Protestant Theology in Germany
By Michael
Moxter and Ingolf U. Dalferth
Protestant theology in
Germany originated with the Reformers of the sixteenth century. Of diverse
intellectual and theological origins, it was from the beginning an academic
discipline taught at the universities of the Protestant states of Germany. The
rich variety and often controversial pluralism which it developed in the
course of its history had theological, but also political, origins. It derived
from the state-based reorganization of church life and public education
according to the principle cuius regio, eius religio whose impact on the
complex development of Protestant theology in Germany can hardly be
overestimated.
Typically, Protestant
theology is predominantly soteriological in orientation. It reflects a
Christ-centred Trinitarian faith in God (solus
Christus) and hence accepts the Word of God as testified by
Scripture as the supreme arbiter in all matters of faith (sola scriptura). Its
formative period was the seventeenth century, when Lutheran and Reformed
divines worked out their doctrinal systems of scholastic orthodoxy in response
to post-Tridentine Roman Catholi-[490]cism and in confessional and political
opposition to each other. It moved into its self-reflective phase in the
eighteenth century when the internal criticism of pietism and the external rise
of enlightened reason forced it to define its distinctly Protestant (as opposed
to merely confessional Lutheran or Calvinist) position beyond its rejection of
the Roman papacy and its claims to authority in more positive theological
terms. Philosophically generalized by German idealism, its ethos had a
formative impact on the intellectual and cultural formation of German society
in the nineteenth century. It suffered a major setback through the disestablishment
of the Protestant churches after 1918 and the collaboration of many Protestants
with the Nazi regime, from which it never wholly recovered. It still holds a
privileged position by being taught at state universities by state-paid
professors of theology. But although it has produced many fine theologians and
important contributions to the study of theology in this century, its influence
on society at large and on church life in particular has been continuously diminishing.
The term 'Protestant'
Originally the term
'Protestant' referred to the legal protest made by six princes and fourteen
south German cities at the Diet of Speyer in 1529. This protest was directed
not against Rome but against the rescinding of the unanimous declaration of the
earlier Diet of Speyer in 1526 that until a General Council met every prince
should be free to introduce religious changes. The religious import of this
legal protestation was that in questions of religion and faith the only authority
to be obeyed was the Word of God, not a political body or a majority vote. It
was in the light of this that Lutherans, and soon all Reformation movements
opposed to Rome, were called 'Protestant' by their critics, while they themselves
preferred to describe their position as 'evangelical'. But the separation from
the more radical enthusiast and Anabaptist movements after 1525, the breach
between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli in 1529 and the Peace of Augsburg in
1555 made it quite clear that mainstream 'evangelical' Protestantism remained
firmly in the traditions of western Christianity and that the opposition
between Lutherans and Calvinists was as great as their common opposition to
Rome. It was not before the seventeenth century and the bitter experiences of
the wars of religion that both Lutherans and Calvinists adopted – via England
and western Europe – the neutral (political) description of Protestants as
their common name. By this time it was clear that the Protestant break with
Rome was permanent; that the religious unity of the empire could not be
restored by force; that western Christianity was definitely dissolved into a
variety of confessional traditions, churches and religious movements; and that
this plurality of conflicting religious convictions could only coexist peacefully
if the common affairs of human life were based on natural law and principles of
reasonableness established independently of religious commitments. So the
eighteenth century saw European culture well on the way from a pluri-religious
to an increasingly secular society.
Protestant
self-understanding
For Protestant theology to
come to grips with this, it had to work out its self-understanding in changing
contexts and with differing emphases. While there is a clear continuity of
theological orientation due to the confessional self-determination of the
Lutheran and Reformed churches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
German Protestant theology has produced different types of theology in
different periods since the Reformation. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries it defined itself primarily vis-à-vis Roman Catholicism and
the more radical spiritualist and (Ana)Baptist traditions in Lutheran or
Reformed (Calvinist) terms. The rejection of obedience to the Roman papacy
(Bossuet, [1688] 1841), the self-demarcation against Baptist, spiritualist and
anti-Trinitarian movements, and the opposition between Lutheran and Calvinist
orientations have since been fundamental traits of Protestant theology.
In the eighteenth century
the primary points of reference were the dissenting and nonconformist pietist
traditions, the enlightened synthesis of humanist and Renaissance traditions
with the new spirit of empirical and mathematical science, rational philosophy
and Confucian ethics, and the growing enlightenment
secularism. This led to an even greater internal diversification of
Protestant theology [491] and to the disintegration of confessional orthodoxy
by rationalism and supranaturalism, neologism and a growing historical
consciousness. The self-conscious engagement with rationalist and idealist
philosophies and the wholehearted commitment to critical historical scholarship
have left their mark on German Protestant theology.
In the nineteenth century it
had to come to grips with the rise of nationalism, industrialism and the social
problems in its wake, but also with the progress of the natural sciences,
technology and historical scholarship. This led, on the one hand, to the
resurgence of a confessionalism based on the national churches, with a strong
commitment to missionary, charitable and social activities. On the other it
also prompted unionist attempts to overcome the old Protestant antagonisms and
paved the way to neo-Protestant liberalism, preoccupation with the historical
sciences, identification with the culture and religious system of the day, and
the loss of eschatological outlook. Protestant social ethics, which had always
been torn between honouring the authorities in power as ordained of God
(especially in the Lutheran traditions) and prophetically denouncing the world
in the light of the reign of Christ and the coming kingdom of God (in the more
Calvinist traditions), now became closely wedded to the bourgeois values of
national German society.
The twentieth century not
only saw the disestablishment of the Protestant churches after 1918, the
collapse of Protestant liberalism and conservative confessionalism before and
during the Nazi regime, and the failure of many churches and individuals to
resist the lure of nationalism and to find their place in a democratic society.
It was also characterized by the rediscovery of an eschatological orientation,
the opposition of dialectical theology to religious liberalism, conservative
traditionalism and pietist subjectivism, the experiences of church struggle,
Holocaust and the political disasters of the Second World War, the rise of
religious pluralism and indifferentism, the ecumenical movement and the
overcoming of the old divide between Lutheran and Reformed churches, and the
economic, social and political developments that led to European unity and the
collapse of the Marxist regimes in eastern Europe towards the end of the
century. Protestant theology in this period became more international and
ecumenical in outlook and less prone to confessional demarcations against other
Christian churches both within and outside the Protestant camp. It became
hermeneutically sensitive to the difference between the Word of God and the
Bible, opposed to Enlightenment theism and its metaphysical consequences, and
increasingly Trinitarian in orientation. But it also became aware of the
haunting legacy of Christian anti-Judaism, the depreciation of women in the
church, the issues of theological feminism, and the need to develop new forms
of political theology. It grappled with the manifold moral and social problems
of a secular industrial society, its materialism and religious indifferentism,
the erosion of commitment to the Christian churches and their progressive
marginalization in German society. So in the latter part of the century German
Protestant theology was more open to theological developments outside the
German-speaking world than at any time since the sixteenth century.
Central problems of
Protestant thought
It follows from what has
been said that the central problems of German Protestant theology were
characteristically different at different times in its history. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries its major tasks were to clarify the stand
of evangelical Protestantism vis-à-vis both Roman Catholicism and
radical ('enthusiast') religious movements such as the Anabaptists and
anti-Trinitarians, and to sort out the doctrinal differences between Lutheran
and Calvinist convictions within the Protestant camp. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries the emphasis shifted to the internal differences between
theological orthodoxy and pietism and to the external differences between, on
the one hand, the claims of revealed religion and, on the other, Enlightenment
rationalism (reason) and empirical science (nature). In many respects the
complex movement of the Enlightenment constituted the most significant development
in the intellectual history of German Protestant thought since the Reformation
and before the ecumenical reorientation in our century. The rise of
historical-critical thought during the later Enlightenment replaced the
predominantly metaphysical understanding of [492] reality inherited from
antiquity by an essentially historical view of the world. So from the end of
the eighteenth century Protestant theology was dominated by the question of
history, concentrating particularly on the relationship between revelation and
history and between Christianity and other religions, on the impact of modern
science on the Christian faith, and on its role in modern society.
In the twentieth century the
disestablishment of the churches after the First World War, the breakdown of
Protestant identification with the culture of bourgeois Germany, and the rediscovery
of eschatological orientation (dialectical theology) and the Reformation
heritage (Luther renaissance) led to a new concentration on the problems of
faith and God, law and gospel, church and state, Christology and justification.
The church struggle in the Nazi period, Barmen, and the ambivalent experience
of the confessional church furthered the ecumenical orientation of German
Protestant theology and paved the way towards greater unity among the
Protestant churches. Thus the Leuenberg Concord between the Lutheran, Reformed
and United churches in 1973 in
fact ended the centuries-old doctrinal divisions that had characterized German
Protestantism since the Reformation. And the last decade of the century saw a
growing unity among Protestants in Europe, including not only the great
national Protestant churches but also Baptist and Methodist free churches and
the heirs to the more radical Reformation movements such as Hussite, Waldensian
and Mennonite churches. After the Second World War the experience of the 'death
of the God of theistic metaphysics' resulted in a renewed interest in biblical
tradition, exegetical (demythologizing) and hermeneutical questions. This led
to a renaissance of Trinitarian thought in academic theology and to a
self-conscious engagement with present-day religious, social and political
issues in the ecumenical and practice-oriented theological reflections of
church bodies and synods. In particular the unsolved problems in the
relationship between Christianity and Judaism, the ecumenical relations with
Roman Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council, the active but
controversial participation in the ecumenical process of the World Council of
Churches, the issues of theological feminism, and the need for the Christian
churches to define their role in an increasingly multinational and
pluri-religious culture in German society were central to Protestant thought in
the latter part of the century.
