety, both synchronically and diachronically, has been rewritten as the
history of civil society. New overarching grids are imposed on old conceptual frameworks
divided along religious lines. Thus, the German historian Hartmut Lehmann has been arguing
for years for an integral approach that transcends confessions to parallel movements like
Puritanism, Jansenism, Quietism, Pietism, Methodism, Evangelicalism. He also placed the
transatlantic coherence of the great revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries on the agenda. He sees, in the history of Western religion between 1670 and 1920, a
succession of waves of re-christianization or revitalization, supported by active particular
networks and early international volunteer organizations of “decided Christians” who hoped
to turn the tide of modernization.50
For religious history of the twentieth century, the current conceptualization can
scarcely be surveyed. That is not only because of the endless pluralization of meaning in
society itself but also because of the sensitive problematization of secular ideologies like
“political religions.” One concept that deserves mention here because of its fruitfulness for
studying religious movements in different societies and periods is that of fundamentalism.51 In
the words of the British writer Karen Armstrong, it here concerns in general disputable forms

46
See my essay ‘Van Refo500 naar Refo5000: Europese religiegeschiedenis in perspectief’, Kontekstueel 30/4
(maart 2016) 9-12.
47
The thesis of Jean Delumeau, Un chemin d'histoire: Chrétienté et christianisation (Parijs 1981). On the
rebound, Reformation is seen as starting movement for secularization , cf. Charles Taylor, A secular age
(Cambridge 2007), or Brad S. Gregory, The unintended Reformation. How a religious revolution secularized
society (Harvard 2012).
48
Cf. Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele, “Defecit Ecclesia”. Studien zur Verfallsidee in der
Kirchengeschichtsanschauung des Mittelalters (Mainz 2006); Fred van Lieburg, ‘Dynamics of Dutch Calvinism.
Early Modern Programs for Further Reformation’, in: Gijsbert van den Brink & Harro M. Höpfl (eds), Calvinism
and the Making of the European Mind (Leiden 2014) 43-66.
49
The confessionalisation concept, developed by German historians Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling,
has incited a lot of empirical research and theoretical discussion. Cf. Ute Lotz-Heumann, ‘The concept of
“Confessionalization”: a historiographical paradigm in dispute’, Memoria y civilización: anuario de historia, no.
4 (2001) 93-114. A synthesis is offered by Heinz Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Staatsinteressen:
internationale Beziehungen 1559-1660 (Paderborn 2007). A standard work on long-term effects in Germany:
Andreas Holzem, Christentum in Deutschland 1550-1850: Konfessionalisierung – Aufklärung – Pluralisierung
(2 vols.; Paderborn 2015).
50
Hartmut Lehmann, Transformationen der Religion in der Neuzeit. Beispiele aus der Geschichte des
Protestantismus (Göttingen 2007). See for the transatlantic aspect also Jonathan Strom et al. (eds), Pietism in
Germany and North America 1680-1820 (Burlington, 2009). For a comparitive approach within Europe the
current series The dynamics of religious reform in church, state and society in Northern Europe, 1780-1920
(Leuven 2010-).
51
Groundbreaking, after the islamic revolution in Iran which reminds to Protestant fundamentalism in the south
of the Unites States, was the project lead by Martin E. Marty & R. Scott Appleby (The Fundamentalism Project,
5 vols., Chicago 1991-1995), recapitulated after Nine Eleven in: Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby &
Emmanuel Sivan, Strong religion: the rise of fundamentalisms around the world (Chicago 2003).

12
of spirituality that have arisen as reactions to an alleged crisis that in essence consists of the
threatening modernization of society.52 But fundamentalists themselves are also modern in,
among other things, the methods they use, in their radical words and rigorous deeds, and – last
but not least – by closed images of history, characterized by a sacred beginning period and a
Messianic future that they create and defend so that their truth can be victorious.

