Gerard van der Leeuw

Gerardus van der Leeuw ( born March 18, 1890 in The Hague, † November 18, 1950 in Utrecht ) was a Protestant theologian, religious scholar, Egyptologist and a Dutch politician.

Biography

He was born the son of Gerardus van der Leeuw (1861-1922) and Elisabeth Antoinette Nelck ( 1863-1949 ).

From 1908 to 1913 van der Leeuw studied theology at the University of Leiden, where he dealt in particular with the history of religion with specialization in Egyptology. 1913 and 1914, he studied in Berlin and Göttingen and received his PhD in 1916 at the University of Leiden on the gods of Ancient Egypt. From 1916 to 1918 he worked in the service of the Reformed Church. In 1918 he was appointed professor at the University of Groningen professor of religious history and the history of theology and was specifically responsible for the department " Theological Encyclopedia ". He also taught at the University of Groningen, the Egyptian language and literature. In 1943 he was arrested by the German side. His chair was renamed after the end of World War II in a chair in the phenomenology of religion. He held until 1950 The professorship. His work at the University, he interrupted for a year when he was in 1945 and 1946, the first Minister of Education in the postwar period in the Netherlands for the Labor Party. In addition to his professorship, he became involved continue in the Reformed Church. In 1950 he was elected the first president of the " Association for the History of Religions ".

According to him, the Volkenkundig Museum Gerardus van der Leeuw is named in Groningen.

Work

As a scientist applies van der Leeuw as a major representative of the phenomenology of religion. His work was aimed not so much to the formation of a methodologically uniform system from, but rather on understanding the lived religious content. He pursued this psychological and theological approaches. His psychological effort comes specifically in his work "On some recent results of psychological research and its application to the history, especially the history of religion " (1926 ) expressed, in which he specifically to psychological approaches within the philosophy of existence (such as Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Binswanger ) refers. Among his publications is particularly mentioned " Phenomenology of Religion" of 1933 as a work of comparative religion and the religious phenomenology the manual. He separated significantly between early and modern forms of experience of religion. According to him, the early forms were not characterized by a transcendence of the divine, but rather from the sense of powers within the meaning of Mana the Polynesian peoples. "God" here is just another word for this power, resulting in a de facto equating religion and magic in it.

As part of its operation for the church he campaigned for an understanding of theology as religious ethics and anthropology and for the liturgical movement.

Publications

• The do -ut -des- formula in the theory of sacrifice. In: Archives for Religious Studies. ( ARW) Vol 20, 1920/21, pp. 241-253.
• Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion. Reinhardt, Munich 1925.
• Phenomenology of religion. Mohr, Tübingen, 1933.
• Man and religion - anthropological experiment. Haus zum Falken, Basel, 1941.
• The balance of Christianity. Rascher, Zurich 1947.
• From saints in art. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1957.