Modern Theology

In 1843 a movement arose in the Netherlands that would change the Western relationship with religion forever. It called itself Modern Theology, though more often still the Leiden School, and it spoke with the self-assurance of people who believe they have leased the future. Its birth coincided with a generation of scholars who held that Christianity could survive only if it revised itself down to the bedrock, that faith was faith only after reason had weighed it, and that revelation had to answer for itself before the tribunal of philology. What they began in those lecture halls would, decades later, become decisive for the way Europe approached, judged, and sought to govern Islam. The road from Leiden to Mecca runs through textual criticism, comparative religious studies, and the bureaucracy of Batavia. It begins here, in a movement that regarded itself as liberation and that was scarcely aware of what it carried with it when it set out.

The Leiden School and its foundations

In the middle of the nineteenth century Leiden was the intellectual capital of Dutch Protestantism. The university, a center of theological debate since 1575, bore on its façades and in its archives the traces of three centuries of learned polemic. But in the 1840s and 1850s something began to shift that in the preceding centuries had seemed immovable. Orthodox Reformed theology, which regarded the Bible as the literal and infallible Word of God, lost its ground to a new generation that wanted to read the Bible as one read Homer or Tacitus, as a historical document shaped by its time, a collection of texts shaped by its authors, a literary deposit shaped by the political circumstances that had produced it.

The founders of this movement were no enemies of faith, so they maintained, and they meant it too. They were, on the contrary, convinced that Christianity could hold its ground only if it embraced historical criticism no longer as an enemy but as an ally. Faith had to be purified of what they called superstition: miracles that were scientifically untenable, prophecies that had been inserted after the fact, texts that had been reworked by human hands over centuries. What remained after that purification, they reasoned, would be a kernel of ethical truth that was universal and enduring. No more supernatural claims, no ecclesiastical instrument of coercion, no slavery to the letter. A pure humanistic morality, grounded in reason and in the inner conviction of the believer.

It was an attractive idea for a generation that grew up in the shadow of the Enlightenment and in the full light of the scientific revolution. Biology, geology, philology: each had demonstrated in its own way that the world was older than the Bible suggested, that species evolved, that the earth formed slowly, and that texts bore the human traces of the hands that had touched them. The question for the enlightened theologian was no longer whether he had to accept these findings, but how he would recalibrate his faith in their light. He stood, as he felt it, at a turning point. He stood, as it later proved, on a slope.

Johannes Henricus Scholten

The first great name of Modern Theology was Johannes Henricus Scholten, professor at Leiden from 1843 to 1881. He set out from the Dutch Reformed Church, but gradually developed a system that replaced the transcendent God of Calvinism with something that can hardly be described as anything other than pantheistic: God was reason itself, at work in nature and in history, not a Creator above His creation but the inner lawfulness of all that exists. His major work, De Leer der Hervormde Kerk in hare Grondbeginselen (1848), was read in theological circles as a revolution. The orthodox rejected it as heresy. His students read it as liberation. History tends to remember the verdict of the students and to ignore the verdict of the orthodox, even where both verdicts carried within them something that time would yet underline.

Scholten’s method was rationalist to its core. Every dogma had to be tested against reason, against the historical sources, against the inner coherence of the Christian consciousness. Whatever could not be defended before the tribunal of reason no longer had any claim to the title of revelation. The result was a radical rereading of Scripture. Large parts of the Old Testament were rewritten from divine legislation into human projection. Moses became a lawgiver of his time, great and influential but not supernaturally inspired. The prophets became social critics, men of an exceptional ethical consciousness but not the mouthpieces of a transcendent Being. The miracles were reinterpreted symbolically, or quietly set aside, or treated as later additions that had sought to persuade a more naïve public.

