«Il tacere non conviene nell'ora presente». Baldassarre Labanca e la bancarotta della teologia

Mauro Pesce has recently emphasized the need for a multidisciplinary approach to the history of Christianity, inviting colleagues to engage with the social and cognitive sciences. This call is not new. In 1895, another historian of Christianity, Baldassarre Labanca, suggested the strategic alliance with the positivists as the way out of the conundrums of theology and confessionalism for religious studies. Aim of this paper is to reconstruct the main characteristics of Labanca’s proposal, in many ways similar to the Pesce’s one.