The ends of the earth

With our reference to the both impressive and controversial work of Karen Armstrong, we
find ourselves of course in the final lap of my exploration of the long term. Few authors are
able to write about the world of various religions as expertly and as effortlessly as she does. It
was from her pen that the ultimate historicizing of religion of all times and place flowed,
whereby McCulloch’s three millennia seem to be nothing than mere ripples in the pond of the
advancing centuries. In the form of a “history of God” spanning four-thousand years,
Armstrong lets a broad public look into a universal mirror that at the same time prompts every
simple academic to relativization and modesty.53 The respect for the past certainly compels an
academic historian to limit his ambitions, at least in research though not in teaching.54 On the
scale of a human life, many ideals remain switches in eternity.
For that matter, a focus on European religious history, for example, would be an
inspiring specialization that has nothing to do with an objectionable Eurocentrism. In German
religious studies, a fruitful research program has been developed that revolves not so much
around geographical Europe but only around a plurality of meaning-giving entities that have
developed on this continent.55 This includes religions and confessions that exist alongside or
in competition with each other, including agnosticism, atheism, and somethingism, as well as
art, science, and the economy. Europe has taken its own religious path, different from the
religiously relatively homogenous parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and from the free
religious market in North America.56 Within the history of European religion, the Netherlands
has again followed its own Sonderweg.57 From this conceptual approach, a local long-term
history of religion can be completely meaningful academically.58
Nevertheless, we do need to answer the pressing question of the global proportion.
With the rise of church history, there arose also a separate history of missions as the logical

52
Karen Armstrong, The battle for God: fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Londen 2000).
53
Karen Armstrong, A history of God: from Abraham to the present: the 4000 year quest for God (Londen
1993).
54
Current bachelor programmes do not allow for much education in religious history. At Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, we use for example John C. Super & Briane K. Turley (eds), Religion in World History (New
York/Londen 2006).
55
Burkhard Gladigow, ‘Europäische Religionsgeschichte’, in: Hans G. Kippenberg & Brigitte Luchesi (eds),
Lokale Religionsgeschichte (Marburg 1995) 21-42; Andreas Gotzmann et al., Pluralismus in der europäischen
Religionsgeschichte (Marburg 2001); Hans G. Kippenberg et al. (eds), Europäische Religionsgeschichte. Ein
mehrfacher Pluralismus (2 dln., Göttingen 2009); Christoph Auffarth, ‘Europäische Religionsgeschichte – ein
kulturwissenschaftliches Projekt’, Theologische Literaturzeitung 135 (2010) 755-768; Helmut Zander,
“Europäische" Religionsgeschichte: religiöse Zugehörigkeit durch Entscheidung – Konsequenzen im
interkulturellen Vergleich (Berlijn 2015).
56
Hartmut Lehmann (ed.), Säkularisierung: der europäische Sonderweg in Sachen Religion (Göttingen 2004);
vgl. Samuel Nelson & Philip S. Gorski, ‘Conditions of religious belonging: confessionalization, de-
parochialization, and the Euro-American divergence’, International Sociology 29 (2014) 3-21.
57
Zie Christoph Auffarth, ‘Religion in den Niederlanden: Das Modell einer Europäischen Religionsgeschichte’,
book review of Joris van Eijnatten & Fred van Lieburg, Nederlandse religiegeschiedenis (Hilversum 2005,
2006).
58
Cf. Fred van Lieburg, Heilig Nijkerk: religiegeschiedenis van een landstad (Zoetermeer 2013).

13
consequence of European expansion in large parts of American, Africa, and Asia. We already
cited above the influence of the new knowledge of strange peoples on the view of religion
among the distant “heathens.” The growing faith in progress and the Protestant revival
activism promoted the construction of the success story of Christianity. In the middle of the
eighteenth century , the Scottish minister John Gillies (1712-1796), for example, described the
progress of the Gospel with an entirely new periodization of the church history.59 A century
later, the first jubilee book of mission and Bible societies was published, filled with statistics
of the numbers baptized and Bibles distributed in the overseas areas. The British, who were
active everywhere in the world, were clearly the dominant party in this proud colonialism.60
The impulses for what we now call cultural anthropology, linguistics, literature, and religious
studies does not change this.
The first academic account of the history of missions was the standard work,
completed in 1945, by Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884-1968), who was himself a missionary
in China. In seven volumes, he described an equal number of periods alternating between the
expansion and recession of Christianity. He thus saw a continuing wave movement with the
nineteenth century as the triumphant peak.61 The ink was not yet dry before Latourette began
work on a series on the modern history of Christianity, whereby he wanted to give equal
attention to the old churches in and the young churches outside Europe, in order to end with
the idea of a “world Christian community.”62 The latter concept, however, did not really catch
on in theology and missiology until the turn of the millennium, when the majority of
Christians were to be found in the Third World. Given this shift in the demographic core from
north to south, globalization is a requirement of the current situation, which cannot remain
without consequence for the view of the past.63
In the end, it does not specifically concern the history of world Christianity nor that of
any other globally defined tradition.64 It concerns the variegated, diachronous, and polycentric

