Die Zeit der Gegenwart

Abstract

This essay reflects on time and religion in historiography, in particular on semantics and contexts of the present in Study of Religion frameworks concerned with history and historicity. Referring to ongoing historiographical debates about the formation of historical time in modern European intellectual history, this category is treated in a twofold way: On the one hand by means of certain objects discussed in the historiography of religion in European contexts; on the other hand as a discourse about temporality that organizes relations between historiography and present times. The data basis for my analysis is provided by a typological approach dealing with experiences of time and structures of religion in European history from a sociological perspective (Wolfgang Eßbach 2014). Preliminary remarks concern general reflections on a future history of religion and present pasts in the light of an increasing interest in historical approaches in the Study of Religion. The present needs to be understood as an object and a critical term in the Study of Religion both historically and theoretically informed with regard to discourses about time and the presence of present pasts in religious history. Given that theorizing time and historiography remains a necessary and indispensable condition for doing history in the Study of Religion, this article argues for a more comprehensive discussion of historiographical and metahistorical concepts concerned with temporal relations of the past, the present, and the future as historical objects and discursive modes of time in which historians of religion are operating. Therefore, in this essay special attention is given to constructions and notions of modern historical time in theories of historiography and conceptual history, especially with regard to some arguments about the presence of the past and the future made by German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006). According to Koselleck, this presence refers, in the modern era, to a new understanding of history, which found its expressions in certain relations of what he calls “space of experience” (“Erfahrungsraum”) and “horizon of expectation” (“Erwartungshorizont”). With respect to Wolfgang Eßbach it is argued that his sociological understanding of religion and European history refers to a transformation of historiographical time regimes and corresponding notions of the past, the present, and the future. According to Lucian Hölscher, this transformation took place during the 20^th century and changed common historiographical possibilities of relating past and future times. Against this background it seems important that historical thinking in the Study of Religion should pay close attention to particular frames of historiographical time. In conclusion I outline possible nodal points that link these discourses about time and religion in historiography with more general problems in the Study of Religion. They concern relations of conceptual history and discourse analysis, religion as a critical concept, and the presence of past times.