Different needs and problems
have thus occasioned German Protestantism to develop, through adaptation and
resistance, a variety of theologies through the centuries, always trying to
recover and redetermine what it took to be essential in new situations and
changing contexts. But for all this diversity, there is also a remarkable
continuity, due mainly to two factors: the continuing existence of the territorial
churches of the Reformation, and the continual reflection of academic theology
on the peculiar character of Protestant theology in contrast to Roman
Catholicism, required by the historical fact that theological faculties at
German universities must by law be either Protestant or Roman Catholic. Through
the years this has led to a series of self-referential meta-reflections on the
'essence' of Protestantism which are characteristic of German Protestant theology
since the Enlightenment.
The common core of
Protestant theology
The common core of
Protestant theology before 1700 consisted in the rejection of papal authority
and the authoritarian clericalism of Roman Catholicism, as well as of the more
radical spiritualist, Anabaptist and unitarian movements, and in the insistence
that God's grace is mediated only through his Word in law and gospel so that
the Bible is the ultimately binding Word of God and the individual
consciousness enlightened by the Spirit is the ultimate arbiter in matters of
religion and salvation. Accordingly theological reflection concentrated on four
major issues: the understanding of salvific grace as worked out in the
doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola
fide); the mediation of grace through Christ and the Spirit in word
and sacrament (solus Christus, solo
verbo); the Bible as the only source of the church's proclamation of
justifying faith in Christ and as the ultimate norm of all Christian teaching,
creeds, confessions and forms of polity (sola
scriptura); and the question of authority in the church as answered
by the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, that is, the conviction that all believers are priests who can
intercede [493] for one another, not only the ordained clergy, and that nobody
can be forced against conscience, Scripture and reason in matters of faith for
the sake of authority.
It was this latter aspect
which became prominent when, in the wake of the Enlightenment, Protestant
thinkers sought to determine the 'essence' or 'principle(s)' of Protestantism
more explicitly. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw numerous attempts
to mediate between the religious parties by stating what is common, central and
essential to all Christian life and faith. According to Martin Bucer, for
example, the 'substance of the Christian faith' (substantia Christianismi) is not any doctrine or article
of faith but the wholehearted and total trust in God and Christ. In the
orthodox period and early Enlightenment a number of thinkers (A. Hunnius, G.
Calixt, C. Crusius, G.W. Leibniz) tried to overcome the confessional divisions
by distinguishing fundamental articles of faith which are shared by all
Christians from non-fundamental ones on which believers may differ without loss
of salvation. This concentration on what is central and necessary to the
Christian faith was generalized by the quest of the 'essence of Christianity'
in the Enlightenment. Some (especially deists) answered it by identifying it
with the permanent truths of natural theology. Others, more aware of the
problem of history, used the dialectics of internal essence and external form
to relativize all actual forms of Christianity to be only historical
manifestations (appearances) of an underlying principle (essence). While this
was never fully realized by any of its contingent historical manifestations, it
was only accessible through the whole historical process of its realizations
(see H. Wagenhammer, Das Wesen des Christentums of 1973).
The same dialectics of form
and content, appearance and essence, fact and principle were applied to
Protestantism in numerous attempts from the mid-eighteenth century to determine
its 'essence' or 'principle(s)'. They can be grouped into four characteristic
approaches. The first understands Protestantism as the religious manifestation
of a non-religious (or not merely religious) principle which is not, and need
not be, realized only in religious forms of life. The second sees Protestantism
governed by a principle which necessarily leads to specific forms of religious
life. The third denies that Protestantism is historically and theologically
coherent enough to be explained by one underlying principle at all. And the
fourth seeks to combine these approaches by identifying the principle of
Protestantism as the critical standard by which all religious and non-religious
historical forms of Protestantism should be judged. These four approaches are
now described in more detail.
First approach Immanuel Kant described the inexplicable fact of freedom as the
transcendental principle of autonomous moral self-determination and of all
truly human life and was, for this reason, called the 'philosopher of Protestantism'
by F. Paulsen (1899) and others; but it was above all G.W.F. Hegel who worked
out this idea in philosophical detail. For him the willingness 'to accept
nothing among one's convictions that has not been justified by thought' is the
'peculiar principle of Protestantism' (Grundlinien
der Philosophie des Rechts, 1821). It grounds the freedom of the
individual in both its private and public dimensions. For freedom is the
ultimate ground not only of private morality, uncoerced by external authorities
of whatever sort and guided only by the insights of reason and consciousness, but
also of public law and political institutions, the objective historical 'realm
of realized freedom'. The Protestant principle of the Reformation ('Here I
stand!') is the 'principle of the independent and in itself infinite
personality of the individual, of subjective freedom'. As such it is of more
than mere local or passing historical significance. It marks the beginning of
the full religious, social and political realization of freedom and autonomy in
the modern state which has transformed the world.
In the nineteenth century
this understanding of the Protestant principle of freedom as the beginning of
modernity and the foundation of the modern state inspired both the more liberal
Protestant ethos of R. Rothe and the national conservatism of F.J. Stahl. Both
contributed in their different ways to the formation of the
culture-Protestantism which dominated Germany in the latter part of the
nineteenth century. For if Protestantism is grounded on the principle of
subjective freedom which is most adequately realized in the modern state, then
the distinction between church and state is [494] bound progressively to
disappear. With the Reformation, Christianity has moved into its secular phase
in which the point of the Christian religion is realized not only for the few
in the church but for all in the constitutional state.
The same conviction of the
progressive realization of the Protestant principle of subjective freedom also
guided F.C. Baur in his work on the history of dogma. For him the Reformation
was the decisive turning point in the history of Christianity. The Protestant
critique of Roman Catholicism was fundamentally the protest of autonomous
subjectivity against the heteronomous authority of the church. This autonomy
was not realized once and for all by the Reformation but is 'a principle
capable of infinite development' (Lehrbuch
der christlichen Dogmengeschichte, 1867). It is also to be upheld vis-à-vis
the Bible, which Protestants treat critically just because they accept it as
authority. And it cannot fully be understood without taking the whole, and
still developing, history of Protestantism into account. It follows that if we
want to understand any Christian doctrine we must trace its historical development,
and it comes as no surprise that most of the major Protestant theologians in
the nineteenth century have at the same time been historians or actively
engaged in historical research.
Second approach Baur was not simply applying Hegelian ideas to the study of doctrine.
As a young man he was deeply impressed by F.D.E. Schleiermacher's The
Christian Faith of 1821-2, which he rightly regarded as inaugurating a new
post-Enlightenment phase in Protestant theology. With this book Schleiermacher
sought to justify the union between Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia
after 1817 by describing their
doctrinal positions as two equally valid forms of Protestantism, and
Protestantism and Catholicism as two equally legitimate forms of Christianity.
The latter difference is, as he succinctly stated in §24 of his Christian
Faith, that 'the former
makes the individual's relation to the Church dependent on his relation to
Christ, while the latter contrariwise makes the individual's relation to Christ
dependent on his relation to the Church.' This identified, in an admirably
clear way, ecclesiology and the role of the church in the Christian life of
faith as the central point at issue between
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism; and this has been borne out by the
theological and dogmatic developments in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
Schleiermacher's insight was
not immediately grasped by his contemporaries. A. Twesten, his pupil and
successor in Berlin, coined the phrase, the 'two principles of Protestantism',
that is, the 'formal principle' of Scripture and the 'material principle' of
justification by faith alone. And it became a widely held conviction,
influentially stated by A. Ritschl, that only the two principles together
defined the distinctive character of Protestantism. A special status is assigned
to the Bible in Protestant life and thought as the normative witness to God's
revelation. But the seventeenth-century theories of the infallible and inerrant
inspiration of the biblical texts in all details of content or even verbal
expression were widely dismissed as making an idol of the Bible. The biblical
texts are historical documents and must be treated according to the general
principles of historical criticism and interpretation; the biblical canon is
not closed but theoretically open; and although the Bible has ultimate
authority in all matters of faith and salvation, theology is not slavishly tied
to it but is required to exercise the freedom of critical judgement and
reflective reason in interpreting the biblical texts, as much as with any other
text. Some, like R. Hagenbach, have therefore concluded that 'the principle of
free enquiry' is 'the true principle of Protestantism'; and even in our century
it was held by G. Ebeling (1950) that the historical-critical method bears a
special affinity to the Protestant spirit.
This was also the conviction
of A. Harnack at the turn of the century. In his widely read The Essence of
Christianity of 1900 he
analyses the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism in terms of
reformation or 'critical reduction' and revolution or evangelical criticism of
church dogma and canon law.
