Predigen über Herrschaft: Ordnungsmuster des Politischen in lutherischen Predigten Thüringens/Sachsens im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert by Luise Schorn-Schütte

Abstract

Reviewed by: Predigen über Herrschaft: Ordnungsmuster des Politischen in lutherischen Predigten Thüringens/Sachsens im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert by Luise Schorn-Schütte Mary Jane Haemig Predigen über Herrschaft: Ordnungsmuster des Politischen in lutherischen Predigten Thüringens/Sachsens im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert. By Luise Schorn-Schütte. Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 17. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021. 95 pp. This brief work examines over 200 sermons (both printed and handwritten) preached between roughly 1550 and 1650 in Saxony and Thuringia. It investigates their statements about ruling authorities and political matters. The first chapter looks briefly at sermons as a means of political-theological communication in the early modern era. The second chapter examines the context, including the geographic region, the social and geographic origin of the preachers as well as their educational and vocational history, the audiences for sermons, and the publication and spread of sermons. The third chapter focuses on the content of the sermons. It examines how the teaching on three estates (church, government, and household) provided a [End Page 96] basis for thinking about society, questions of loyalty and obedience, admonition and criticism, and the meaning of the "Fatherland." The last chapter offers a two-page summation of results. This work is part of a larger scholarly discussion concerning the rise of the early modern state. It examines the concepts and language preachers used to describe the role and tasks of ruling authorities. Both explicit and implicit comparisons are drawn to the concepts and language of jurists. The study finds that, for the preachers, the concept of the three estates was constitutive. Division of power placed limits on ruling authorities. The claim, arising in the middle of the seventeenth century, that ruling authority should be concentrated in the secular territorial rulers, was largely without theological legitimation. The study further finds that the sermons maintained the right to criticize the authorities, even extending to the right of resistance. It also touches upon the concepts of natural law and conscience that influenced both theologians and jurists. Mary Jane Haemig Luther Seminary Saint Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.