59
John Gillies, Historical collections relating to remarkable periods of the success of the Gospel (2 dln.,
Glasgow 1754).
60
For example George Browne, The history of the British and foreign bible society: from its institution in 1804,
to the close of its jubilee in 1854 (2 vols., Londen 1859); Richard Lovett, The history of the London Missionary
Society, 1795-1895 (2 vols., Londen 1899); William Canton, A history of the British and Foreign Bible Society
(5 vols., Londen 1904-1910).
61
Kenneth Scott Latourette, A history of the expansion of Christianity (7 vols.; New York/Londen 1937-1945).
62
Kenneth Scott Latourette, Christianity in a revolutionary age: a history of Christianity in the 19th and 20th
centuries (5 dln., New York 1958-1963).
63
Paradigmatic for the transformation of ‘mission history’ to a global history of Christianity is the first volume
in the series Missionsgeschichtliches Archiv: Ulrich van der Heyden & Heike Liebau (eds), Missionsgeschichte,
Kirchengeschichte, Weltgeschichte: christliche Missionen im Kontext nationaler Entwicklungen in Afrika, Asien
und Ozeanien (Stuttgart 1996). Cf. Paul Kollman, ‘After Church History? Writing the History of Christianity
from a Global Perspective’, Horizons 31 (2004) 322-342. For India: Rolf Noormann, ‘Von der
Missionsgeschichte Indiens zur Geschichte des indischen Christentums. Ein grundlegender Paradigmenwechsel
in der neueren indischen Kirchengeschichtsschreibung’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 120 (2009) 3-26. For
the Netherlands: Fred van Lieburg, ‘Van zendingsgeschiedenis naar mondiale religiegeschiedenis: overweging
bij het handboek van Jan Jongeneel’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis 19 (2016) 28-33, reviewing
J.A.B. Jongeneel, Nederlandse zendingsgeschiedenis. Ontmoeting van protestantse christenen met andere
godsdiensten en geloven (Zoetermeer 2015). For eastern Christianity: Philip Jenkins, The lost history of
christianity: the thousand-year golden age of the church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and how it dies
(New York 2008); Heleen Murre-van den Berg, ‘The unexpected popularity of the study of Middle Eastern
Christianity’, in: Sidney H. Griffith & Sven Grebenstein (eds), Christsein in der islamischen Welt. Festschrift für
Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden 2015) 1-11.
64
Tomoko Masuzawa, The invention of world religions or, How European universalism was preserved in the
language of pluralism (Chicago 2005); cf. Kathryn Lofton, ‘Religious history as religious studies’, Religion 42
(2012) 383-394.

14
history of religion in the broadest sense of the word.65 The future will show whether religious
dimensions remain sufficiently recognizable in the larger cultural and linguistically oriented
area studies or region studies. The same obtains for the oft-mentioned processes of
globalization and glocalization. The latter invented term refers to the local processing of
universal phenomena. What we do know is that local religious practices have already been the
vehicle for centuries for intercultural contacts, trade networks, migration streams, exchanges
of knowledge, and narrative traditions. That implies that the history of religion par excellence
can show that globalization is not a modern development but, as a long-term process, is older
than modernity itself.66 Western periodizations melt like wax before the sun as soon as
Eastern or Southern traditions are taken into consideration in their historical depth.67 Let the
religious timeline therefore be a touchstone for a good history of the world.

Paradoxal conclusions

What is now the subject, the method, and relevance of religious history as that is intended to
be done in the twenty-first century at a university – in case: at Vrije Universiteit, claiming to
be free from church and state? After my guided tour through the history of religious
historiography, the promised answer to this triple question can be nothing other than the
formulation of a threefold paradox. Does this field of attention within the humanities have a
subject of research? Does this subdiscipline of the general science of history have its own
methodology? Does the history of religion matter? It is true that there is political, social, or
economic history, just as there is also world history, cultural history, or the history of ideas,
but should the religious dimension of the past also be thematized? Can we not leave that to
religious studies, the social sciences, theology, philosophy, literature or art studies? I will
present my letter of credence not as a believer but as a professional.
As the first paradox, let me cite the indefinability of the history of religion. Religion is
“the sense of and taste for the eternal,” the great Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) said.68
A thousand and one such definitions can be cited, without offering any solution for the riddle.
Even the linguistic origin of the word is uncertain. For an academic, religion – just like
concepts like gender, race, class, nation, or ethnicity – is an “essentially contested concept.”69
It functions because we are agreed that we are not in agreement about it. All we can study is
the whole of ideas, deeds, and things that people more or unconsciously include in the
religious domain. Religious history then concerns the individual and collective ideas and
practices in specific circumstances of time and space. That there are fluid boundaries with