Protestantism reduced the essence of Christianity to the Word of God and the
inner experience of faith which corresponds to it. And it objected in principle
to all attempts to place the church, its dogma or its laws above the gospel. It
is the historical task of Protestantism to safeguard this freedom of true
evangelical Christianity against all attempts at religious and moral
heteronomy. [495]
Third approach The Schleiermacher—Ritschl—Harnack tradition of understanding
Protestantism in terms of a (never fully realized) principle or set of
principles by which it is clearly marked off from Roman Catholicism came to an
end with E. Troeltsch ([1906] 1966). He took Protestantism seriously as a
complex historical phenomenon, too diverse to be understood as the successive
historical manifestation of one and the same underlying principle, and properly
accessible only in terms of the canons of historical-critical method. In his profound
historical analysis of Protestantism he identified not the Reformation, but
the Enlightenment as the decisive turning point in the intellectual history of
the West. The Reformation and its aftermath still belonged to the religious
culture of the middle ages without any direct impact on the modern world.
Protestantism, accordingly, is not explicable as a single and coherent
historical phenomenon. Rather we must distinguish between, on the one hand, the
premodern 'old Protestantism' of the orthodox period in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries which continued the uniform religious culture of the
middle ages, accepted supernatural revelation and the dogmatic method in
theology, and marked itself off against humanism, spiritualism and the more
radical Baptist movements, and, on the other, the post-Enlightenment
'neo-Protestantism' which embraces the liberal ideas of freedom, autonomous
subjectivity, religious and political tolerance, free scientific enquiry and
historical method with its principles of criticism, analogy and correlation. In
neither sense, however – and here Troeltsch most clearly departs from Hegelian
accounts – can Protestantism be seen as a source of the modern world: old
Protestantism is still medieval and premodern, while neo-Protestantism is
already part of modernity.
It is here that M. Weber's
sociological account of Protestantism ([1904-5] 1930) differs from Troeltsch's
historical analysis, which otherwise he parallels in many ways. He focuses on
the causal connection between Protestant, especially Calvinist, ethics and the
rise of capitalism, and he diagnoses the impact of this 'ascetic Protestantism'
on western society as a process of 'disenchantment' which prepared and
reinforced the means-end rationality that characterizes the modern
sociocultural system of the west.
Fourth approach Troeltsch's and Harnack's versions of liberal Protestantism and their
close involvement with the bourgeois culture of Germany were sharply criticized
by K. Barth and the other proponents of dialectical theology after the First
World War. For them 'Protestantism' was a term theologically compromised by
neo-Protestantism. They preferred to call their own position 'evangelical', not
only because this was closer to the original Reformation usage but because –
as especially Barth made clear in both his Christian Dogmatics and Church
Dogmatics – their theology
was meant to explicate not the self-understanding of a particular (Protestant)
church, tradition or religious party, but the Word of God by which all forms of
Christianity, including Protestant ones, must be judged. P. Tillich agreed with
this but formulated his programme precisely in terms of the Protestant
principle to which he gave a new and important twist. He distinguished between
the historically contingent formations (Gestalten)
of Protestantism and the universally valid principle of Protestantism which he
found expressed in the Reformation doctrine of justification by grace alone
(Tillich, 1950). This principle is the permanent protest against, and criticism
of, our human temptations to confound the conditional and the unconditional,
to elevate finite religious or profane powers to the status of infinite or
absolute power. All historical forms of Protestantism are necessarily
conditioned and concrete forms of life. They are true only if, as finite and
specific formations (Gestalten)
of grace, they include both a specific form and the protest against this form,
a concrete historical realization and its negation. This intrinsic dialectics
safeguards Protestantism in its assigning of absolute value or permanent
validity to any doctrines, forms of life or institutions, and it explains its
inner dynamics to be semper reformanda, always on the move to better and more adequate Gestaltungen
in our profane reality.
Protestant thought and
theology
Protestant thought and
theology has been pluralist from the
beginning. Its sense of identity was not based on the unchanging
character of church doctrine or the continuity [496] of ecclesial institutions
and traditions but on the permanent proclamation of God's Word as law and
gospel, that is, the justification of the sinner by faith alone as testified by
Scripture. Scripture, not church doctrine, was accepted as the fundamental norm
and source of Christian life and theological reflection, and the confessions
and catechisms of the sixteenth century as adequate restatements of the central
tenets of biblical teaching in those historical circumstances. Whereas the
Lutheran churches subscribed to the Augsburg Confession (1530) as their
authoritative confession, the Reformed tradition always knew a variety of
confessions and catechisms. After many failures, attempts to overcome the
Protestant divide only succeeded in this century in the wake of the Barmen
Declaration (1934) with the Leuenberg Concord (1973), which proved to be of
more than merely passing or regional importance. The Leuenberg Concord
especially has established itself as a paradigm of Protestant ecumenical
theology that overcomes old divisions without swerving from the fundamental
Protestant tenets of solus Christus, sola scriptura, sola gratia, and sola fide.
Scripture The
assertion of the Bible as the norma normans of all Christian life and
thought has led Protestant theology since M. Chemnitz, M. Flacius, J. Gerhard
and A. Hunnius to develop and defend a doctrine of the authority of the Bible.
While Luther insisted on the viva vox evangelii as the Word of God,
theologians in the orthodox period identified the (written) Word of God with
the canon of the Old and New Testaments which they claimed to be not only
inspired but inerrant and infallible. Some even went so far as to hold theories
of dictation which made not only the content but the wording of the biblical
texts part of God's revelation. On the other hand, the canon never became
officially closed in Protestantism, and this openness of the canon served as a
constant reminder that the Bible is not to be turned into an icon or idol. It
is the authoritative witness to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Hence the
biblical texts were to be made available to every individual. But this verbum
externum cannot be understood as the Word of God without the working of the
Spirit in the heart of the reader or listener. Hence the orthodox doctrine of
the inspiration of Scripture requires the parallel doctrine of the inner
testimony of the Holy Spirit: only together do they justify the conviction that
the biblical texts are the normative Word of God. Although this was clear in
theory, orthodox theologians in practice used biblical texts as inspired
premises for dogmatic conclusions or claimed, as pietism did, a specific hermeneutica
sacra for them.
For this reason, the rise of
historical criticism in the Enlightenment constituted a major challenge to both
Protestant orthodox and pietist theologies. While pietist theologians reacted
to this by postulating a theologia regenitorum open only to those who
are reborn, academic theology distinguished between history and dogma,
biblical exegesis and dogmatic and moral doctrine and, since the beginning of
the nineteenth century, widely accepted the post-Enlightenment views of
biblical criticism. Biblical texts have to be treated as any other ancient
literary text. This inspired a formidable and exemplary study of the biblical texts,
their ancient settings and historical and literary developments in German
Protestant theology during the past two hundred years. But it also produced a
growing divide between academic theology and the life of the church. For by
concentrating on the biblical texts as such it tended to overlook the fact that
these texts must be placed in the context of the life of faith, the
proclamation of the church and the working of the Spirit in order to become
accessible as the Word of God. So in a sense the history of the Protestant
study of the Bible since the Reformation can be described as a series of
attempts to determine the proper context in which these texts have to be
studied. While the Reformers insisted that not Scripture but the use of
Scripture to provoke faith in Christ (usus
scripturae) is what theology has to study if it wants to understand
the Word of God as law and gospel, orthodox theologians theoretically restated,
and thereby changed, this by claiming the perspective of law and gospel to be
the decisive dogmatic framework for studying the biblical texts. Instead of
concentrating on the faith-provoking use of Scripture, they dogmatically
placed the biblical texts in a doctrinal context. This was too theoretical for
pietism, and not theoretical enough for the Enlightenment. Thus whereas
pietists claimed not doctrine but the life of the believer to be the proper
context for studying the biblical texts, [497] the Enlightenment insisted on
the context of reason and experience as the only adequate way to make sense of them.
The study of the Bible has since become
torn between the ills of private subjectivity and the
dangers of objectifying generalizations or historical descriptions
devoid of individual commitment. In the nineteenth century history, other
religions, the natural sciences and modern culture became the predominant
contexts in which biblical texts were placed, studied and interpreted. The
outcome was an immensely increased knowledge of the historical development,
cultural immersion, literary refinement and religious richness of the biblical
texts, but at the same time a growing awareness of their at best relative
difference from other religious texts, traditions and experiences. Instead of
demonstrating its uniqueness, the comparative and historical approaches to the
Bible proved its cultural dependence and religious relativity. This made it
increasingly difficult for theology to use it as the authoritative norm and
source of Christian faith. In the light of the rediscovery of the eschatological
nature of the Christian faith by J. Weiss, F. Overbeck and C. and J.C.
Blumhardt, theologians like R. Bultmann reacted to the theological breakdown
of these historifying and relativizing approaches after A. Schweitzer and
Troeltsch by insisting on the existential structures of human life as the key
to a proper understanding of the biblical texts and the universal validity of
their kerygmatic message. And from the middle of the twentieth century methods
of literary criticism and critical hermeneutics became increasingly used to
correct the shortcomings of a merely historical-critical, sociological or
psychological study of Scripture.
However, none of these
methods helped to recover the theological import of Scripture. For the decisive
question is not the method but the object of biblical study: as long as
theologians study merely the texts rather than the faith-provoking use
of these texts, their study of the Bible is ultimately a-theological. Biblical
exegesis which concentrates on the biblical texts in their various
historical/sociological/psychological contexts is a merely
historical/sociological/ psychological discipline. Dogmatic theology must move
beyond this by considering the faith-provoking use of these texts in the life of the church if it is to arrive at
theological conclusions
for today.
