Theology and Religious Studies: Research

In this Research Master’s programme Islamic Studies and Theology, study route of Theology & Religious Studies: Research, you will expand your knowledge and research skills within a broad interdisciplinary framework and prepare yourself for further graduate studies in Islam.

Within the programme you can focus on a specialized area within Theology or Religious Studies. It encourages you to pursue your own interests. You will develop knowledge and skills on topics and debates concerning Islam within contemporary contexts. Furthermore, you will examine materials that are at the forefront of academic research in Islamic Studies and that provide a foundation for future research.

This Research Master’s programme is connected to the VU Amsterdam’s Centre for Islamic Theology, that offers several courses on Islam in the modern world. Among others, you can choose for extra-courses in Islamic hermeneutics, religious transmission and Islam in context.

What is the importance of researching Peace within religious studies?
In what way are religions related to political and economic conflicts?
In what stand is religion relevant for actual politics?
How are religions being used to heal wounds, to create hatred, to work for peace?

Are you triggered by the questions above? Or do you have other questions related to the field of peace and conflict studies? Then the Peace, Trauma, and Religion (PTR) study route will be a perfect fit for you.

During the Peace, Trauma, and Religion program, you will have the chance to discuss topics with students from different backgrounds and different contexts. Students gain knowledge and skills required for research at the frontier of peace and conflict studies. At the same time, it will become clear that academic understanding is more than knowledge alone. In order to acquire some precise insights regarding peace and conflict studies with the focus on religion, PTR students have the opportunity to join an excursion to have an in situ experience; e.g., Colombia, Israel/Palestine, South Africa, Germany.

This two-year program is the only track where students take all PTR study route courses such as Just Peace and Religion and Trauma (all taught in English). While being introduced to the most recent discussions in peace and conflict studies, the component of religion is being discussed to understand how it overlaps with peace and conflict studies. At the same time, you will have the freedom to explore your favorite topics or denominations in depth. Additionally, room for specialization is offered by a freely elective course. 

The program also features expert-instructions on doing research in the courses Hermeneutics and General Research Skills. These cover interpretation, academic writing, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, presenting at a conference, and producing solid research proposals. Also, the students follow a 12EC internship. Those who follow regularly Research Master trajectory write a 30EC RMA thesis in the second year and follow modules Research Design I and Research Design II. Furthermore, students who finish the 1-year study route Peace, Trauma and Religion have the option to switch to the 2nd year of the Research Master program. A choice that can be discussed with the coordinator of the program. 

Religion is a pivotal phenomenon in the modern world, including the West: it inspires, it motivates, it consoles, but at times it can also obstruct or even harm. Consequently, it is highly contested: its truth-claims, its attitude towards reality, its societal consequences, and its relation to contemporary science. The Philosophy & Religion study route of the Research Master’s programme will introduce you into some of the core issues surrounding religion in Western democracies and it will do so from an empirically informed philosophical and theological perspective. You can choose your own study route and decide which focus your own research will have. 

Questions to be addressed in this programme are:

• What is the nature and value of religious faith?
• What ethical and meta-ethical challenges does religion face?
• What are the main arguments for and against belief in God?
• How should we construe and assess naturalism and atheism in our modern world?
• How does religious faith relate to science?
• How can we conceptualize the nature of God in Abrahamic religions?

The study route Biblical Studies and Digital Humanities of the Master's programme Theology and Religious Studies: Research, focuses on the study of the Hebrew Scriptures by means of computational tools that have entered the field of “Digital Humanities”. The application of these tools to texts and traditions challenges the traditional disciplinary boundaries between the Humanities and the Sciences. It has a great potential for interdisciplinary research, addressing pertinent questions in the biblical scholarship, as well as new questions that arise with the new possibilities of corpus analysis one could only dream of in the pre-digital era.

In your studies, you will deepen your knowledge of biblical texts and languages, acquire basic programming skills in the Python language, and will learn how to apply these skills for textual analysis of the Bible or other ancient sources. Depending on your own interests, you can learn more about biblical studies, programming for linguistics, or Bible translation.

This research programme is offered by the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC), an internationally renowned research group that combines the meticulous analysis of biblical texts and languages with innovative state-of-the-art methods of digital analysis. Students of this programme participate in the research meetings of this centre and are offered the possibility to do an internship with one of the ETCBC researchers.

Are you interested in deepening your expertise in Biblical Studies, in crossing borders between disciplines and to enter unexplored paths of innovative research, this programme will be a perfect choice. 

The Bible is the world’s most influential book. The study route “Contextual Biblical Interpretation” of the Master's programme Theology and Religious Studies: Research trains you to understand how the Bible is being used, what kind of effect the use of the Bible has on its readers, and how that is (and isn’t) related to the origins of the Biblical books. How can the same book be used to advocate human dignity and be claimed by populist politicians? What role does the Bible play in times of crises (such as the Corona crisis) and what is the role of the Bible in the arts? How does the Bible relate to issues such as gender, race and class across the world and throughout history?

Through courses on both Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and New Testament case studies, you gain a broad overview of the role that the Bible plays in different contexts. The relationship between text and context is of particular interest: contextuality is a catalyst for interpretation. Each context invites new and unique interpretations, showing how inexhaustible the Bible is, both as a sacred text and as a cultural classic. Students can combine courses on biblical subjects with courses in the history of religions or church history and disciplines such as systematic theology, missiology or Bible translation. 

