Theology and the birth of Ethnology

In her The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity , recently republished by Baylor, Debora Shuger examines, among other things, how Renaissance writers attending to biblical texts spread out in all directions: “In the Renaissance, discussions of Christ’s agony in the garden unfold into meditations on the conflictual and decentered structures of subjectivity, comparative anthropology unexpectedly surfaces in theological speculations on the Atonement, and passion narratives explore the psychological and historical dialectics of male violence and victimage.” She goes so far as to say, “it now seems to me that before the Enlightenment the dominant modes of subjectivity in the Christian West originate as passion narratives.”

On anthropology and atonement, she notes Grotius, whose De satisfactione Christi “knits together Classical jurisprudence, universal history, colonial apologetics, and international law.” It begins as “a defense of the orthodox theology of the Atonement” but in the final section “unexpected invents comparative anthropology in order to explain the logic of sacrifice, including Christ’s sacrifice.” The intertwined disciplinary interests remind Shuger of the way poststructuralist cultural studies mix Marx, Lacan, Saussure, and who knows what all.