A Comparative View of Religions

A Comparative View of Religions by Johannes Henricus Scholten offers a provocative framework for understanding faith as a movement between dependence and self-awareness. Scholten, a 19th-century Dutch theologian and philosopher, presents a systematic, comparative study in the intersecting fields of religion and philosophy that traces how religious consciousness evolves across cultures and epochs. He begins with the basic presuppositions—God as object, man as subject, and their mutual relation—and maps religious forms from fetish and nature worship (where dependence is predominant), through the deification of humanity in Greek thought and the renunciatory currents of Buddhism, to the maturation found in Israelic and Christian religion, where dependence and personal freedom are reconciled. He also considers how Islam reflects borrowings from earlier traditions and stresses the historical limits of reconstructing earliest religious stages. Scholten’s analysis is both historical and philosophical, offering clear concepts for comparing beliefs without doctrinal advocacy. Ideal for students of comparative religion, theology, and philosophy or any curious listener seeking a concise, intellectually rigorous framework for how religions develop and relate, this audiobook provides a lucid introduction to the evolution of religious ideas.