The Pure Theory of Religion

“What if academic theology were to move beyond the methods of the natural and historical sciences and beyond the question of what does or does not exist?” This book develops a “pure theory” of religion comparable to the pure theory of mathematics. It does so by focusing on the miracle of Christ's Resurrection from the dead on the Third Day; either outright and explicitly, or implicitly, in reflections and thought experiments made with historical thinkers, like Saint Augustine of Hippo and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for whom this miracle was central and true. Working with thinkers such as these is essential, because the miracle of the Third Day is simply not conceivable apart from those “for whom it is central and true.” Conventional wisdom has said that this makes it untrustworthy, as though it were a figment of the imagination, and as though it were more important that something happened, or not, than that people believe it to have happened. The focus in this book is on the latter, and it is in this sense that the treatment of religion offered here moves within the realm of the “purely theoretical.” What may surprise some readers is that for all of this the results turn out to be decidedly real. Hollingworth first sketched out the possibility of such a pure theory of religion in a special lecture delivered to the European Academy on Religion & Society, in Lund, Sweden. This book presents that pure theory of religion in full, as well as the full text of the original lecture for the first time in print.