What Scholten did was no attack on faith, and it is important to acknowledge that. It was a repositioning of the ground of authority. Not the church, not the dogma, not the literal text: reason was the only legitimate judge. And reason, as Scholten argued with a self-evidence that characterized his generation, spoke a language that was universal. It spoke the same language in Amsterdam as in Berlin, in Leiden as in Paris. It knew no confessional or national boundaries. That it did after all speak a language, that it had roots in a specific history, that its very pretension to universality was itself a product of a particular place and time, was an insight that would penetrate only later, and with difficulty.

Abraham Kuenen and the historical-critical method

The second figure, for this story perhaps even more crucial, was Abraham Kuenen, professor at Leiden from 1853 until his death in 1891. Where Scholten was a systematizer, Kuenen was a philologist and historian of the Old Testament. He stood in constant correspondence with Julius Wellhausen in Greifswald and with the broader current of German biblical criticism that spread across Europe from the 1860s onward, and he refined what he called the historical-critical method: a systematic analysis of biblical texts as to their dating, their authorship, their sources, and their redactional history. He was patient, learned, scrupulous, and, in a respect that his students seldom forgot, merciless. He did not leave a text in peace until he had laid bare its layers.

His picture of Scripture was that of a library, not a book. Genesis contained two creation accounts by different authors, with distinctive vocabulary and with a sequence of creation that contradicted one another. The Torah had not been written by Moses but compiled from at least four separate source documents: the Yahwist (J), the Elohist (E), the Deuteronomist (D), and the Priestly Code (P). Each of those sources stemmed from a different historical period, reflected different political interests, and had been bound together into a single whole by later redactors. The prophetic books contained interpolations by a later hand. Ezra and Nehemiah contained chronologies that pointed to human error or to deliberate political manipulation. Scripture was, seen in this way, a sediment of centuries, and the task of the scholar was to lay bare the layers and to give each layer back its place in time.

This was, as Kuenen stressed ceaselessly in De Godsdienst van Israël (1869–1870) and six years later in De Profeten en de Profetie onder Israël (1875), no anti-religious program. It was written with sincere admiration for the ethical force of biblical prophetism. But that admiration was historical in character. The prophets were great men of their time, not the mouthpieces of a supernatural Being. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah: they spoke out of their own conviction, shaped by their political context, their cultural baggage, and their personal charisma. God did not speak literally through them. They spoke on behalf of a moral ideal that they themselves had formulated, even though they sincerely believed that God had inspired it in them. Their self-interpretation was, in other words, not the interpretation to which the scholar was bound.

The scientific consequence was clear and carries the whole nineteenth century within it. Whoever wanted to understand the Bible had to read it as a historical document. That required knowledge of Hebrew, of the ancient Near Eastern cultures that surrounded Israel, of the political history of the Middle East in the first millennium before the common era. It also required something that was harder than knowledge: the willingness to treat Scripture as one treated any other document, with critical distance, without the assumption that its content had to be true in advance. A method that reads revelation as the sediment of its time cannot but deliver its reader up to that same time. Whoever strips the text of its vertical claim also strips himself of the possibility of hearing it vertically.

The epistemic rupture

What Modern Theology did was more than a rereading of Christian texts. It established a new epistemic position: the Western scholar as the only competent judge over religious claims to truth. Revealed religion, of whatever kind, had to be judged from the outside, by a method that it had not itself produced and that fundamentally contested its own criteria of authority. The believer who said, this is God’s Word, was answered with: prove it, for we know only the historical source and reason.

This position had an internal logic that determined its strength and its danger at once. If the Bible was a human document, then the same held for the Qur’an. If Judaism could be explained historically and sociologically, then Islam could be too. If the prophecies of Isaiah were the product of their time, then the Revelation to the Prophet ﷺ was equally a product of the Arabian society of the seventh century. The method was universal, or it was nothing. And its universality was non-negotiable, for it derived its authority precisely from its pretension to be able to treat everything in the same way.

