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approach to religious studies as a reaction against a Christianity that had already long been distorted by supersessionism.254 Long gives a genealogy of religious studies in which he traces the development of the discipline from Max Muller, the eminent linguist and progenitor of modern religious studies, through Rudolf Otto, Joachim Wach, and to Eliade (his colleague).255 Long relates Max Muller’s opposition to Adolf von Harnack, the influential modern liberal historian of dogma. Long extols Muller’s approach and continues his criticism of Christian theology as unable to take seriously the study of other religions based on the merits of their own accounts. Long relates that Harnack was opposed to the establishment of the history of religions as a discipline because he “felt that such study would lead to dilettantism and that those who wished to study other religions should study them through Christianity.”256 Long maintains that Harnack viewed Christianity as “the absolute religion” by which all other religions should be evaluated. Long suggests that Muller’s approach, which posits a sensus communis undergirding all linguistic forms, leading to an experience of the sacred known as the sensus numinous, was a liberating alternative to Harnack’s absolutism.257 Long presents his genealogy of religious studies as the progression from the sensus communis to the sensus numinous, “that capacity for the experience of the sacred that has always been the same for every human being.”258 For Long, Muller’s quest for a “new primordium for Western culture” has now been realized in “the nature of experience itself as expressive of a primordium of human consciousness.”259 Long maintains that “religion is a practical social concern” whose “objective pole,” while needing to “be validated by communal consensus,” is “a mode of release from the entanglements of the social” and “the awareness of an objectivity that lies beyond the social and the existential.”260 Religious studies is a quest to ascertain the universality of the human spirit. In this quest, a transcendent god is irrelevant. A religious primordium is substituted for deity. For Long, it is the death of God261 and his replacement by the universal sensus numinous that Long celebrates as the rise of a “new god” who, while unable to be expressed in “the older theological languages,” has evoked a “new beat, a new rhythm, a new movement.”262
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