History of Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) - Education and Religion

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Wermke
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 261158889

Prominent representatives of the History of Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule hereafter RGS) began in 1900, to spread the results of their research not only with a scientific purpose, but with an intention to get laity to be interested in them. They addressed an educated audience in comprehensible lectures, publications and in series of writings as well as in vacation courses. The theologians of the RGS experienced a need to educate people in terms of religion and to convey the Christian religion as a meaningful institution in a pluralistic society. The present project is the first one to focus on the efforts of the RGS to educate people as a profound phenomenon, which has been influenced by the RGSs special understanding of religion and education. Therefore the interactions between theological and religious ideas, which were the foundation of proposals and projects in the time until World War I, will be analyzed. The RGSs special interest in religious education motivated some of its representatives to engage themselves in organizations, which supported a reformation of religious education. On these grounds the project examines ways in which the RGSs concepts of educating people were received in publications devoted to religious pedagogy. In that regard the personal and content-related continuities and discontinuities of the RGS in debates about religious pedagogy before and after World War I are investigated. Based on those examinations the present project focuses on the connection between RGSs efforts to educate people and the establishment of a modern, Protestant religious pedagogy. The project assumes that the RGS influenced the development of religious pedagogy, as an independent scientific and academic discipline, to a great extent. Hence the project benefits the present discussion on the development and the self-understanding of the religious pedagogy, by exploiting motives and impulses from exegetical disciplines that influenced modern religious pedagogy within the framework of the RGS, and by analyzing them historically and systematically.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Institution: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena; Theologische Fakultät; Lehrstuhl für Religionspädagogik
• Participating Persons: Dr. Thomas Heller; Professor Dr. Manuel Vogel