Here lies the germ of what would later become orientalist scholarship in its most problematic form. Edward Said described in Orientalism (1978) how Western knowledge production about the East was never neutral, but always structured by the relations of power between Europe and its colonial possessions. The knowing agent, the European scholar, always stood in a relation of power to his object, the Islamic culture or society. That relation was never symmetrical. The European scholar defined, categorized, and judged, while the Islamic society was defined, categorized, and judged. No reciprocity, no dialogue between equals, no acknowledgment of the gaze of the other upon one’s own eyes.

What Said described as a political structure was at the same time a theological structure. Modern Theology provided the epistemic foundation for orientalism: a method that called itself universal but that was rooted in a very specific Protestant-rationalist worldview. The orientalist who analyzed the Qur’an as Kuenen analyzed the Bible pretended that his gaze from the outside was superior to the gaze of the believer from within. The Muslim who recited the Qur’an as the Word of Allah ﷻ did not truly know his own text, so ran the implicit assumption. Knowledge required distance, method, and the willingness to desacralize. A method that dissolves revelation into its historical environment also dissolves something in the reader. That loss is not measurable in philology. It can only be recognized afterward.

The Qur’an as an object of study

Over the course of the nineteenth century the historical-critical method was applied to the Qur’an as well, chiefly by German and Dutch scholars who carried the instruments of biblical criticism into new terrain. In 1860 Theodor Nöldeke published his Geschichte des Qorans, a systematic attempt to order the Qur’anic suras chronologically on the basis of internal stylistic features and historical indications. The work was brilliant in its philological precision and devastating in its theological implications. The Qur’an was, in this reading, not one text but a collection of texts, arranged into early Meccan, middle-Meccan, late Meccan, and Medinan groups, and typified accordingly as spiritual or political, universal or bound to its time.

Nöldeke had no access to the rich tradition of the Qur’anic sciences as it had been developed within the Islamic learned world over thirteen centuries. The disciplines of ʿulum al-Qur’an, the internal chronology of the revelation as transmitted by the Companions ﵃, the knowledge of the asbab al-nuzul, the transmission chains of the qira’at: all of this was largely unknown to him or was regarded as unreliable on account of its religious character. Knowledge transmitted by believers about their own faith could not, so ran the implicit reasoning, be objective. The believer was, precisely through his faith, disqualified from speaking reliably about his own text.

The Islamic scholarly tradition had, however, long before the nineteenth century developed an extremely refined hermeneutic for dealing with the Qur’anic text. The classical tafsir literature, from Ibn Jarir al-Tabari ﵀ in the ninth century to Ibn Kathir ﵀ in the fourteenth, joined philological precision to a deep familiarity with the transmitted context of every revelation. The hadith scholars had developed criteria of isnad analysis that in their rigor not only matched biblical criticism but in certain respects already anticipated it in the third Hijri century. What the Western orientalists called textual criticism had been practiced within the Islamic tradition for centuries already, out of a relationship of believing reverence and scholarly meticulousness at once.

The implications for the Islamic world

For the Islamic world these developments were at first scarcely visible. Kuenen’s lectures in Leiden did not touch the Muslim scholars of Cairo, Fez, or Istanbul directly. But the method that was refined in Leiden would find its way to the Islamic world by way of the colonies, and it would do so in a form far more dangerous than pure academic criticism: in the form of colonial knowledge, applicable as an instrument of governance. When a graduated Leiden orientalist with this epistemic baggage was appointed as adviser to Dutch colonial policy in Aceh and Batavia, the study rooms of Leiden were made exportable to the mosques and pesantren of Sumatra. The question was then no longer: what does the Qur’an really say. The question became: how do these Muslims use their Qur’an to resist our power, and how can we undermine that resistance. The distance between Geschichte des Qorans and the resident’s office at Kotaradja was greater than one thought, and smaller than one hoped.

That is the road this story follows. No conspiracy. A structure, a configuration of knowledge and power, shaped by the historical conjuncture of nineteenth-century Europe and its colonial ambitions, and at moments illuminated by the sincere conviction that one was doing good.

