Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, ( German: “history of religions”) also called Religionswissenschaft , (“science of religion”), comparative, historical method in the study of religion. The Religionsgeschichtliche Schule developed in German biblical studies during the 19th century and emphasized the degree to which biblical ideas were the product of the cultural milieu. Important in this line of development was Albert Schweitzer, in whose Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) the eschatological teachings of Jesus are emphasized, together with the dissimilarity of his thought world from our own. The history of religions is generally understood to be nonnormative—that is, it attempts to delineate facts, whether historical or structural, without judging them from a Christian or other religious standpoint.
The modern history of religions came into its own from about the time of Max Müller. During the latter part of the 19th century an attempt was made to place the methodology of comparative religion and mythology on a systematic basis. During this period, various lectureships and chairs in the subject were instituted in Western Europe and the United States. The first congress of Religionswissenschaft took place in Stockholm in 1897, and a similar one in the history of religions was held at Paris in 1900. Later, the International Association for the History of Religions was formed.
A great amount of the work of scholars in the field has been devoted to exploring particular histories—piecing together, for instance, the history of Gnosticism or of early Buddhism. In principle, Christianity is considered from the same point of view, but much significant work has also been comparative and structural. This can range from the attempt to establish rather particular comparisons, such as Rudolf Otto’s comparison (in his mysticism East and West) of the medieval German mystic Meister Eckehart and the medieval Hindu philosopher Śankara, to a systematic typology, as in Religion in Essence and Manifestation by Gerardus van der Leeuw.
There have been many significant scholars in the history and phenomenology of religion since Müller. In the 20th century, Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) made a profound impression on the scholarly world with the publication of The Idea of the Holy (in its German edition of 1917), which delineated a central experience and sentiment and elucidated the concept of the Holy. The German-American historian of religions Joachim Wach (1898–1955) established Religionswissenschaft at the University of Chicago and was thus the founder of the modern “Chicago school.” Wach was concerned with emphasizing three aspects of religion—the theoretical (or mental; i.e., religious ideas and images), the practical (or behavioral), and the institutional (or social); and because of his concern for the study of religious experience, he interested himself in the sociology of religion, attempting to indicate how religious values shaped the institutions that expressed them.
Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), a Romanian scholar who immigrated to the United States after World War II, had a wide influence, partly because of his substantive studies on Yoga and on shamanism and partly because of his later writings, which attempt to synthesize data from a wide variety of cultures. The synthesis incorporates a theory of myth and history. Two important elements in the theory of Eliade are, first, that the distinction between the sacred and the profane is fundamental to religious thinking and is to be interpreted existentially (the symbols of religion are, typically, profane in literal interpretation but are of cosmic significance when viewed as signs of the sacred); and, second, that archaic religion is to be contrasted with the linear, historical view of the world. The latter essentially comes from biblical religion; the former viewpoint tends to treat time cyclically and mythically—referring to foundational events, such as the creation, the beginning of the human race, and the Fall of man, on to illud tempus (the sacred primordial time), which is reenacted in the repetitions of the ritual and in the retelling of the myth.
Since the days of Wach and Eliade, the history of religions has been identified primarily with the University of Chicago. Scholars who are associated with the “Chicago school” have included Joseph Kitagawa, Jonathan Z. Smith, Charles Long, Wendy Doniger, Frank Reynolds, and Lawrence Sullivan.