Theological method The distinction between historical
and dogmatic theology is itself a result of Protestant self-reflection on
theological method. Since the
seventeenth century it has distinguished different branches and disciplines of
theology no longer in terms of their subject matter (biblical, moral and
dogmatic theology) but in terms of the methods used for studying them (theologia positiva, theologia
scholastica). In 1787 J.P. Gabler defined biblical theology as a
historical discipline distinct from dogmatics, whose task is to restate the
Christian faith in a way 'adequate to our time'. Theology's external
relationships with other disciplines are thus mirrored in the internal
differentiation of theological disciplines according to the tasks pursued and
methods used.
This found classical
expression in Schleiermacher's Brief Outline of the Study of Theology of
1811, which defined the basic pattern of the study of Protestant theology in
Germany for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For him theology is a
positive, that is, non-speculative or non-foundationalist, science. Just as in
the case of medicine and law, both its place in the university and its internal
organization are determined by its practical task, the furthering of Christian
life in modern society. This leads to its differentiation into three major
disciplines. As philosophical theology it relates to the realm of knowledge and
science, as practical theology to the realm of life in general and Christian life in particular, but in its central
part which comprises both exegetical and dogmatic theology it is fundamentally
a historical discipline. This balanced conception and practical grounding of
theology avoided both the speculative foundationalism of the idealist tradition
and the reduction of theology to a merely historical and comparative study of
religion(s), which has endangered the existence of independent theological
faculties at German universities from J.G. Fichte, Paul de Lagarde and Overbeck
to the present day.
Barth accepted this
practical and church-related orientation of theology but criticized
Schleiermacher for placing human religion and [498] piety rather than the authoritative Word of God at its
centre. And W. Pannenberg tried to move beyond both Barth and Schleiermacher in
his Theology and the Philosophy of Science of 1973 by returning to the traditional definition of
theology as the science of God. The differentiated unity of theology is to be
understood not in terms of method but in terms of the unity of its subject
matter: God, the all-determining reality. This reality cannot be directly
experienced in the world but becomes only indirectly accessible in the
subjective anticipations of the totality of meaning which is presupposed in all
particular experiences. This turns theology into a systematic super-science
that seeks to detect the indirect co-givenness of God in all areas of human
experience and science. And since the experience of reality as a whole finds
symbolic expression primarily in the historic religions, a theory of the
history of religions is fundamental for theology. Thus whereas Schleiermacher
outlined theology as a fundamentally practical enterprise based on the reality
of organized religion or church life, and Barth conceived it as a fundamentally
critical enterprise based on God's revelation in Jesus Christ, Pannenberg
returned to a pre-modern understanding of theology as a theoretical
super-science of the totality of reality.
Doctrine of God Developments in theological method have manifest implications for the
doctrine of god. Protestant
theology has always insisted on a close relationship between cognitio dei
and cognitio hominis,
God and faith, theology and anthropology, and it largely followed Luther, who defined
the proper subject matter of theology as homo reus et perditus et deus iustificans
vel salvator. But this
soteriological emphasis in the doctrine of God was worked out in different ways
in the history of Protestant theology.
1 The first Lutheran dogmatics,
Philipp Melanchthon's Loci communes of 1520, did not contain a separate
tract De Deo but insisted that to know Christ, and hence God, is to know
his benefits towards us. Thus the very Melanchthon who inaugurated the
reception of Aristotelian metaphysics into Protestant theology provided the
decisive argument for neo-Protestant criticism of all metaphysical theology.
In the aftermath of Kant the pro nobis was taken not merely in a soteriological but in an epistemological
sense. We cannot know whit God is in himself, as W. Herrmann put it, but only
what he does in and for us. By fundamentally distinguishing between objectified
and existential reality, Bultmann interpreted this to mean that the essential
relatedness of God and human being does not allow theology to talk about either
God or human existence in objectifying terms. Instead we have to interpret all
statements about God as statements about human existence in both a
soteriological and epistemological sense. This concurred with Schleiermacher's
attempt to move beyond the objectifying talk of God in religion, theology and
philosophy by showing that all objectifications of God are contingent
determinations of our God-consciousness and as such are manifestations of an
underlying indeterminate structure of God-consciousness which is the
pre-reflective capacity, common to all rational beings, for awareness of an
existential relation to that to which we owe our existence, whereas it owes its
existence neither to us nor to anything else. Hence 'God' does not name a
(supernatural) being but 'the Whence of the feeling of utter dependence'.
Accordingly 'all attributes that we ascribe to God are not to be taken as
denoting something special in God, but only something special in the way in
which the feeling of utter dependence is related to him' (The Christian Faith, §50).
2 The Protestant emphasis on
the non-objectification of God is an attempt to safeguard the fundamental
difference between God and created being in the tradition of Exodus 20: 4
without completely denying the knowability of God. Hegel, who took the
principle of subjectivity to be the principle of Protestantism, identified
Kant's and Fichte's transcendental philosophies as explications of this
principle. Kant's critique of Enlightenment theism and its proofs of the
existence of God can be seen as a philosophical reworking of the Protestant
insistence on a close correlation of God and faith, in that he combines a
denial of all theoretical knowledge of God with the postulate of his existence
based on the requirements of practical reason. Protestant theology of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be unthinkable without his 'I had to
abolish knowledge to make room for faith' (Critique of Pure Reason). Fichte went even further by
[499] applying this principle to the notion of God itself, that is, to the
application of any concepts, in particular the concept of person or personality,
to God. For him, whatever is conceptualized cannot be God. It is against this
background that Protestant theology, while clinging to the soteriological
emphasis of the doctrine of God, developed an increasingly critical attitude
towards all sorts of metaphysical theism. Elaborating Blaise Pascal's
distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, it took an explicitly anti-metaphysical and anti-theistic turn,
which characterizes such different positions as Schleiermacher's criticism of
natural theology, Ritschl's rejection of all metaphysics in theology, Harnack's
view of the corruption of the original gospel by Hellenist thought, K. Barth's
and D. Bonhoeffer's critique of the traditional understanding of divine omnipotence,
impassibility and transcendence, J. Moltmann's and E. Jüngel's insistence on a
Trinitarian anti-theism and D. Soelle's paradoxical postulate of atheist
belief in God.
3 But it was L. Feuerbach
who in his Essence of Christianity
of 1841 took this anti-theistic attitude to its atheistic extreme. Claiming
to explicate Luther's soteriological correlation of God and faith he held that
'consciousness of God is man's self-consciousness; knowledge of God is man's
self-knowledge'. For him God is the self-objectification and
self-externalization of man's self-knowledge as species being. This made
theology an epiphenomenon of anthropology, and it forced Protestant theologians
from then on explicitly to mark off their own soteriological accounts of God
from this anthropological atheism which made religion the creation of human
imagination. Four types of approach to coming to grips with Feuerbach have
become particularly prominent.
The first is to place the
theological project in the context of a (broadly understood) religious or
natural account of God. Thus W. Pannenberg claims, against all tendencies to
dissolve or eliminate the concept of God in Protestant theology, that we need a
general notion of God that fixes minimal conditions for coherent talk of God if
we want to make sense of the gospel and come to grips with Feuerbach's verdict
on theology. The Protestant distrust of metaphysics must thus be corrected by
transcendentalist (T. Rendtorff, E. Herms) or anthropological (Pannenberg)
foundations of Christian talk of God, by recourse to 'original revelation' (P.
Althaus) or by placing it in the context of an account of the history of
religions as the history of the appearance of the unity of God (Pannenberg).
This is set against the
second approach, Barth's attempt to interpret the impossibility of objectifying
knowledge of God as manifestation of his sovereign freedom to make himself
accessible only in and through his self-revelation. Starting from the insight
that God can only be known through God as revealed in Jesus Christ, Barth
embraced Feuerbach's view of anthropology as the mystery of theology and turned
it into a verdict on the whole neo-Protestant tradition since Schleiermacher.
Theology must start from the (eschatological) fact of God's self-revelation,
not from epistemological considerations of its possibility or assumptions about
a fundamental structure of utter dependence or religious a priori of human
existence. The fact of God's self-revelation as Lord (Church Dogmatics I/1 §8) manifests God's being as the
one who loves freely (Church
Dogmatics II/1 §28); and this in turn requires a Trinitarian account
of God who reveals himself as love by freely identifying with Jesus Christ on
the cross. Thus the mystery of God is his humanity, and his divinity his
self-humiliation until death for us. But then Feuerbach's thesis has to be put
on its head: theological statements are not anthropological statements in
disguise, but all anthropological statements have to be understood as being
derivative from Christology (Church
Dogmatics II/l) and hence in the last resort from the doctrine of
the Trinity.
Barth's comprehensive
reworking of the doctrine of God in Christological and Trinitarian terms
reflects insights which were first worked out in Hegel's speculative
philosophy. The contents of the Christian or absolute religion can be
philosophically reconstructed, justified and appropriated in a dialectical
process outlined in the Science of Logic of 1812. And just as the truth of religion is preserved
in philosophy, so the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity is preserved and
completed in the speculative theory of the internally differentiated Absolute.
Theological [500] Hegelianism was very influential in the nineteenth century
(K. Daub, P. Marheineke, R. Rothe). It has recently been rigorously renewed by F. Wagner, who claims that the only
consistent way to oppose the
charge of Feuerbach is to base theology not on the consciousness, language or
facts of religion but on the
self-unfolding process of the self-determining self-determination that is the Absolute.
