Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 84:335 (Jul 1927)
Article: Toe Roots Of Religion
Author: John E. Kuizenga

BSac 84:335 (July 1927) p. 279

Toe Roots Of Religion

John E. Kuizenga

Hold thou the good: define it well:
For fear divine philosophy
Should push beyond her mark, and be

Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

—Tennyson, In Memoriam, 53.

The question as to the origin of religion at once resolves itself into three questions: How did religion get started in human history? What is there in the constitution of man which makes him religious? What is the meaning, the value, of religion? It matters not how exclusively a man be interested in one of the three, he is forced to confront the others. The first question, properly the History of Religion, both in logic and in what has been written on it, becomes the second; the second, properly the Psychology of Religion, both by its own nature and by the evident bias of so many who have written on it, fairly clamors for the third; and the third, properly the Philosophy of Religion, refuses to be the “airy nothingness” of mere speculation, pathetically praying for its right to set its feet on the solid facts which the first and the second ought to furnish it. Our interest here is in the Psychology of Religion,—that must explain why we give it more space; yet simple honesty requires the admission that the Psychology of Religion really settles few things, and is in its very nature never ultimate, never satisfactory. Those who persistently give all their attention to feeling their own pulse and looking at their town tongue are apt to end in the insane asylum; and the process is generally hastened, if the pulse and the tongue be purely mental. Sanity consists by and large in seeing a thing in its relations; in our judgment the Psychology of Religion, seen in its proper relations, tends to confirm the Bible view of man’s relation to God.

BSac 84:335 (July 1927) p. 280

I.

The History of Religion, discussing how religion actually got started among men, is to-day a tangled jungle, criss-crossed by so many paths, that a way-faring man though no fool may be lost therein. Here lurks many a Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

We submit evidence of this jungle and its trails. Herman Bavinck, the myriad-minded, in his Dogmatics, felt it sufficient to point out only the following attempted explanations of the origin of religion: 1

fear, priest-craft, ignorance;
embryonic in animals, e.g., a dog’s love of his master, combined
with a sort of negative self-feeling and fear;
animism;
fetichism;
magic;
instinctive sense of the infinite;
search f...