Comparative religious studies

Parallel to historical-critical biblical scholarship, a second discipline developed in the nineteenth century that is of great importance for this story: comparative religious studies. Where the historical-critical method was aimed primarily at the dissection of individual texts, this discipline turned its gaze on religious systems as a whole. Their structures, their rituals, their myths, their social functions, and their mutual affinities. A religion was, in this approach, no longer a unique proclamation but an instance of a more general category.

The founder of this discipline in its nineteenth-century form was Friedrich Max Müller, a German scholar who spent his working life at Oxford. In his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) he argued that all religions could be understood as variations on a small number of universal themes: the experience of the infinite, the veneration of nature, the search for the transcendent. His famous saying, “he who knows one religion knows none,” summed up the program. Müller’s method was in principle democratic and treated Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity as variations on a common phenomenon. In practice, however, there was a hierarchy that no one explicitly defended and that everyone found self-evident. Christianity, and in particular its Protestant interpretation, counted as the most developed expression of religious experience. Other religions were precursors, side roads, or variants. The comparison was, to put it cautiously, not quite comparison.

Islam in comparative religious studies

The position of Islam in this discipline was ambivalent. On the one hand Islam was recognized as one of the great world religions, with a coherent theology, an extensive legal tradition, and an impressive civilizational heritage. On the other hand it was treated as a religion that had had its best days: a system that had once been dynamic but that in the nineteenth century had congealed into formalism and stagnation. The Islamic world had, so ran the verdict of most European scholars of religion, not grown along with modernity. Its backwardness was no accident but structural.

This verdict had direct political implications. If Islam was a congealed religion that kept its followers in intellectual stagnation, then that justified European intervention. Not as conquest but as modernization. Not as subjugation but as the liberation of the Muslim from his own religious limitations. The orientalist who studied Islam was therefore not merely a scholar but also an agent of civilization. Whoever believed that science advanced humanity, that Europe was the bearer of that science, and that the Islamic world in its present form kept its followers in poverty and ignorance, could in all sincerity hold that European intervention was a benefaction. The colonial official who curtailed Islamic law and introduced European legal institutions did so, in his own eyes, not as an oppressor but as a liberator. He slept, as a rule, well.

Snouck Hurgronje would later think this reasoning through to its ultimate consequences and apply it, and he would do so under a name that he adopted in Mecca and that would never again depart from him. But that history still lies far in the future. For now it is enough to understand that comparative religious studies, together with the historical-critical method, formed the intellectual framework within which the nineteenth-century European understood Islam. As a historical phenomenon. As a social system. As an object of study, but never as a living revelation of the truth.

The church and its context

It is important to understand what Modern Theology did to the Dutch Reformed Church, for that church was the world into which the young Snouck Hurgronje would be born and formed. By 1860 the method of Scholten and Kuenen had become so influential that a large part of the liberal ministers in the Netherlands openly sympathized with it. In places like Leiden, Amsterdam, and Utrecht there preached ministers who no longer regarded the virgin birth of Jesus as a historical fact, who interpreted the miracles allegorically, and who read the death and resurrection as a spiritual symbol rather than as a physical event. The pulpit became, slowly but unmistakably, a professor’s chair. The orthodox Reformed countermovement resisted fiercely; Groen van Prinsterer and later Abraham Kuyper were the most outspoken critics, and Kuyper would in the 1880s found the Free University as a Calvinist counterpart to the liberal Leiden university. But in the 1840s to 1870s Modern Theology was at its height.

In this milieu, in 1857, a child was born. His father was a Dutch Reformed minister. His surroundings were steeped in the discussions that Scholten and Kuenen had set in motion, in the belief that science and faith were reconcilable, and in the self-evidence that European civilization was the standard by which all other cultures ought to be measured.

