Volume 10, Issue 2

Zusammenfassung Dieser Aufsatz vergleicht die beiden klassischen apologetischen Schriften, Moses Mendelssohns “Jerusalem” (1783) und Friedrich Schleiermachers Reden “Über die Religion” (1799), als Beispiele dafür, wie im Berlin des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts die Religion und ihre prägenden jüdischen und protestantisch-christlichen Traditionen verstanden werden konnte. Keine dieser beiden Schriften läßt sich einfach nach den üblichen Mustern der deutschen Aufklärung oder der deutschen Frühromantik erklären. Werden diese beiden Texte gemeinsam in den Blick genommen, so geben sie Gelegenheit zur Einsicht, wie sich ihre Argumente (zur subjektiven Anteilnahme, zur Allgemeinheit der Religion gegen die Besonderheit der Konfession, zum Sinn für politisches Leben und Geschichte) sowohl aufeinander als auch auf aufklärerische und romantische Interpretationen der Religion beziehen lassen.

This essay concentrates on the reception of Oswald Spengler's book, „Der Untergang des Abendlandes” by German Protestant theologians in the early 1920s, who were more susceptible to the influence of this book than were philosophers. Just after the First World War, for example, Werner Elert, Karl Heim and Ernst Troeltsch – not to mention Emanuel Hirsch, Friedrich Gogarten and others – had to cope with deeply interconnected crises in faith, church, theology and nation. Spengler's idea of cycles in history seemed to help them understand Germany's 1918 defeat not as due to military exhaustion but to a sort of divine destiny. But it also gave hope that this destiny would help to overcome the crisis. The authors drew epon certain aspects of Spengler's thinking to establish their theory of Christianity. However, the influence of Spengler vanished soon enough. As a result, the story of his reception is an example of the struggle to locate Christianity within post-war German society.

Zusammenfassung The Fischer controversy of the 1960s regarding the German Empire's responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War stands today as a pivotal debate for the question of whether the political culture of the Federal Republic has achieved a critical, self-reflexive view of contemporary German history. Drawing from Fischer's historiographic work back to his early academic activity as Protestant church historian an thereby also to understand the Fischer controversy as a debate regarding the responsibility of Protestantism for the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

The first part of the correspondence between Friedrich August Tholuck, the leading theologian of the German Revival Movement, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, later the head of the Anglo-catholic Oxford-Movement, shows Pusey as a “pupil” of his German friends Tholuck, August Neander and Karl Heinrich Sack, whom he met while studying in Germany (1825–1827). In his “Enquiry into Theology” (1828) he wrote a remarkably liberal refutation of Hugh James Rose's confessionalistic high-church criticism of the “State of the protestant religion in Germany” (1825). Based on the protestant “sola scriptura” Pusey rejected any “check and restraint over the human mind” and took the stance of what he called an “animated science” mediating between free scientific enquiry and pious belief in one's personal need of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ. Thus Tholuck's and Pusey's standpoint came to somewhat unclearly oscillate between personal experience as the fundamentum inconcussum of their belief and the endeavour to base this belief on the authority of the historically secured messianic understanding of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the factual credibility of the gospel history.

The first part of the correspondence between Friedrich August Tholuck, the leading theologian of the German Revival Movement, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, later the head of the Anglo-catholic Oxford-Movement, shows Pusey as a “pupil” of his German friends Tholuck, August Neander and Karl Heinrich Sack, whom he met while studying in Germany (1825–1827). In his “Enquiry into Theology” (1828) he wrote a remarkably liberal refutation of Hugh James Rose's confessionalistic high-church criticism of the “State of the protestant religion in Germany” (1825). Based on the protestant “sola scriptura” Pusey rejected any “check and restraint over the human mind” and took the stance of what he called an “animated science” mediating between free scientific enquiry and pious belief in one's personal need of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ. Thus Tholuck's and Pusey's standpoint came to somewhat unclearly oscillate between personal experience as the fundamentum inconcussum of their belief and the endeavour to base this belief on the authority of the historically secured messianic understanding of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the factual credibility of the gospel history.

Johann Joachim Spalding, Ueber die Nutzbarkeit des Predigtamtes und deren Beförderung (1772, 2 1773, 3 1791), hg. von Tobias Jersak, Kritische Ausgabe I/3, Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2002, XXXIII + 392 S., ISBN 3-16-147807-X, Eur 99,–. Johann Joachim Spalding, Briefe an Gleim – Lebensbeschreibung, hg. von Albrecht Beutel/Tobias Jersak, Kritische Ausgabe I/6,2, Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2002, XXXII + 350 S., ISBN 3-16-147809-6, Eur 99,– ( Friedrich Wilhelm Graf ) Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Exegetische Schriften, hg. von Hermann Patsch und Dirk Schmid, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Erste Abteilung (Schriften und Entwürfe) Band 8 (KGA I/8), Berlin/New York (Walter de Gruyter), 2001, LVII + 282 S., ISBN 3-11-016893-6, € 98,– ( Alf Christophersen ) Harvey Hill, The Politics of Modernism. Alfred Loisy and the Scientific Study of Religion , Washington, D C. (The Catholic University of America Press) 2002. 227 + viii pp. ISBN 0-8132-1094-1. $ 54.95. ( Darrell Jodock )