Abstract
In the wake of the Enlightenment and heavily influenced by serious challenges in Biblical scholarship to conventional doctrines, various kinds of liberal theology emerged in European Protestantism of both the Reformed and Lutheran traditions. Within the Calvinist-Zwinglian churches of Switzerland, this came to expression in, inter alia, progressive religion which stood in marked contrast to confessional orthodoxy. The novelist Gottfried Keller had been influenced by the German atheistic philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach in the 1840s and shortly thereafter gained prominence as one of the most gifted Swiss writers of his era. In his novella “Das verlorene Lachen”, Keller systematically rejected confessional Reformed orthodoxy, liberal currents in the Reformed churches, Roman Catholicism and Protestant nonconformity as intellectually archaic and out of harmony with the democratic and egalitarian spirit of the times, either products of supporters or a stratified social system which he found unacceptable.
Highlights
In die voetspore van die Verligting, en sterk onder die invloed van ernstige opposisie in die vorm van opponerende standpunte wat konvensionele Bybelse leerstellinge uitgedaag het, het verskeie liberale teologieë in sowel die Lutherse en gereformeerde tradisies na vore gekom
In the wake of the Enlightenment and heavily influenced by serious challenges in Biblical scholarship to conventional doctrines, various kinds of liberal theology emerged in European Protestantism of both the Reformed and Lutheran traditions
The novelist Gottfried Keller had been influenced by the German atheistic philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach in the 1840s and shortly thereafter gained prominence as one of the most gifted Swiss writers of his era
Summary
In Switzerland, as elsewhere in Europe and beyond, numerous literary artists joined philosophers and other commentators in subjecting contemporary developments in religious life to varying degrees and kinds of criticism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. That Keller should emerge as a radical critic of Christianity as it was represented in both peasant and bourgeois society probably surprised none of his acquaintances One of his biographers, J.M. Lindsay, recorded that Keller’s widowed mother, Elisabeth Scheuchzer, a doctor’s daughter from the village of Glattfelden near Zürich, “was sustained by a strong faith in God the Provider, but her religion had no great devotional intensity” (Lindsay, 1968:13). Richard Ruppel (1998), to cite one relevant example, perceived in Das verloren Lachen obvious disillusionment with religious life generally Despite his emphasis at the outset of his brief analysis on the underlying phenomenon of modernisation and social change, he did not evince a comprehension of the fundamental contours of the nineteenth-century Swiss ecclesiastical terrain, i.e. the significantly varying denominational and theological emphases from which the citizens of the Helvetian Confederation could choose and through which Keller swashbuckled in this novella (Ruppel, 1988:171-189). To a considerable degree the social fabric of rural Switzerland lagged behind, and it maintained a class structure that had changed little for centuries
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