Secular Bias In The Study Of Religion Summary

Is secularization another form of confessional history?

In the article The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in The Study of Religion by Brad S. Gregory, Gregory discusses the ongoing secularity and secularization happening in the study of religion. He discusses religion within social sciences, whether or not religious events from the past are real or not based on the metaphysical naturalism of the said event, religion in relations to epistemological skepticism, and just plain secularization. After having read the article, it has lead me to believe that secularization really is another form of confessional history. The definition of confessional history, to my understanding, is “to write history from a religiously biased point of view” in such a way that it hinders the full capacity and full understanding of the historical event’s content. In this case, the secularization of religious events fits the definition as it takes away from the historical content of the history itself. Gregory discusses secularization in his article and

He explains that historians who follow this claim dogmatically, believe that “no religion is, indeed cannot be, what its believer-practitioners claim that it is” despite the fact that miracles are “not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency” and such miracles are often those that occur within different religions. To try and explain miracles with natural sciences would be impossible due to its nature being of a divine creator because we cannot explain nor describe the divine power of God. An example being in Christianity, how Mary conceived a child through the power of the Holy