De Secularisatie in het Westen en de ‘Terugkeer van God’

Hoe God verdween uit de sociologie

Samenvatting

Sociology of religion, after having honestly and continuously reported about the gradual and growing processes of secularisation in the West and the decline of organized religion over the past half of a century, recently started to discuss the return of God and the sacred and to question the general Weberian thesis of secularisation as a necessary historical process of disenchantment of the world. The article, instead, wants to question the general concept of religion underlying both the secularisation thesis and its ambiguous counterpart, the so called “return of God”. It does so by referring to quite a few processes of theological renewal within Christianity at least, but present in other living faiths as well, resulting in a metamorphosis of the idea of God, leaving its “theïstic” and “ontotheological” interpretations behind and overcoming the traditional dilemma of an opposition between the natural and a supposed supernatural world, implied in the concepts of “the sacred” and “”the transcendent” that were used in the 19th century comparative study of religion. Because the masters of sociology borrowed these concepts from their religionist colleagues, and identified these with traditional dogmatic formulations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and because their followers in the sociology of religion did not pay too much attention to changing theological interpretations of the idea of God in the second half of the twentieth century, sociologists of religion are endangered to loose sight of the real content of the God-belief of modern people and to take the revival of the idea of “the sacred”, of belief in miracles and alternative medical techniques, and of the growth of spiritual movements concentrating on personal experiences of the transcendent, the supernatural and the “beyond reason” wrongly for the “return of God” or for the failure of the secularisation thesis. Instead, studies of religious change should concentrate on the “metamorphosis” of the idea of God in the Judeo-Christian traditions as laid bare in theological research from the sixties of the 20th century.