Confessional Lutheranism and German Theological Wissenschaft: Adolf Harless, August Vilmar, and Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmann by James Ambrose Lee II

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confessional Lutheranism and German Theological Wissenschaft: Adolf Harless, August Vilmar, and Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmannby James Ambrose Lee II Mark Mattes Confessional Lutheranism and German Theological Wissenschaft: Adolf Harless, August Vilmar, and Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmann. By James Ambrose Lee II. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. xii + 307 pp. This study examines the defense of theology as an academic discipline within the German university offered by three leaders in the Neo-Lutheran confessional awakening, Adolf Harless, August Vilmar, and J. C. K. von Hofmann. While theology had long enjoyed a privileged position in the university as a forum for pastoral formation, its status within the academy increasingly came under scrutiny in the early nineteenth century as the natural sciences gained ascendency, providing the paradigm of rationality (7). Historically, university-trained civil servants, such as lawyers, doctors, and ministers, tended to support the status quo. In response, many Enlightenment figures, critical of both church and state, did their thinking outside the academy. For these thinkers, knowledge was increasingly viewed as "science," the systematic ordering of a discipline into a whole that not only gets results but also supplied methods for public scrutiny (24–25). Hence, theology was increasing legitimated not on the basis of its ability to offer truth but instead because clergy helped promote morality in public life. For Kant, since the university existed to support the state, the discipline of theology was justified because it was useful for social stability, but not because it could deliver truth. In response, with the renewal of interest in confessional theology in Germany early in the nineteenth century, Neo-Lutheran theologians tried to find ways to present theology as a science. They appealed to the philosopher Schelling who advocated that the natural sciences implicitly assumed a larger, living unified body of knowledge, a "primordial knowledge," a supposition of the "absolute," as the ground for their intelligibility (45). They could also appeal to Schleiermacher who sought a covenant between theology and science (66) by affirming God as the transcendental ground who guaranteed the correlation of thought and being (77). Harless, Vilmar, and von Hofmann rejected rationalistic theologies which accommodated to reason alone as the ground of truth. [End Page 214]Instead, each appealed to an experience of dependence upon God as the basis for life, as well as the forgiveness of sins, and new birth. They argued for a churchly theology, but also, in the case of Harless and von Hofmann, that theology is a science. Harless, like Schelling, saw theology as a science because it offered an overarching unity, beholden to both experience and the confessions, which could join its various parts into a single, organic body (125). He developed an "encyclopedia" approach to theology which neither deduced its system of truth from a general principle nor merely proof-texted from the Bible (136), but instead linked its various topics on the basis of an inner logic which anticipated a teleological fulfillment of created beings in God, as mediated through Christ (137). In contrast, Vilmar was not inclined to accommodate to empirical views of science and disowned the designation of theology as a science. Unlike science which moves from particular observations to general laws, Vilmar posited that theology begins with its distinctive "object" and then considers how the individual parts relate to it (159). Vilmar understood theology to be grounded in the actual events or facts ( Thatsache) of Jesus's ministry, but that the reality of these events had a trans-historical character, since they continued in the witness of the church (162). While Vilmar would advocate an "unscientific theology" (192), his proposal was deeply enmeshed within the debate concerning the relation between religion and science in his day. Von Hofmann argued that science could not be reduced to a mere cognitive act because truth was not the sum of all knowledge. Instead, truth existed for the common good (205). Not surprisingly, von Hofmann was opposed to any reduction of truth to the natural sciences (209). The essence of Christianity is to present the fellowship between God and humanity realized in Jesus Christ (215). Theology's vocation is to unfold, in a comprehensive and systematic way, this relationship as...