65
Recent and stimulating volumes: Abigail Green & Vincent Viaene (eds), Religious internationals in the
modern world: Globalization and faith communities since 1750 (Basingstoke 2014); Klaus Koschorke & Adrian
Hermann (eds), Polycentric Structures in the History of World Christianity/Polyzentrische Strukturen in der
Geschichte des Weltchristentums (Wiesbaden 2014). A specimen of comparative and long-term perspectives:
Karel Davids, Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences. China and Europe Compared, c.
700-1800 (Leiden 2013).
66
Victor Roudometof, ‘Forms of religious glocalization: Orthodox Christianity in the Longe Durée’, Religions 5
(2014) 1017-1036.
67
An early evalution of this problem was offered by the Working Commission on Church History van de
Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, as reported in: Lukas Vischer (ed.), Towards a history of
the Church in the Third World: Consultation on the issue of periodisation (Bern 1985).
68
‘Religion ist Sinn und Geschmack fürs Unendliche’: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an
die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Berlin 1799), 29.
69
Chris Lorenz, ‘Representations of identity: Ethnicity, race, class, gender and religion: An introduction into
conceptual history’, in: Stefan Berger & Chris Lorenz (eds), The contested nation: ethnicity, class, religion and
gender in national histories (Basingstoke 2008) 24-59.

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beauty, art, emotion, knowledge, reflection, physicality, materiality, or whatever form of
giving meaning to or interpreting reality does not need any argument.
This indefinability immediately gives direction to the question of the method of
religious history. That the whole text-critical arsenal of the humanities needs to be deployed is
an open door. Image and matter make the necessary cross-links to the history of art and
archeology. No single human, social, or natural science can be neglected when parsing the
homo religiosus. A special openness must be present for the “digital humanities.”70
Computational techniques deserve both enthusiastic and cautious experimentation in religious
studies as well, when it concerns more than counting and calculating with electronic data. The
essence lies in the revelation of patterns in “big data” that could never be uncovered without
the help of algorithms. Digital tools can be outstanding aids for connecting words or concepts
that have been traditionally associated with religion to other clusters of information, when the
results can again be relativized according to tested recipes.
As a second paradox of religious history, I will here cite continuity. As soon as
religious experiences live on in a more or less permanent community or organized group, a
tradition arises that is maintained in an unending game of contextual factors as a shared
culture of memory. For the participants in that tradition over the course of the centuries, there
is a certain normativity that leaders, sacred scriptures, or recognized rituals have. There is also
often an expectation for the future, an end time, a metahistory. Despite the presupposition of
permanence, every tradition inevitably includes change, transformation, reproduction,
appropriation, construction, or projection. The historian is directed, if he is doing his job, to
that dynamic, unlike the theologian who does not shun teleology or finalism. The researcher
into religion continues to distinguish the self-images of the tradition from his own attempt to
discover some continuity. Each result of the impossible attempt is relative and disputable. But
that makes the test so necessary, precisely for a fluid phenomenon like religion or religious
renewal movements.71
The third and final paradox affects the relevance of religious history even more
directly. It is the paradox of modernity. Precisely because religion is defined as a phenomenon
in the Western process of modernization, there is always the risk of it being neglected or as
being considered temporary. Even though the media are filled daily with religion, the
paradigm of decline always thrusts itself forward as the reverse side of the Enlightenment
coin. Politics, society, and the economy are obviously important; the merging of religion and
modernity always seems to need explanation. Leaving aside the question whether knowledge
of the history of religion can still be effectively transmitted within faith traditions, the public
outside of those traditions seems to be increasingly less informed, including the highly
educated and well-read public, the cultural and intellectual elite, and the academic community
of teachers and students. Religious history is more relevant than ever, for its term is still very
long. Humanity cannot do without it; the university even less.

70
Fred van Lieburg, ‘Religiegeschiedenis 3.0. De uitdaging van digital humanities’, Tijdschrift voor
Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis 17 (2014) 93-99.
71
I dealt with this core problem of all religious and/or ecclesiastical historiography with regard to the field of
Dutch Pietism studies in: ‘Wege der niederländischen Pietismusforschung. Traditionsaneignung, Identitätspolitik
und Erinnerungskultur’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 37 (2011) 211-253.

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