Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums by Hannes Kerber

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums by Hannes Kerber Joseph A. Haydt Hannes Kerber. Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021. 286 pp. Hannes Kerber's monograph exploits close readings of largely neglected participants in the so-called fragments controversy to deliver a genuinely original reading of Lessing's authorial strategy during the early years of the controversy. On the strictly philological plane, this study merits attention among Lessing scholars for uncovering a host of sources within the Christian theological tradition that influenced Lessing's late religious thought. Kerber carefully documents Lessing's underappreciated sensitivity not only to the doctrinal debates that animated the formative (pre-Nicene) centuries of Christianity but also to the core theological innovations of the early Reformation. Kerber's book is no mere philological investigation, however, and his exegetical discoveries serve a broader interpretive agenda that bears on Lessing's assessment of Enlightenment philosophy and theology. In Kerber's view, Lessing believed that the religious disputes of his contemporaries systematically neglected the principles that the great theologians of both ancient Christianity and the Reformation had deemed to represent the most profound insights of Christianity. Kerber's Lessing aims to reconfigure such debates by restoring these dormant theological resources. Here, I focus on one example from Kerber's reconstruction of this strategy: Lessing's efforts to restore a Lutheran conception of faith in Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, composed in 1777 in response to Johann Daniel Schumann's defense of Christianity in Über die Evidenz der Beweise für die Wahrheit der christlichen Religion. In his discussion, Kerber documents in extensive detail the [End Page 195] careful attention that Lessing paid to Schumann's text in crafting his famous response, with the aim of challenging the widely held belief that the essay articulates Lessing's own theory of religious and historical truth. By comparing Lessing's text to Schumann's, Kerber demonstrates that each major junction of Lessing's argument proceeds by invoking a specific passage or claim in Schumann's text. Kerber argues that Lessing does not use Schumann's essay merely as an occasion to elaborate an independent theory of revelation; instead, Lessing's text adopts the terms of Schumann's argument and drives them to their logical conclusion, thereby calling attention to the incongruence between his interlocutor's premises and the conclusions they are meant to support. Kerber convincingly argues that this text does not aim to criticize religion or divine revelation as such but rather seeks to expose a particular form of religious thinking that conceived of religious faith as a species of certainty that could be justified by historical or rational truth. Kerber's Lessing believed that this conception of faith had surreptitiously become paradigmatic for the religious thought of his contemporaries, a development that involved abandoning a category distinction that had been fundamental for the theology of the Reformation: that faith is not an issue of rational certainty, but a matter of trust. In the guise of confessional orthodoxy, Schumann—and those who shared his views about the task of Christian theology—had parted ways with this central tenet of Protestant thought and reduced Christianity to a disguised rationalism. And, Kerber argues, it is just this lost tenet that Lessing wants to restore. Far from developing a critique of orthodoxy based on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment, Kerber's Lessing is engaged in a process of recovering traditional orthodox beliefs to criticize the innovations of his theologian contemporaries, innovations which had come at the price of forfeiting the deepest theological claim that the Reformation had proposed with respect to divine revelation. (In a subsequent chapter, Kerber turns to Nathan der Weise to elaborate what Lessing takes to be at stake in this Protestant concept, arguing that it is a central concern of the play to portray the ethical, religious, and social force of the Lutheran conception of faith when taken in its complete scope.) Kerber's aim throughout this study is to show that Lessing was equally critical of both contemporary orthodoxy and its Enlightenment critics. While it has frequently...