A fourth attempt takes a
vigorously Trinitarian approach. Thus E. Jüngel opposes both traditional
theism and atheism with a Trinitarian account of the God who has revealed
himself through the cross of Christ as redeeming love. God is the mystery of
the world, but we are unable to discern that mystery unless we place our
experience of the world in the light of God's self-revelation in Christ, that
is, re-experience all our experience in faith. Thus faith is not the projection
of ideal humanity into the idea of God but a second-order experience of the
world in which we discern it as (fallen) creation in the light of the love of
God disclosed in Christ. God has appropriated death on the cross of Christ, and
we cannot adequately talk of God unless we take this into account. Hence in so
far as atheism is the negation of theism, it critically belongs to every truly
Trinitarian account of God.
The four reactions to
Feuerbach all concur in that
they rediscover and restate the doctrine of God in Trinitarian terms. After the
prevailing theism of the nineteenth century this is one of the most distinctive
developments of German Protestant theology in the (second half of the)
twentieth century.
The Trinity
The Protestant renewal of Trinitarian theology in the twentieth century starts
with Barth, who reacted to the widespread neglect of the doctrine of the
Trinity in western theology in his time. Few denied that it was one of the
principal mysteries of faith. But it was of little practical significance to
the life of faith. Since Augustine and scholastic Augustinianism, Trinitarian
thought had come to wear an abstract air, and the western inclination towards a
unitarian formulation of the doctrine of God was even further increased by the
Enlightenment. Where the doctrine of the Trinity was not held on merely
traditionalist grounds, it was discarded altogether or it took on a speculative
life of its own.
According to K. Rahner, the
first decisive move in the isolation and subsequent sterilization of the
doctrine of the Trinity was the separation of the discussion of 'the one God'
from the discussion of 'the triune God'. The doctrine of the Trinity became a
doctrine alongside others rather than the frame of reference or the grammar of
all the others. The Reformation did not achieve a restoration of Trinitarian
thought; and at the beginning of the nineteenth century Schleiermacher rightly
observed that to achieve this was still one of the unfulfilled tasks of
Protestant theology. It remained so for another century. Since the
Enlightenment, discussions of the Trinity have become subordinated to a
preoccupation with the unitary being of God. Philosophical theism — the belief
in the existence of a supreme and beneficent Being - was widely taken over by
Christian theologians. Nineteenth-century attempts to defend Trinitarian
thought against these developments led to its absorption into the discussion of
the being of God as Absolute, where it took on a speculative life of its own.
But this estranged it even further from the life of the church. It left the
figurative language of faith without adequate conceptual form. And it opened up
a gap between the life of faith and the intellectual engagement with the
problem of God.
Philosophers were first to
react against these developments. With Feuerbach, K. Marx, S. Freud and F. Nietzsche the speculative movement
and its attempted rescue of Trinitarian thought came under vigorous attack. Yet
since its close association with the Christian tradition had made its
vulnerability the vulnerability of Christian theology as well, the criticism of
these thinkers was largely unacceptable to (liberal) theology. Only when, in
the twentieth century, theology gradually began to divorce itself from
Enlightenment theism and its aftermath, could it come to grips with both the
speculative tradition and its critics by taking a vigorously Trinitarian and
explicitly anti-theistic approach.
Anti-theism, that is, the
rejection of Enlightenment theism, its consequences and its antithesis
(atheism), has thus been one of the major motives for Trinitarian theology
today. It is the common denominator of such different theologies as those of
Moltmann, Jüngel, Pannenberg and Wagner. They all agree that [501] Christian
theology, in order to move beyond the barren alternatives of theism and
atheism, must be Trinitarian in character. But they differ widely and even
irreconcilably in the ways in which they ground their Trinitarian positions.
For E. Jüngel, as for Barth
in his later years, the doctrine of the Trinity is Christologically grounded (Jüngel,
Entsprechungen: Gott-Wahrheit-Mensch). Originally Barth's doctrine of the Trinity was 'bound up with
the concept of revelation, in the strict sense of God's self-revelation which
is grounded in God's Trinitarian self-unfolding' (Pannenberg, Basic
Questions in Theology,
1967-71). This invited the criticism that Barth's doctrine, by working out the
structure and implication of the Deus dixit, 'is fashioned out of the logic of God as absolute subject'
(J.B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel,
1986) and that his 'construal of the Trinity as the self-unfolding of a divine
subject inevitably does damage to the co-eternity of the divine persons,
diminishing their plurality to mere modes of being subordinate to the divine
subject' (Pannenberg). But as the Church Dogmatics evolved, the emphasis
shifted away from the inner structure of revelation towards the history of
Jesus and, in particular, the cross. And in stressing the 'displacement'
between Father and Son on the cross, Barth increasingly intensified the divine
plurality.
Jüngel criticizes Barth for
not taking that process far enough. His own work on the Trinity starts from
God's self-identification with the crucified on the cross, and he conceives its
function in working out the identity of God's being-for-himself and his
being-for-us in the person of Jesus Christ. If God has identified himself with
the crucified one, we must 'distinguish God from God' Jüngel, Unterwegs zur
Sache, 1972). But the
unsurpassable contrast between Father and Son on the cross is not a
'contradiction within God' (Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, 1977). God – as Spirit – remains at
the same time related to himself in this contrast. This is why we must give not
merely a binitarian, but a Trinitarian account of God. Jüngel follows a long
tradition of western thought when he describes the Spirit as the reassertion of
unity after difference. But he has difficulty in articulating, with any
clarity, the personal agency of the Spirit. So instead of pressing from the
event of the cross towards an account of the Trinity as an irreducible plural
society, he turns to working out the unity of the self-differentiated
God in terms of the concept of love: because God is love, he is essentially
related, both in himself and in the sense of being open to what is different
from him. In God 'to be' and 'to be related' are one and the same; and the
character of the ontological relationality of God is love, that is, in Jüngel's
definition, 'the unity of life [self-relation] and death [self-loss] in favour
of life'. Hence even in his self-abasement on the cross, God is not foreign to
himself but eminently true to himself: 'in giving himself away, he does not
lose but becomes himself (Webster) because, as God, he does not simply act
lovingly but ontologically is love. Hence there is no need to posit
'an essence of God behind his loving pro nobis, for his aseity takes form as loving self-renunciation'.
Jüngel uses the concepts of
'love' and 'relation' to retain the coherence and unity of the divine being
without sacrificing the sense of 'displacement' which is introduced into the
being of God by the cross. J. Moltmann starts from the same Barthian legacy but
moves in a different direction. His case for the necessity of Trinitarian
discourse is developed from asserting God's real relation to human pain and
suffering, supremely exemplified by the cross. On the cross, he says, God was
abandoned by God. He not merely holds, as Jüngel does, that the cross occasions
the distinction between God and God, but understands the separation of Father
from Son in the dereliction of the cross in a full mythological sense. He is
able to do this because for him the divine self-separation on the cross is
grounded in the priority of persons over relations and the repudiation of any
reduction of the three persons to the absolute subject as substance. For him,
the primordial reality is the plurality of the persons, and 'the unity of God is only actual in that
plurality' (Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology). So he develops a pluralist account
of a social Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit linked together only by what he
calls the Trinitarian history of God. That is to say, the Trinity itself is
seen in terms of God's involvement in historical becoming, and although
Moltmann goes so far as to deny a definite taxis between the persons 'in
favour of a trinity that can be taken "in any order", he [502]
nevertheless relates it to our progressive ordering towards a free, creative,
relationship of
"friendship" to God in the Holy Spirit' (J. Milbank). However, while
this ensures that God is not seen as a closed monad, but as a community of
loving interaction open to a reality beyond itself, Moltmann so much stresses
the personal agency of Father, Son and Spirit, that it becomes difficult to see
how it can still be said to be one and the same God. Moreover, in his account
of the separation of Father and Son on the cross he does not succeed in doing
justice to the agency of the Spirit
vis-à-vis Father and Son.
He has attempted to remedy this by developing an account not only of the
kenosis of the Son but also of the kenosis of the Spirit. But this in fact
increases his difficulty in distinguishing clearly between the agency of the Son and that of the Spirit, and
virtually bars him from ascribing to the Spirit not merely the function of
demonstrating the openness of the triune community but also of establishing
its unity by overcoming the
difference between Father and Son.
Moltmann's difficulties with
the unity of God are one reason for W. Pannenberg to look for a different
solution. He agrees with Jüngel and Moltmann that Barth's earlier attempt to
develop the doctrine of the Trinity from the formal notion of revelation as
expressed in the statement 'God reveals himself as the Lord' is unsatisfactory.
Instead of starting from the formal
notion of revelation, we must start from the content of God's revelation in
Christ. But for Pannenberg this is not so much the cross and the relationship
between Father, Son and Spirit in terms of which the cross can be understood as
a salvific and revelatory event. Rather it is the particular relationship of
the historical Jesus to God and, in particular, the fact that Jesus
distinguished himself clearly from the God he called Father and, in renouncing
himself completely, made room for the action of the Father and the coming of
his kingdom. If this is interpreted, as Pannenberg interprets it, as the
self-revelation of God, the way in which Jesus distinguishes himself from the
Father discloses that there is an eternal relationship of Father and Son in God.
Jesus' self-distinction from God manifests the eternal self-differentiation of
the Son from the Father, which corresponds to the self-differentiation of the Father from the Son; and this, for
Pannenberg, is the key for a correct
interpretation of the cross of Christ
(Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 1988).
