Faith & Spirit Quote by Julius Wellhausen

Wellhausen is doing what he so often does: making a cool, surgical comparison that quietly rearranges the furniture of religious history. On the surface, he’s recalling a familiar New Testament tension - Jews and Samaritans arguing over where God should be worshiped. The sharper point is the assumption underneath their quarrel: not whether worship must be centralized, but only where the single authorized center should be. The fight, in other words, takes monotheism’s “oneness” and smuggles it into institutional geography.

That’s a classic Wellhausen move in context. As a 19th-century Protestant scholar who helped pioneer the documentary hypothesis, he was fascinated by how religious ideas harden into systems: how a living, varied set of practices becomes a regulated orthodoxy. By invoking the “unity of God Himself,” he shows how theological claims aren’t just metaphysical; they become administrative. One God implies, almost irresistibly, one legitimate altar, one legitimate priesthood, one legitimate map.

The subtext is a critique of inevitability. When communities treat centralization as self-evident, they stop noticing it as a political choice. Wellhausen hints that the real disagreement between Jews and Samaritans wasn’t merely devotional but jurisdictional: whose tradition gets to define the coordinates of the sacred. The New Testament reference isn’t pious window dressing; it’s evidence in a historical argument about how “truth” is enforced through place, and how competing claims to worship are really competing claims to authority.