Total presuppositionlessness renders study and research impossible. But if nevertheless presuppositionlessness is one’s aim and one takes a positivistic position with respect to religion, the inevitable result is a “theology of ‘mood’ in place of concepts, a system of paradoxes in place of sober truth, the ‘art’ of being enthused about everything in place of the conviction which looks for a fixed standard of things.” In this area the purely empirical method results in surrender to the relativism of the historical process or event and the loss of one’s ability to judge the truth content of a religion. It also results in the tendency to judge religious phenomena purely esthetically in terms of their “beauty.” Then, as Nietzche did with Nero and Cesar Borgia, one goes into raptures over ecstatics and fanatics as the religious showpieces of humanity.
Reformed Dogmatics Vol. 1: Prolegomena, (p. 73)
