Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch by Christian Volkmar Witt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch by Christian Volkmar Witt Joar Haga Lutherische "Orthodoxie" als historisches Problem. Leitidee, Konstruktion und Gegenbegriff von Gottfried Arnold bis Ernst Troeltsch. By Christian Volkmar Witt. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. 300 pp. Most books present familiar material in new ways, fewer break new territory. Rarer still are those which change the way we think about a given period. This is such a rare book. The German church historian Christian Witt has written a book about the framing of the period that many until recently have referred to as Lutheran Orthodoxy. After this, it will be difficult or impossible to use the term "Orthodoxy" as a neutral category, suited to designate a period of church history. Packed with analytical tools from the theory of [End Page 230] institutional symbolic orders by sociologist Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Witt deconstructs the function of a central term in history. A term that postulates a correct faith, ortho-doxa, "orthodoxy" does not merely function as a formula of identification of certain concrete features, it is also an instrument of demarcation and marginalisation (18). Witt uses the three concepts in the title (Leitidee, Konstruktion, Gegenbegriff) as perspectives on his material, stretching from Arnold to Troeltsch. Witt traces how the idea of truth is at work among central European church historians not merely in how they treat historical facts; he also uncovers how it is built into the very theories the interpretations rely on. These theories are in some ways connected through their truth-claims, or their resistance to making truth claims. To highlight this aspect of the conceptual framework, Witt draws on the historian Reinhard Koselleck, a scholar close to Carl Schmitt, who viewed politics through the categories of friend and foe. Indeed, one could read the whole German Begriffsgeschichte as an attempt to utilise Schmitt´s understanding of the political as a battle ground. Witt's twelve pages about "Gegenbegriff" (oppositional concept) could serve as a fruitful theoretical reflection on a wider range of materials, due to its unpacking of an almost silent pejorative potential in the analytical tools. In the conclusion, Witt in a more direct manner comes to the fore and fleshes out his understanding of heterodoxy, the opposite of orthodoxy. Witt underlines that the so-called heterodox theologian does not become heterodox by framing himself in the image of a different doctrinal conception. It is much more likely that the heterodox would construe his own identity as orthodox (40). Witt's deconstruction of the (in)famous Gottfried Arnold´s (1666–1714) supposedly Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy (1699)—the most unwillingly ironic title of all time—is perhaps the most fruitful part of this work. One could claim that Witt's presentation of Arnold offers nothing new. Arnold´s revisionist claims and radical pietist assumptions have been previously noted. For Arnold, to be orthodox meant to be a hard-headed persecutor of true believers. The strength of Witt´s text lies in showing how far the implications [End Page 231] and consequences of Arnold's fundamental distinction reverberated among church historians. By Witt's thorough step-by-step analysis of how Arnold unleashed his pejorative power, Arnold's method and its results become clear. In one sense, Witt's book is a portrayal of the rhetorical power of historians. Witt's nuanced tracing of how the normative choices of a man at the close of the seventeenth century dominated successive research is simply mindboggling. Witt traces the categories of interpretation influenced by Arnold through several church historians from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. For example, the analysis of the normative positions of supposedly neutral Enlightenment theologians such as Johann Semler (1725–1791) is rewarding. The search for an "inner attitude" (102) corresponded to Semler's lamenting how the Catholic church attempted to create a monopoly of the truth by allegedly suppressing an original plurality (109). The chapter on August Tholuck (1799–1877) and his book Der Geist der lutherischen Theologen Wittenbergs (1852) is a gem. Witt shows how Tholuck fought on two fronts, against the rationalism of yore and the confessionalism of...