However, even if we accept
this move from the historical fact of Jesus' obedient attitude to the God he
called Father to the eternal mutuality of self-differentiation between Father
and Son, we are still left with a binitarian rather than Trinitarian account of
God. Only when we move from the cross to the resurrection do we get an adequate
understanding of the third person, for the resurrection, not the cross,
'depicts the dependence of the Father and the Son on the Spirit as the medium
of their community' (Schwöbel, 1990, p. 276). Accordingly Pannenberg describes
the three persons as three mutually dependent centres of activity and not as
three modes of being in one subject.
This conception of the Trinity
has a number of important consequences: it dissolves the traditional western
distinction between immanent and economic relations in so far as 'the mutual
self-differentiation of Father, Son and Spirit in the divine economy must be
seen as the concrete form of the immanent Trinitarian relations' (Schwöbel,
1990, p. 275). Moreover, the 'mutuality of their active relationships implies
for Pannenberg . . . that the monarchia of the Father has to be understood as the result of the
cooperation of all three persons' (p. 276) in the divine economy. 'From this
perspective the world as a whole can be seen as the history in which it will be
finally demonstrated that the Trinitarian God is the only true God' (ibid.).
However, this claim about
the eschatological vindication of the Trinity leaves Pannenberg with a problem
which he fails to solve. If the full realization of the monarchia of the
Father is the kingdom, and if this is brought about only as the final result of
the cooperation of all three persons in history, the divine unity of these
three centres of activity is hidden and obscure in the course of history.
Pannenberg emphasizes the 'eschatological resolution of the tension between the
persons of Father, Son and Spirit in revelation and the hiddenness of the unity
of God in the world' (Schwöbel, 1990, p. 277). But 'the question is how the
three persons of the Trinity can be understood as presenting one divine essence
without reducing them to [503] moments or aspects of the one essential Godhead
and without positing the divine essence as a fourth subject lurking behind the
persons of Father, Son, and Spirit' (p. 277). It is here that Pannenberg's
account fails most conspicuously. He does not succeed in offering a Trinitarian
solution to the problem of the unity of God which is more than an eschatological
postponement. Rather he gets stuck in a dualist cul-de-sac: on the one hand he
develops the difference of Father, Son and Spirit from his account of
revelation in terms of Jesus' self-distinction from the God he calls Father; on
the other hand he grounds the unity of God in a metaphysical concept of God's
essence prior to and independent of revelation: the concept of God as Infinite.
This concept of God, at which we can arrive independently of revelation, as Pannenberg
is at pains to show (in Systematic Theology), is normative and regulates all our thinking and speaking of
God, including our accounts of the Trinity. For whatever we want to say about
Father, Son and Spirit on the basis of revelation, it must accord with the
fundamental idea of God as the Infinite.
It is here that F. Wagner
criticizes Pannenberg for not going far enough. He hopes to remedy the
revelationist leftovers which he detects in Pannenberg by basing his account of
the Trinity on a theory of the Absolute in the tradition of Hegel and W.
Cramer. For him, a convincing and tenable account of God must start from the
idea of the Absolute and not from any particular event or understanding of God
in history, tradition or religious consciousness. For unless what we say about
God is grounded in a theory of the Absolute, which gives content to the idea of
God without recourse to religious consciousness and its varying conceptions of
God, we shall not be able to distinguish our account of God from superstitious
and irrational belief or escape the charge of Feuerbach. On the other hand, the
theory of the Absolute must be such that it allows us to explain or make sense
of the actual ways in which religious consciousness conceives God. Wagner hopes
to achieve this by describing God as the process of absolute
self-determination, that is, as the self-determination which determines itself
to determine itself. This presupposes an internal differentiation of God into
that which determines itself, that which can be determined by itself and that
which is the self-determination of the self-determinable by the
self-determinator. And he understands this threefold distinction as a
conceptual reworking of the difference between Father, Son and Spirit. Hence he
claims to have shown that before we turn to analysing revelation or any other
event or fact of religion, we can, in purely rational or conceptual terms, arrive at a theory of the Absolute
which is intrinsically Trinitarian in structure and character: the Trinity may
be a mystery of faith, but it is rationally transparent to philosophical
reason.
It is obvious that some very
hard questions must be asked as to Wagner's understanding of reason,
rationality, conceptual construction and, in particular, his view of the working of language and the
translatability of the figurative language of faith into the conceptuality of a
theory of the Absolute. All this invites a number of well-known Wittgensteinian
criticisms. Nevertheless, the problem that he seeks to tackle is a real one:
the doctrine of the Trinity is only an adequate doctrine of God if it is more
than a mere expression and manifestation of Christian tribalism. It must be
construed to provide an account of God – not of a Christian God (whatever that may be) or of some
particular beliefs about Father, Son and Spirit which Christians (but not Jews
or Muslims) happen to hold over and above their common belief in God. The God
of Christian faith is not a particular Christian God but God as experienced and
worshipped by Christians. And a doctrine of the Trinity will be inadequate if
it fails to make this clear.
That anti-theism is a
common motive of Protestant Trinitarian theology today was already noted. As
its second major characteristic has now emerged its Christological orientation, that is, its focus on the history
of Jesus and, in particular, the nature of the involvement of God with the
death of Jesus upon the cross. This is even true of Wagner, who seeks to show
that what Christians confess about God in the light of the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ is a universal truth about God, accessible not
only to faith but also to reason. So present-day Protestant Trinitarianism
clearly reflects its traditional soteriological concern and Christ-centred
faith.
Christology The
question of the significance of Jesus Christ lies at the heart of Protestant
[504] theology, and in Christology it
has made the most important contributions to Christian theology since the
Enlightenment (McGrath, 1986). The Reformers appropriated classical
Chalcedonian Christology (see the third chapter of the Augsburg Confession
of 1530) but reworked it soteriologically. Theologians in the orthodox period
systematically distinguished between the person and the work or office of Jesus
Christ in terms of an ontology of nature, person and act. To bring this
ontological account of Christ into line with the biblical story, and in
particular with Philippians 2: 5ff, the basic text for Lutheran Christology,
they developed the doctrine of the two stages of Christ's life, the status
exinanitionis and status exaltationis. But with the Enlightenment and the rise of historical
consciousness, the problem of history and the question of the relationship
between dogma and history became too pressing to be left to such a doctrinal
appendix. It permeated the whole Christology and theology of Protestantism and
caused its most profound reorientation since the Reformation. It kept its
soteriological emphasis, and hence the categorial distinction between person
and work of Christ. But it now restated it in terms of the 'historical Jesus'
and his 'meaning for us'.
In 1774-8 G .E. Lessing published the Wolfenbüttel
Fragments of H.S. Reimarus's Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer
Gottes which inaugurated over a century's quest
of the historical jesus. For the Enlightenment, the ultimate arbiter of
knowledge and truth in religion and theology as well as in all other areas was
neither Scripture nor tradition, but reason and experience. It thus challenged
the metaphysical Christologies of orthodoxy on epistemological, rationalist
and moralist grounds. The rationally unacceptable two natures doctrine was
replaced by more reasonable moral or aesthetic interpretations of Christ's
significance. The doctrine of the uniqueness of the God-Man was restated in
terms of Jesus as a morally perfect man, a teacher of truth in his lifetime and
a supreme example of self-giving in his death. And the reliability of the
biblical accounts of Christ on which the doctrinal claims concerning his unique
status were based was questioned with increasing scepticism. Lessing
interpreted the contrast between the authority of the 'written tradition' and
its 'inner truth' in terms of the difference between 'accidental truths of
history' and 'necessary truths of reason'; and he confessed to being personally
unable to cross 'the ugly great ditch' between history and reason, between the
particularity of historical fact and the generality of rational truth, which
did not allow the deduction of the doctrinal accounts of Christ from the
biblical accounts of Jesus (Über
den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, 1777). Likewise, Kant regarded
it as impossible for any individual historical being to be the full revelation
of eternal truth. Kant believed that the 'ideal of a humanity well pleasing to
God' was indeed encapsulated in the idea of a man like Jesus Christ. But the
practical belief in such a son of God does not require 'any example from
experience' but is based on the requirements of practical reason alone. This
ideal or archetype is self-authenticating even if there was never a human being
exemplifying it (Religion within
the Limits of Reason Alone, 1793).
Protestant theology did not
follow Kant's proposal, which went beyond the Enlightenment accounts of Jesus
as moral teacher and example of moral perfection. But throughout the nineteenth
century and beyond, it accepted Kant's close correlation of Christology and the
idea of the kingdom of God. This is as true of Schleiermacher and Hegel as it
is of Ritschl and Barth. Schleiermacher developed his Christology in The
Christian Faith by arguing back from 'the state of the Christian, inasmuch
as he is conscious of divine
grace' (§§91-112) to its sufficient cause, the redeeming influence of Jesus on
the collective life of the Christian community. The collective life of the
Christian community owes its existence to the archetypal potency and perfection
of Jesus' God-consciousness, mediated historically and socially through normal
causal channels. He is redeemer in that he, and he alone, is the archetype of
the final perfection of God-consciousness, and at the same time the one in
which it was historically manifested. As such he exerts an assimilative power
capable of bringing about an increasing perfection of God-consciousness in us,
by drawing us not by supernatural magic or as moral model of perfect humanity
but through the normal channels of communicating the gospel into the Christian
community that is dominated by his perfect God-consciousness. [505]
This novel starting point
allowed Schleiermacher to reconstruct and appropriate both the orthodox
Christological dogma and the Enlightenment criticism of it. By transcending
the supernaturalism of orthodoxy as well as the rationalism and naturalism of
the Enlightenment, he inaugurated a new area of Christological thought. This
was partly due to his new understanding of nature and history and, in
particular, to his (romantic) conception of the individual universal
that went beyond the Enlightenment contrast of particularity with generality in
distinguishing history and nature. History is the realm of human action and to
be studied by ethics; nature and realm of events governed by causal laws and to
be studied by physics; religion mediates between the two by combining the
individuality of autonomous action with the universality of natural law. A. Ritschl
restated this from neo-Kantian premises as the dichotomy between fact and
value, and argued that Christological statements are not metaphysical
statements of supernatural facts about Christ's nature but value-judgements
about his 'value for us'. Jesus' calling (Beruf)
was 'the establishment of the universal ethical fellowship of mankind' (The Christian Doctrine of Justification
and Reconciliation, 1870-4). Those who believe in him as Christ
participate in the kingdom of God as mediated through the community of faith.
