Almuth Ebke

This project examines the transnational and transdenominational debate over biblical inspiration to understand religious conceptions of the modern that have been marginalized by current conceptions of historiographical modernity. Since the mid-19th century, debates over divine authorship of the Bible have polarized theological scholarship, reshaped institutional structures of Christian churches, and influenced their position within society. Challenging the assumptions of the secularization thesis, the study argues that competing conceptions of the “modern” emerged within distinct discursive spaces shaped by religious thought: Catholic, “mainline” Protestant, and Anglo-American evangelical. These traditions all addressed the role of religion in modernizing societies, but in different ways and with varying institutional consequences. In academic discourse, European mainline Protestantism – with its adoption of historical-critical methods – gained dominance and helped shape early sociological understandings of religion’s role in society, while other Christian notions were sidelined. These Protestant frameworks, soon read as secular, were central to the emergence of the modern social sciences and the very concept of modernity itself. By embedding secular ideas of the modern in their original religious-sociological context, the project aims to provincialize transatlantic narratives of modernity and to recover the theological and confessional diversity from which they emerged.