Frömmigkeitsgeschichte und Kulturgeschichtsschreibung. Überlegungen zur Kirchenhistoriographie Karl Aners (1879–1933)

Abstract

The discussion of German theology around 1900 was stamped by a dual perspective in regard to the ‘history of religion’. In the first instance the efforts at discussion pointed to a subjectivistic culture of religion and piety, while in the other it was a matter of a consistent historicization of positive religion. In the writing of church history K. Sell took up the first impulse and connected it with reflections of a collective historiographical concept (E. Gothein, K. Lamprecht). The historiographic interest thus lent credibility to a church-historical perspective of ‘folk religion’ or ‘popular piety’. K. Aner’s ’Das Luthervolk. Ein Gang durch die Geschichte seiner Froemmigkeit’ was the first collective history of piety of German Lutheranism to be written in the manner demanded by Sells. As a church historian presumably strongly influenced by the theology of Ritschl, Aner thereby united the idea of a historiography of piety with the concept of the writing of cultural history in the spirit of G. Freytag and K. Lamprecht, for which the concept of ‘folk soul’ served as a central category. Within the theological controversy concerning the controversial relationship between subjective and objective religion or between individualistic or collective interpretations of history, Aner’s assumed a position with regard to the historiography of piety that was as much against the followers of a program of consistently historicizing theology as it was against the representives of individualistic concepts of ecclesiastical historiography. He thus came to stand between the two opposing positions within the camp of liberal theology.