3 The interest in Islam was increasing across Europe in Troeltsch’s time ( Habermas 2014 for a detailed discussion, see Almond 2010). Considering all accessible material, I counted more than one hundred references to Islam in Troeltsch’s oeuvre of more than twenty-five volumes. For the current controversies about Islam in European and American public squares, then, Troeltsch is instructive because he clarifies the problems and the promises of the theological thinking that came to be called “liberal.” Islam is a recurrent referent in Troeltsch’s thinking, running through his theological and philosophical writings.

2īy analyzing and assessing Troeltsch’s interpretation of Islam, I aim to argue that he concurrently constructs and collapses the supremacy smuggling for which he is criticized.

The fact that Troeltsch never claimed the label of liberalism for his interdisciplinary thinking-indeed, he criticized the politics and the practices of liberalism both inside and outside churches ( Troeltsch 2006, 94–96) 1-has led neither his defenders nor his despisers to cast doubt on him as a “supremacy smuggler.” Given that many scholars know Troeltsch only through Masuzawa’s account, her critique of the supremacy smuggling in his conceptualization of religion is a promising point of departure for a study of the interpretation of Islam in the legacy of theological liberalism. She proposes that Troeltsch’s liberalism presents “in the name of pluralism” the “hidden supremacist pretensions” that so much scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth century presumed ( Masuzawa 2005, 325). Troeltsch is at the center of Masuzawa’s concluding chapter, “The Question of Hegemony: Ernst Troeltsch and the Reconstituted European Universalism” (2005, 309–24). Since Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) has been labelled the figurehead of the theological liberalism that Masuzawa criticizes, he has to bear the blame. Masuzawa has been immensely influential in the study of religion, so much so that many scholars draw on the legacy of theological liberalism only very carefully, only very critically-or not at all. In her seminal study, The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa suggests that, through the language of “world religions,” liberals secretly smuggled assumptions of the supremacy of Christianity from theological into non-theological scholarship on religion (2005). ACROSS the study of religion, critiques of liberalism abound.

Age of empires 2 supremacy