Volume 43, Issue 2

On the background and within the framework of the traditional Israelite-Jewish anthropology Ben Sira advises his pupils and readers to accept death as a fate and to draw the consequences of the fact that human beings have no other life than the present one. For the Lord the shortness of human life gives reason for his mercy, if they return to his commands. On the other hand the way a man dies is a parameter for God's judgement. Apart from the fact that everybody is responsible for his fate the transitory character of life gives reason to enjoy oneself using his property for gifts to his friend and the embellishment of the own transitory days. But he should as well take care of his name, for a good name is just what may survive. In regard to the death of other people one should not withdraw from a dying, but after his death not lengthen the mourning for this would weaken himself whithout helping the dead one. This in the whole conservative outlook of Ben Sira protected him against philosophical and apocalpytic speculations, which he judged as devorced from reality. All what a humans may need for their life became revealed to them by the Lord. To act according to his commandments is better than to look out for fresh revelations. So we may understand Ben Sira as a representative of Judaism as a religion of reason in a transitional age, even if we would credit to his unnamed opponents that they had some idea about the transcendent mystery of life.

E. W. Ch. Sartorius (1797–1859), a forgotten lutheran theologian of the 19th century, provides a comprehensive understandig of God as love in the three volumes of his dogmatics (‘The Doctrine of the Holy Love’). He sees love as the intentional relative property (i. e. an attidude) of the surrrender of one self-conscious particular being to another. In applying this concept to the being of God, Sartorius develops the trinity of three divine persons from the statement ‘God is love’. However, this conception seems to fail because this particular concept of love implicitly presupposes a concept of individual self-consciousness. Consequently, God is “loving selfconsciousness” – three times. The main problem consists in the fact, that Sartorius, although he is able to develop the trinity from the concept of love, he is unable to show how the persons are constituted by love. However, the relationship of the notions of ordo amoris and surrender, the concept of faith as trusting in being loved and his concept of a specific relationship of the doctrine of the trinity to soteriology in order to avoid forms of “panentheism” could provide interesting suggestions for the present discussion of the doctrine of God.

It is difficult to translate the title “Wissen und Glauben” (Knowledge and Faith, see Romans 11:33 and I Corinthians 13:13) into English, because there ist a debate between Kant, Jacobi, Fichte and Hegel behind it. Through Fichtes “Wissenschaftslehre” knowledge has been accepted as the basic element of all scholarship, whereas faith belongs to religion. First of all we will show, that knowledge and faith have an independent root. Each can exist by itself whithout the other one. Secondly, we will show how they complement one another. In fact faith can be sufficient for the individual without knowledge. But faith can only achieve its richness and its public effectiveness together with knowledge, the πλήρωμα (fullness, John 1:16) of faith needs knowledge. Knowledge on the other hand can neither take its depth nor reach its totality without faith. Knowledge that wants to enlighten itself must rely on faith. Faith shows knowledge that it is neither fully founded on man nor can it be fully considered as an image of the universe. On the one hand faith is criticism of self-empowered knowledge, on the other hand it is the way to surpass knowledge (see Ephesians 3:19) and to complete it.

This essay describes a problem, that German protestant theology has faced for nearly a hundred years. The problem derives from a theory of death, which spread among theologians in the first decades of the 20th century. In contradiction to traditional doctrine they interpreted death not as the moment, when the immortal soul seperates from the body, but as the moment in time, when human life comes to its absolute end. That means, they denied the idea of an immortal soul. Accordingly they interpreted the resurrection of the dead as a radically new creation. This theory, named Ganztodtheorie, caused an unsolvable problem, that can be described as follows: How can one be sure, that it is exactely he, who becomes resurrected and not a newly created double? Christian Henning discusses the answers to this question, that had been given by Carl Stange, Paul Althaus, Werner Elert, Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel and Wolfhard Pannenberg and finally presents his own solution. In doing so he modifies the traditional idea of the immortality of the soul.

Theology as a confessional discipline is challenged to prove its academic character. Only the distanced view to religion, as it is significant for non-confessional religious studies, seems to be in a position to deal with the cultural phenomenon called ‘religion’ in a serious academic manner. Theology should to live up to the challenge by proposing itselfs specific concept of ‘religion’. It is in this field, that we find the topic of an fruitful and dialectical encounter between both disciplines, theology and religious studies. On the one hand, theories of religion, as they arose in the context of modern protestantism, can show, that ‘religion’ embodies the concept, by which this confessional tradition transcends its own particularity towards the universality of the human. On the other hand, modern religous studies have evidenced, that we have ‘religion’ only in the particular diversity of practised religions. Against this background, the paper argues for a specific protestant concept of religion, which works out the dialectic between particularity and universality in terms of the relation of the divine absolute and the human individual – focussing on the transparent constitution of the freedom of individuals. The paper concludes with reflections on a concept of modern culture, which allows for realisation of this freedom.