Volume 18, Issue 1

Kurt Nowak (1942–2001) was perhaps the most important church-historian in the former GDR. He was also a novelist, author of five belletristic books: Eintreffe heute abend (1971), Der Tod des Studenten Lothar Dahl (1974), Stechow oder Ein Fluchtversuch (1978), Schöner Übermut des Herbstes (1982) and Vertraute Fremde (1990). The essay describes the process of creation of those five books and analyses the relation between the theologian and the novelist.

The article starts by observing a parallel between the identification of Christ's humanity and universal human nature, for which Harnack repudiates some church fathers, and David Strauss' claim, in his Life of Jesus , that the subject of the Incarnation must be all humanity. It is argued that this oppositional stance is indicative of fundamental philosophical and theological differences between the Tübingen School and the Ritschl School. Those differences, however, are then explained as emerging from what is ultimately a common project of a radical form of historical theology. This project, it is argued, Ritschl took over from Baur while correcting it in crucial ways. Taken together, the two central theological schools of the 19th century thus illustrate the potential and the limits of christian theology within the historicist paradigm.

This edition illustrates Gottfried Salomon-Delatour's (1892-1964) lifelong engagement with his former teacher Ernst Troeltsch. Salomon-Delatour's memorial-lecture from 1963 given at the University of Heidelberg is a rare and lengthy document, in which a sociologist tries to understand the idea of history from a methodological point of view. The text offers an intelligent and lucid defense of Troeltsch's concept of historicism in the age of scepticism after WorldWar II. The document forms part of the Gottfried Salomon-Delatour papers at the University Archive in Bielefeld. This is the first publication of material from this collection.

This edition contains the correspondence between Paul Tillich and his friend Fedor Stepun, a sociologist and philosopher of religion. Tillich and Stepun had been colleagues at Technische Universität Dresden in the mid 1920s. The correspondence covers the period between 1934 and 1964. The early letters address the situation in Germany during the onset of National Socialism: the so-called Röhm-Putsch , the Kirchenkampf , the institutional changes in the university system and, later, the dismissal of Stepun as professor in Dresden in 1937. After a hiatus of several years, the correspondence continues in 1946. The correspondence shows the search for a new positioning in the postwar years, from the perspective of the émigré Paul Tillich and Stepun, the expert on Russia, who from Munich observed the political developments of the Cold War with great concern. Stepun consistently proves an acute critic of the political theologian Paul Tillich. In particular, Tillich's Christology and his program of religious socialism met with his friend's fierce criticism.