The Very Possibility of a Science of Religion: Ernst Troeltsch and Neo-Kantianism

Ernst Troeltsch appended an intriguing and cryptic footnote in 1912 to an early essay from 1893/94 that was to be republished in a new volume of his collected works, The Christian Worldview and Its Counter-Currents (Die Christliche Weltanschauung und Ihre Gegenströmungen), in which he declared that the intervening years had resulted in “a shift of philosophical standpoint from Lotze and Dilthey to Windelband and Rickert.”1 Troeltsch repeated this claim in his late autobiographical essay from 1922, “My Books” (Meine Bücher), which went on to elaborate in greater detail what this shift consisted of. The question of what precisely changed in Troeltsch’s outlook has been the topic of much debate, fueled in part by that fact that in both instances Troeltsch immediately qualified his professed “shift” in a manner that left it unclear to what extent, if any, his views were actually aligned with the Baden neo-Kantian school that culminated in Rickert, and that he clearly admired. On the one hand, this question might be considered merely biographical minutia of early twentieth-century German thought. On the other, it concerns a key and foundational problem that continues to arise for scholars of religion as they address the place of philosophy in the field, next to historical, anthropological, and social scientific approaches.2 Troeltsch’s move from Lotze and Dilthey to Windelband and Rickert signified a new way of understanding the role of normative inquiry and values in scholarship and scientific research. For Troeltsch, and for the Baden school, the problem of normativity more than any other became a point of contact that exposed the fault lines between the sciences, philosophy, and religious thought itself. The primary goal of this essay is to use the question of the extent to which Troeltsch actually adopted Rickert’s theory of normativity to uncover an illuminating episode at the origins of a persisting issue in the field. This episode is especially relevant precisely because it took place during the early period in which a so-called properly scientific study of religion (Religionswissenschaft) was being conceived and established within the academy.Templeton World Charity Foundatio