And they are reconciled to God in that they thereby participate in the same
qualitative relationship to God as Jesus, the founder of their religion. Thus Jesus'
uniqueness is understood not ontologically or metaphysically but
historically: he is the unique founder of the Christian church. This rejection
of metaphysics and of the metaphysically interpreted classical Christology was
typical of liberal theology towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was
brought to its logical conclusion by A. Harnack, who insisted that dogma was
the Hellenistic corruption of the original simple gospel which was rediscovered
in the Reformation. The irreducible element of the gospel concerns man's
relationship with God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul,
whereas 'Jesus does not belong to the gospel as one of its elements, but was
the personal realization and power of the gospel, and we still perceive him as
such' (The Essence of Christianity).
Through the Christian community we are linked to him historically, not theologically,
in that to have faith in Jesus Christ is to have faith in God the Father, like
Jesus Christ, rather than to believe any dogma about Christ. Christological
problems are thus turned either into particular problems of history or
universal problems of human personality, and the Christian faith is interpreted
historically as a religiously founded culture of humanity and the infinite value
of personality.
The conflict between
universal validity and historical uniqueness had already governed Hegel's
critique of Schleiermacher. For him, the identification of archetypal
God-consciousness with the historical Jesus is unfounded as long as it is only
inferred as sufficient cause from the religious consciousness of grace. Instead
we must argue from God to religious consciousness, not the other way round. The
incarnation must be the starting point, not the reinterpreted conclusion, of
Christological reflection, for the ideal unity of God and man is demonstrated
through the appearance of God in history in the person of Jesus Christ. But
upon what grounds can we justify the identification of the speculative
principle of the incarnation with the historical individual Jesus Christ? This
was D.F. Strauss's, and in a sense also S. Kierkegaard's, question addressed to
both Hegel's and Schleiermacher's Christologies. But whereas Strauss took the
speculative horn of the dilemma, Kierkegaard took the historical one. Thus
Strauss argued that the speculative idea of divine-human unity cannot be
historically embodied in one specific individual but only in the whole history
of the human species — an idea that was effectively taken up by Feuerbach's
anthropotheism. For Strauss, the historical Jesus has at best only an
accidental connection with the archetypal Christ. Hence the tasks of historical
criticism and doctrinal theology must not only be distinguished but must
clearly drift apart. Attempts to base a life of Jesus on the Gospel accounts
are doomed to failure, as he showed in his The Life of Jesus of 1835-6 in that they are heavily impregnated with
mythical expressions of religious imagination, that is, they report not only
facts of Jesus' life but, in the form of factual discourse, the way the
significance of his life was perceived and experienced by the early Christian
community. Doctrinal theology that is [506] concerned with truth cannot start
from a reinterpretation of these imaginative myths, but only from the
speculative idea of divine-human unity. And this, as he proved by his own
monistic pantheism, may be done in a way that has little, if any, connection
with the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Kierkegaard, on the other
hand, sought to solve the dilemma between historical uniqueness and universal
validity by concentrating not on the speculative idea of divine-human unity but
on the 'absolute paradox' of becoming contemporary to the incarnate son of God
in faith. But by interpreting faith as ahistorical contemporaneity with Jesus,
he, just as Strauss, dissolved the theological significance of the historical
Jesus: the life of Jesus, beyond the mere fact of his existence, is without
religious significance. Both Strauss and Kierkegaard thus paved the way for R.
Bultmann's programme of demythologizing in the twentieth century.
Not only Strauss and
Kierkegaard reacted critically to the quest for the historical Jesus that
dominated Christology following Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus published
posthumously in 1864. In the
second half of the century a number of fundamental criticisms emerged from
various theological quarters: (1) the kenotic critique of G. Thomasius; (2) the
dogmatic critique of M. Kähler; (3) the apocalyptic critique of J. Weiss and A.
Schweitzer; and (4) the historical critique of E. Troeltsch.
1 Confessional Lutherans
like E. Sartorius, E. König, C. Hofmann and Thomasius who sought to retain
traditional Christological orthodoxy in the face of historical criticism and
the life of Jesus movement, turned to Philippians 2: 7 and its idea of a
self-emptying of the divine in the incarnation as well as to the Lutheran
doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum to accommodate incarnational
Christology to the full historical humanity of Jesus. Operating within the
circle of the two natures doctrine they interpreted the incarnation not as the
assumption of humanity but as the self-emptying, or laying aside, of divinity.
But if the kenosis is taken to mean a self-limitation of the divine in the
sense that the eternal Son actually changed himself into a man and allowed his
eternal self-consciousness to be completely extinguished (W.F. Gess), then we
are not only faced with the
problem of distinguishing the kenosis from the annihilation of the Son of God,
but also of accommodating the idea of divine self-limitation to that of divine unchangeability
and impassibility. The latter problem Thomasius sought to solve by distinguishing
between immanent and relative attributes of God, for example between absolute
power and omnipotence, or absolute truth and omniscience. The kenosis is an
expression of the divine rather than a denial of it, in that it is the Son's
voluntary renunciation of those divine attributes that were incompatible with a
genuinely human existence without thereby also divesting himself of those
immanent attributes that define his divinity as his free capacity to limit
himself. Self-limitation here becomes not only compatible with, but supremely
characteristic of, God's divinity. And although this was sharply criticized by
J. Dorner for dissolving the fundamental postulate of divine unchangeability,
it was taken up in modified ways in the Trinitarian Christologies of the later
Barth, Moltmann and Jüngel.
3 Although Kähler was
severely criticized by W. Herrmann, O. Ritschl and others for misrepresenting
the value of historical-critical method and ignoring the problem of whether the
'historical Christ' of the Bible was not merely a product of faith rather than
a fact of history, the general thrust of his criticism was borne out by
Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus of 1906. He saw the whole life-of-Jesus approach as operating
within fundamental alternatives, of which he thought we must always accept the
first and reject the second: either purely historical or purely supernatural;
either synoptic or Johannine; either eschatological or non-eschatological. For
him, the [507] rediscovery of the apocalyptic character and strongly
eschatological bias of Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God by J. Weiss
had called Ritschl's essentially Kantian interpretation of the kingdom of God
as the exercise of the moral life in society into question, and made Jesus a
strange figure from an alien first-century apocalyptic milieu without
similarity to the Christ of the
doctrinal Christology of the church.
4 From a different angle
Troeltsch and the history of religions
school also radically undermined the foundations of constructive
theology by historical research. For Troeltsch, the quest for the historical
Jesus was not historical enough. Historical method consistently applied
according to the principles of criticism, analogy and correlation must study
Christianity as any other religion. It also bars any way from historical
accounts of Jesus to dogmatic conclusions as an unfounded metabasis. The centrality of Christ within the
Christian community is to be explained sociologically and psychologically, not
religiously or theologically. Whereas theologians from Schleiermacher to
Harnack saw the significance of Jesus
in his formative influence on the creation of the Christian community,
which still allowed for some sort of doctrinal expression, Troeltsch analysed
Christianity in general social terms, without recourse to a specific influence
of Jesus beyond the sociopsychological requirements of the Christian community
to ground its cult in historical fact.
This radical dissolution of
dogmatics into historicism has been strongly counteracted since the First World
War. The Either-Or way in which liberal Protestantism posed the Christological
problem, as well as the historical and humanist approach by which it sought to
solve it, was radically rejected by (1) the dialectical Christologies of K. Barth
and E. Brunner; (2) the kerygmatic Christology of Bultmann; (3) the
hermeneutical theologies from Fuchs to Ebeling; and (4) the Trinitarian
Christologies of Moltmann and Jüngel.
1 For Barth it was the risen
Christ rather then the historical Jesus who is central to Christology. Hence
its fundamental framework is eschatology, not history and morality. Just as
Schleiermacher argued from the historical fact of the Christian consciousness
of grace to Jesus' perfect God-consciousness as its sufficient cause within the
paradigm of history, so Barth argued from the eschatological reality of the
risen Christ to a Trinitarian account of God as its sufficient cause within the
paradigm of eschatology. For him, Christology starts from a specific divine
activity, not from historical facts and their (private or cultural) meaning or
significance; and its task is to explain this divine activity not in terms of
an analogia entis and doctrine of analogical predication but in terms of
an analogia fidei, by
showing it to be grounded in the free and loving being of the triune God. Thus
a Christ-centred eschatological realism of divine activity rather than a
Jesus-centred historicism or person-centred existentialism is his answer to the
Christological developments of the nineteenth century. And this is worked out
in detail in the monumental Christology of his Church Dogmatics.