Students of the study route Contextual Biblical Interpretation can also opt for a training in Contextual Bible Reading. This training is offered by the Stichting Contextueel Bijbellezen Nederland. Questions can be addressed to Peter Breure at jpebreure@online.nl. The training can be used for the course 'Professional Skills.'

The Centre for Contextual Biblical Interpretation in Amsterdam is a hub for research on the use of the Bible. Its academic colloquium offers a great opportunity for exploring cutting edge research with the researchers themselves. Ongoing research includes topic such as ecological hermeneutics, intercultural hermeneutics, biblical interpretation in church plants, autobiographical criticism, masculinities and queer studies and beyond. Also, the Centre hosts the exchange program Bridging Gaps, creating an intercultural community of learners with students from all over the globe in the fall. Annually, a senior scholar delivers the Dom Hélder Câmara lecture in contextual biblical interpretation in November. Uniquely, the Centre is a collaborative effort of both the Protestant Theological University and the Faculty of Religion and Theology of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, giving members access to both academic communities. 

The Research Master’s study route Reformed and Evangelical Theology challenges you to reconsider your theological convictions.

Are you interested in deepening your expertise in Christian theology from a Reformed and Evangelical perspective? Following the lead of great theologians such as John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Herman Bavinck and James William McClendon, the Research Master’s study route Reformed and Evangelical Theology challenges you to reconsider your theological convictions. Developments in society raise new theological questions. This program trains students to take these questions, for instance regarding faith and science, seriously.

In a time in which institutions and external authorities rapidly lose credibility, personal experience has become an important guiding principle in matters of faith and life for many believers. Their direct experience of God is much more important than the Bible, the wisdom of the Christian tradition or the teachings of the church. But how should these developments be assessed?

The Herman Bavinck Center (HBC) offers this study route of the Theology and Religious Studies Research Master and focusses on theological issues related to 'Presence and Discernment'. Depending on your own interests, however, you can also learn more about a specific theological tradition, thinker or topic.

Students of this program participate in the Research Group Reformed and Evangelical Theology and are offered the possibility to do an internship with one of its senior researchers or with the Herman Bavinck Center. 

Early Christianity was never a single phenomenon. Instead, the label refers to a wide variety of groups that held diverging ideas and practiced their beliefs in just as wide a variety of settings. The Early Christianity study route of the Research Master’s programme Theology and Religious Studies: Research will introduce you into this variety of early Christianity, but also into their rootedness in early Judaism and the Greco-Roman world. You can choose your own study route and decide which focus your own research will have. 

Questions to be addressed in this programme are:

• How should we weigh current scholarship on the Greek text of the New Testament?
• What can we say about the historical Jesus?
• How should we understand Paul’s contribution to the growth of what would become Christianity?
• What dynamics characterise the process of growth from proto-orthodoxy into the orthodox Catholic church of the 4th century?
• How do early Christian rituals relate to e.g. the practices of Hellenistic mystery cults?
• Did the first generations of Christians lead completely different lives from their pagan and Jewish neighbours?

This study route will introduce you to this complexity of contemporary expressions of Buddhism. 

The many different contemporary Buddhist traditions are situated within multiple modernities. In fact, local, glocal, global and transnational Buddhist organisations and praxes (=thought and practices), negotiate complex and shifting pre-modern, modern, and postmodern modes of subjectivities and belonging.

The Buddhist Traditions and Modernities study route of the Research Master’s programme will introduce you to this complexity of contemporary expressions of Buddhism(s) and their varying relationships to various projects of modernity. You can choose your own study route and decide which focus your own research will have. 

Questions to be addressed in this programme are:

• What are the key issues driving Buddhist responses to modernities?
• How can we research the complexity of contemporary Buddhist traditions between universalist and particularist claims and approaches?
• What can we say about contemporary negotiations of the various dimensions of Buddhism(s), in particular of the textual-narrative, philosophical, and ethical-legal dimensions in relation to the organisational, experiential, material, and ritual dimensions?
• How should we understand, in context, Socially Engaged Buddhism and Humanistic Buddhism?
• What dynamics characterise the process of modernization of Buddhist traditions and how do we understand phenomena such as New Age, secular, and alt-right Buddhism and post-Buddhist psychological and well-being practices?
• How does the mosaic of transnational and global contemporary Buddhist traditions between modernism(s) and (neo)traditionalism appear (g)locally outside Asia and in interfaith and minority religious contexts, such as in the Netherlands?

If you want to learn more about the exegesis of the Old and New Testaments, you can do that in this study route Biblical Exegesis.

Each year, one course on the New Testament is taught, out of a cycle of three courses – respectively Gospels, Acts, and one of the Letters – and one course on the Old Testament – respectively Law and ethics, Poetry, and Prophecy.

We assume that you already learned Hebrew and Greek in your bachelor's degree. These courses end with an assignment to write a paper on a specific section or on a specific topic that occurs in the given genre. Besides exegesis you can choose electives that fit your interest, such as Biblical Studies and Digital Humanities, in order to be able to work with the databases we have built, or The Text of the New Testament, in order to understand all the details of textual criticism.

The programme starts with the course Hermeneutics, the basic course circling around the question how to understand texts, persons, religions, cultures. Furthermore, you will be trained in specific research skills in courses such as Academic Writing, Academic Presenting, and Research Design.