Joachim Wach

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Ernst Adolf Felix Joachim Wach (born January 25, 1898 in Chemnitz , † August 27, 1955 in Orselina ), a great-grandson of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy , was a German and American religious scholar and sociologist .

Education

Joachim Wach, the grandson of Adolf Wach and son of Felix Wach and his wife Katharina, came from the Mendelssohn family of Jewish scholars, bankers and artists on both his mother's and father's side . After 1916 on Vitzthumchen school the Dresden Notabitur had taken, he served as a soldier and officer in the First World War on the Eastern Front. From 1917 he was enrolled at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig .

Further studies in Munich , Berlin and Freiburg im Breisgau followed before Wach returned to Leipzig in 1920. His studies of theology, philosophy and oriental languages ​​culminated in his 1922 dissertation Basics of a Phenomenology of the Thought of Redemption , which was published in the same year under the title The Thought of Redemption and Its Interpretation . He then studied in Heidelberg , where he joined in 1924 with his outstanding work Religion - theoretical science-Prolegomena to its foundation habilitated . His habilitation thesis was not without controversy because Wach presented a completely new concept of religious studies in it.

Teaching

In 1924 he became a private lecturer at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig. Again in Leipzig in 1927, Wach was given a teaching position in the sociology of religion . The extraordinary professorship for religious studies followed two years later . 1930 wax was the second volume of his work Understanding at the University of Heidelberg and the Dr. theol. PhD.

Until 1935, Wach developed a lively teaching activity in Leipzig, in which religious studies, religious sociological and philosophical topics were in balance. Then the National Socialists withdrew his license to teach because of his origin (see Law on the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service ). Wach was baptized, but as was customary during the Nazi era , no consideration was given to it. Later he was also stripped of his doctorate.

Wach managed to emigrate to the USA, where he read Biblical Literature at Brown University from 1935 to 1939 as a visiting professor , and then from 1939 to 1946 as an associate professor in the History of Religions. From 1945 he went to his profession as a full professor on the chair of religious studies at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago . In 1946 he received US citizenship. The religious activities of American churches increasingly had an impact on Wach, who for his part strongly advocated the inclusion of religious studies in theological training. In the 1950s he tried to re-establish the methodological and theoretical aspects of religious studies. Wach died unexpectedly of a heart attack on August 27, 1955 in Orselina near Locarno in Switzerland, where he was visiting his mother and sister.

plant

Wach endeavored to establish religious studies as an independent humanities. For him it was an understanding, not an explanatory science, the object of which is the diversity in empirical religion. He saw the question of the nature of religion as an obstacle to the development of an impartial study of religion.

Instead of the evolutionary concept that had dominated religious studies up to that point , Wach demanded a historical-systematic study of religions while explicitly excluding the question of truth. However, no religions could be understood without a religious meaning, an aspect that over the course of time grew in importance in Wax's work.

Although a theologian himself, he drew a sharp line from theology. The theologian has to introduce and interpret normative tradition, while the religious scholar has to show the essence of a religion through understanding, especially through understanding religious experience. The scholars of religion have to show what is believed and not what should be believed. In a comparative procedure, the researcher of religion could even show the essence of religion. This elaboration of the typical is the task of the formal religious system, which thus differs from the empirical history of religion.

Wach himself, however, never complied with this requirement. Rather, in his posthumously published work The Comparative Study of Religions (1958), he largely abandoned the empirical character of religious studies and made it a kind of natural theology . The religious experience, always significant in wax thinking, he now interpreted theologically as an answer to the “ultimate reality”.

Appreciation

Wach had offered religious studies a theoretical foundation as an empirical discipline, which in some respects has not been achieved to this day. In doing so, he went far beyond his teachers (or sources) in this regard: Rudolf Otto , Ernst Troeltsch , Max Weber , Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg , Edmund Husserl . At that time, religious studies had to be emancipated from theology; the path to empirical research was a distant utopia. But Leipzig was the most advanced here in Germany. Nathan Söderblom was appointed to Leipzig in 1912, and in 1914 religious studies were given a cultural studies institute there. It should be about worldview discussion, not just objectifying research. With his great work on the history of hermeneutics, Understanding , Wach also faced the question of method in this respect. In accordance with his teaching assignment in Leipzig, he established the sociology of religion as part of religious studies. His colleague Gustav Mensching later continued this work at the University of Bonn, as did his student Demosthenes Savramis (1925–1990), albeit in sociology.

When Wach had to emigrate, he found an open climate in the USA for his religious studies without fear of contact with the civil theological or the esoteric. While his early German-language work was hardly known here, he appeared in the USA as an advocate of religious experience and, together with William James, became one of the fathers of American religious studies. The English translation (1988) and the reprint (2001) of his habilitation thesis contributed to the full realization of its paramount importance for the fundamental theory of religious studies.

Wach was original in the treatment of the fabrics and also revealed his own attitude to religious questions, full of sympathy for a free and peaceful spirituality. In addition to the project of a comparative religious studies, it offered a theology across special finds from various religions and cultural areas. His Types of Religious Experience are a legacy of what was prematurely accomplished.

Wach was criticized for the fact that, despite his demand for an empirical character in religious studies, he did not concern himself with specific religions and thus failed to apply his method. He himself remained immanently dependent on an evolutionary scheme in that he spoke of an organic development of religious experience. Ultimately, the understanding religious studies demanded by Wach was replaced by a self-interpretation of one's own religious experience.

Works

  • The thought of salvation and its interpretation. Hinrichs, Leipzig 1922.
  • On the methodology of general religious studies. In: Zeitschrift für Missions- und Religionsgeschichte ZRMG 38, 1923, pp. 33–55.
  • Religious studies. Prolegomena on their epistemological foundation. Hinrichs, Leipzig 1924.
    • New ed. and introduced by Christoffer H. Grundmann. Spenner, Waltrop 2001.
    • Engl: Introduction to the History of Religions. 1988.
  • Masters and Disciples. Two considerations in the sociology of religion. Tuebingen 1925.
  • Mahāyāna , especially with regard to the Saddharna-Pundarika-Sūtra. Munich 1925.
  • The typology Trendelenburg and their impact on Dilthey . Mohr, Tübingen 1926
  • Understanding. Outlines of a history of hermeneutic theory in the 19th century. 3 vols. 1929-1933.
  • Art. Sociology of religion, in: Handwortbuch der Soziologie, Ed. Alfred Vierkandt , Stuttgart 1931, 2nd edition 1961.
  • Introduction to the sociology of religion. Tübingen 1931.
  • The problem of culture and medical psychology. Gustav Thieme, Leipzig 1931.
  • Types of religious anthropology. Barth, Leipzig 1932.
  • The problem of death in the philosophy of our time. Mohr, Tübingen 1934.
  • Sociology of religion, Chicago 1944. 9th ed. 1962.
    • German: Sociology of Religion. 1951.
  • Types of Religious Experience, Christian and Non-Christian. Chicago 1951.
posthumously
  • The Comparative Study of Religions. Columbia UP, NY 1958.
    • German: Comparative Research on Religions. Introduction by Joseph M. Kitagawa. Translated by Hans Holländer. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1962.
      • Review, Joachim Matthes in KZfSS 15, 1963, pp. 174–176.
  • Understanding and Believing. Essays. 1968.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Ernst Benz : Joachim Wach - Lectures, Brill Archive, pp. 1 ff. [1]
personal data
SURNAME Wake up, Joachim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wach, Ernst Adolf Felix Joachim (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American religious scholar
DATE OF BIRTH January 25, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH August 27, 1955
Place of death Orselina