It would be a mistake to judge the scholars of the Leiden School as people with evil intentions. Kuenen was sincerely interested in the Bible and sincerely convinced of the humanistic values he propagated. Scholten truly believed that he was saving Christianity for modernity. But science never exists in a vacuum. The institutional context of the Leiden university was interwoven with the interests of the Dutch state, which in the same period was consolidating its colonial possessions in the East Indian archipelago. The Aceh War, which would begin in March 1873, would become the longest and bloodiest war in Dutch colonial history. The need for knowledge about Islam, in particular about the role of Islam in the resistance to colonial power, was urgent and political in nature. Leiden supplied that knowledge. The Indische Instelling in Delft, which trained officials for the colonies, made use of the expertise of Leiden scholars. The link between the study room and the administrative office was institutionally anchored and regarded by both parties as self-evident.

The language of neutrality

Modern Theology presented itself as neutral, as objective, as scientific. Its adherents sincerely believed that they stood above the parties, that they regarded religion with the same unprejudiced gaze with which a botanist regards a plant. But every method bears the traces of its origin. The historical-critical method was born out of European Protestantism, with its emphasis on the individual, on reason, and on the direct relationship of the believer to his text. It carried that baggage with it, even when it turned itself upon religious traditions that were structured very differently.

The Islamic tradition knows a concept that Western theology could grasp only with difficulty: the concept of iʿjaz, the inimitability of the Qur’an. The Islamic scholars held not merely that the Qur’an contained the truth, but that the Qur’an in its linguistic form was itself proof of its divine origin. No human author, however gifted, could have produced the style, the structure, and the content of the Qur’an. This was a claim that the historical-critical method by definition could not treat. It required a judgment about the divine, and that lay beyond its competence. Instead of acknowledging this, orientalism treated the iʿjaz claim as a theologically naïve article of faith that it could set aside. It read the Qur’an for grammatical irregularities, for shifts in style that might point to different authors, for tensions in content that would indicate redactional activity. That in doing so it did not touch Islamic hermeneutics but only demonstrated its own limitations was an insight that would penetrate only much later, and with difficulty. Revelation does not fall silent for the one who reads it as historical sediment. It merely becomes inaudible.

The beginning of a story

The Modern Theology of 1843 is the starting point of this story about Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, but it is more than that. It is the starting point of a broader shift in the European relationship with the Islamic world: from openly hostile confessional polemic to a scientifically dressed analysis that concealed its ideological presuppositions behind the language of objectivity. The polemic was not removed. It was refined and poured into laboratory glass.

Snouck Hurgronje would embody that shift in a manner that his teachers had never foreseen. He would carry the Leiden method to Mecca, and with that method in his suitcase he would adopt a name that was not his own. He would return with knowledge that enabled the Dutch colonial state to tighten its grip on the Muslim population of Sumatra. What Modern Theology had intended as the liberation of Christianity would in his hands be forged into an instrument for the control of Islamic societies. A theology that presented itself as science. A science that regarded itself as neutral. And a neutrality that, in the hands of the colonial state, would prove anything but neutral.

The boy who would be formed by this milieu still lay in 1843 far in the lap of the future. But the world that would make him began here, at the writing desks of Scholten and Kuenen, in the conviction that reason could fathom all religion and that Europe had the right, indeed the duty, to apply that reason to the rest of the world. In 1857, fourteen years later, he would be born. In a small North Brabant town. In the house of a Dutch Reformed minister. In the heart of the Protestant intellectual milieu that had produced Modern Theology.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• Abraham Kuenen, De Godsdienst van Israël tot den ondergang van den Joodschen staat, 2 volumes, Engels (1869–1870)
• Abraham Kuenen, De Profeten en de Profetie onder Israël, 2 volumes, Sijthoff (1875)
• J.H. Scholten, De Leer der Hervormde Kerk in hare Grondbeginselen, Engels (1848)
• Theodor Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorans, Dieterich (1860)
• Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, Longmans (1873)
• Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, Reimer (1878)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)
• Karel van der Leeuw, Theologie en filosofie in Nederland in de negentiende eeuw, Amsterdam (1988)