2 While Bultmann agreed that historical research can
never lead to any conclusion that can serve as the basis of faith, he differs
from Barth in that he interprets the eschaton, not realistically as an act of
God in time and history, but existentially as the moment of existential crisis
in which we are confronted by the divine kerygma addressed to us. The kerygma
is not mere information about God, but conveys insights concerning our human
existence. It does not only
inform us about authentic existence but occasions a crisis and demands an
existential decision on our part. Since the kerygmatic character of the New
Testament message is buried under man-made myth, Bultmann propagates the
existential demythologization of the New Testament. Its proclamation of the way
of life inaugurated by the Christ-event can and must be restated in contemporary
existential terms because it is a present possibility for us and may be
appropriated as our own. The kerygma goes beyond history in that it compresses
the existential significance of the history of Jesus into an eschatological
demand. But there is no way to go beyond the eschatological kerygma to more
basic historical foundations without dissolving it: the fact of Jesus'
existence, not any details of his actual life, is all that is necessary for the
kerygma to effect the existential transition from inauthentic to authentic
existence. Hence Christology which [508] explicates the kerygma knows Jesus
only as the one who is
proclaimed as Christ. The quest for the historical Jesus is not only impossible
(as the form-critical approach to the Gospels made clear) but theologically
unnecessary and illegitimate. For the historical Jesus and his message as such
have no decisive significance for the Christian faith.
3 Many, like E. Käsemann, G.
Bornkamm, E. Fuchs, G. Ebeling or W. Pannenberg, did not agree. For them, it is
of vital importance that faith in Christ has its roots in the person and
proclamation of Jesus. For the kerygma-based Christology of the church would be
an imaginative illusion if it were a misinterpretation of the life and message
of the historical Jesus. Thus the new quest of the historical Jesus is not
another attempt to reconstruct a life of Jesus from the gospels, but to
demonstrate that the kerygma arises with Jesus himself rather than with the
primitive Christian community. His life and message were implicitly what his
proclamation as Christ has made explicit, as Fuchs seeks to demonstrate from
the total correspondence between Jesus' life and message, Pannenberg from
Jesus' filial relationship to the God he called Father, and Ebeling from the
way the event of the cross has become the word of the cross. The relationship
between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and hence between history
and dogma, is thus focused on the eschatological relationship between cross and
resurrection.
4 By restating this in terms
of the relation between the death of Jesus and the life of God, J. Moltmann and
E. Jüngel have argued that because of God's creative identification with the
crucified Jesus as disclosed in the resurrection, the theological problem of
the crucified Jesus is the problem of the crucified God, which can only be
solved in Trinitarian terms. Explicating the eschatological relation between
cross and resurrection, Christology is thus once again emphatically grounded in
Trinitarian theology and the Christian doctrine of God in the cross of Christ.
Ecclesiology One
of Schleiermacher's important legacies to Protestant theology is that every
Christology implies an ecclesiology, and
vice versa. Just as they did not want to depart from traditional Christological
doctrine, the Reformers did not want
to found a new church but renew the old one. Yet the political, social
and religious situation soon forced them to create state-based territorial
churches independent of Rome. These Lutheran, Reformed and (later) united
churches were organized according to the principle eius regio, eius religio; existed in a close symbiosis with
state and society until 1918; and before the Enlightenment, made it difficult
if not impossible for other religious and minority groups to practise their own
faith. The controversies between Lutheran and Reformed churches in the orthodox
period, the rise of pietist reform movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the confessionalist awakening and growing secularism in the
nineteenth century, the restructuring of the churches after 1918 and the
questioning and partial overcoming of traditional confessional divisions in the
ecumenical endeavours of the twentieth century have all left their stamp on
German Protestant ecclesiology.
The Protestant revolt
against authoritarian clericalism is clearly reflected in the Lutheran and
Reformed confessions of the sixteenth century. The church is a creatura
verbi divini and church government a matter of all Christians, not just the
clergy. For while the public proclamation of the gospel through word and
sacrament requires an ordained ministry, those ordained are only functionally,
not sacramentally, set apart from other Christians. That is to say, neither the
distinction between clergy and laity nor that between ministry and episcopacy are of any deeper theological
significance: they only mark differences of tasks and functions within the
Christian community that in principle are open to, and the duty of, every
Christian.
This devaluation of church
hierarchy and the corresponding revaluation of the equal rights and duties of
every Christian in the church has had numerous practical and theoretical
effects on German Protestant ecclesiology. It is reflected in the fact that
church government in Lutheran and Reformed churches was never left to the
ordained ministry alone. It inspired the pietist reform movement in forming ecclesiolas
in ecclesia (P.J. Spener). And it shows in the Lutheran doctrine of the two
regiments of God that explains the relationship between church and society not
in institutional terms but by stating the different rights and duties of every
[509] Christian to engage in both ecclesial and political activities without
confusing or merging them. However, the Protestant view of the church is not
monolithic. Even within the Lutheran or Reformed traditions it has allowed for
widely differing ecclesiological visions and developments since the
Enlightenment. At the one extreme the church is seen to achieve its end only by
dissolving into society, thereby transforming it into a culture dominated by
the values of humanity, personality and mutual love. Thus by distinguishing
between church and religion in the tradition of Kant and Hegel, the church is
understood as a means for more general religious ends which, as in particular
R. Rothe argued, can only be realized by a transition of Christianity from its
church-based form into the secular form of the modern state. This view lies at
the bottom of the cultural Protestantism of the nineteenth century and also
governs the 'Christianity outside the church' movement of the twentieth
century. At the other extreme there is the neo-Lutheran confessionalism of C.
Harms, W. Loehe and A.F.C. Vilmar in the nineteenth or W. Elert in the twentieth
centuries, which insists in the light of the Augsburg Confession, chapter 7,
and the doctrine of the two regiments on the irreducible existence of the
church in, and its permanent contrast to, society. However, the church is not a
civitas platonica, as
Melanchthon had pointed out, since its constitutive activities, the
proclamation of the gospel by word and sacrament through which God the Spirit
works faith and salvation, are public events in time and history. The church is
a complex reality both hidden (not invisible!) in society as God's activity and
at the same time visible and part of society as human activity. Orthodox
theology concentrated more on the first aspect, neo-Protestant ecclesiology on
the second. Since the activities of the church are part of the general fabric
of actions and institutions that make up society, as Schleiermacher and Hegel
have shown in their different ways, ecclesiology cannot proceed in merely
doctrinal terms. Instead any theologically viable account must include external
perspectives on the church such as are provided by social philosophy
(Schleiermacher), the social sciences (Troeltsch), the philosophy of culture
(Tillich), philosophical (Bonhoeffer) and empirical sociology or the sociology
of organizations (E. Herms; N. Luhmann).
This need to combine
doctrinal and extra-doctrinal considerations in theological accounts of the
church is most obvious in the case of church law. At the turn of the century R.
Sohm claimed that there exists a fundamental contradiction between church law
and the essence of the church as ecclesia invisibilis, whereas Harnack insisted that the
development of church law in the early centuries was both adequate and
indispensable for the Christian church as a visible historical institution. The
problem posed itself again in the crisis of German Protestantism marked by the
Barmen Declaration (1934), which claimed that the church has to pay witness to
Jesus Christ not only by its gospel message but also by its institutional order
and regulations. Bonhoeffer was one of the first to see this clearly and to
take the sociological form of the church as a dogmatic problem (Sanctorum Communio, 1927).
His understanding of the church as 'Christ existing as community' and his
(later) views of the church as essentially a 'church for others' have deeply
influenced Protestant public opinion and ecclesiology after 1945. In the German
Democratic Republic they inspired the programme of a 'church in socialism', and
in both East and West Germany they contributed considerably to the ecumenical
reorientation of Protestant theology in the second half of the twentieth
century.
In the twentieth century
Protestant theology has moved into its ecumenical phase (see ecumenism). But the problem of the unity
of the Christian churches has been part of its history from the beginning. In
the Reformation period it showed in the Protestant demand for a general
ecumenical council; in the seventeenth century in the attempts to base a union
on the 'consensus quinquesaecularis'
(G. Calixt) or on 'fundamental articles' acceptable to all Christians;
in the eighteenth century in the pietist attempt (A.H. Francke, N. Zinzendorf)
to give priority to Christian life and experience over confessional orthodoxy;
in the nineteenth century in the external and internal mission and diakonia
irrespective of confessional or religious ties; and in the twentieth century in
the ecumenical movement, which was started and dominated by Protestant churches
for half a [510] century. German Protestant theology actively participated in
this process. It achieved remarkable results, such as the Leuenberg Concord
(1973) and numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements with other churches
and confessional traditions. But it also reproduced its differences concerning
the task of the church and its relation to society and politics at an
international level, and introduced its own divisions between liberal and
conservative or evangelical positions on church, mission, political theology
and social engagement of the churches into the ecumenical movement. It has
influenced the ecumenical movement and was influenced by it, and its future is
now indissolubly tied up with the future of the worldwide Christian movement.
Within this new context German Protestant theology is still very much alive
today; it has a rich legacy to convey to a world that is increasingly pluralist
and diversified, secular and ahistorical; and it knows that it can only be true
to its past if it faces up to the problems of today and tomorrow.
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