The Suitability of the Tools Provided by Ernst Troeltsch for the Understanding of Twentieth-Century Religion

Abstract

In German religious sociology there are few giants. Ernst Troeltsch, who first taught theology at the University of Heidelberg and later philosophy at the University of Berlin, is one of them. Among his many publications none is more influential and more impressive than Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen,1 first published in 1912 and dedicated by him to the universities of Greifswald and Breslau which had recognised his scholarly achievements with honorary doctorates in philosophy and law respectively.2 In the decades after his early death in 1923 Troeltsch's works were soon marginalised within Germany. While his books were held in high regard outside Germany, and especially in the USA, representatives of German dialectical theology disputed most of his insights and the proponents of the so-called 'Lutherrenaissance' disliked Troeltsch's notion of the medieval character of much of Luther's thought. For them Luther was a national hero whose legacy could help to rebuild German pride after the defeat of 1918. But in Troeltsch's works there was nothing to support such a notion. After 1933 the leading theologians both of the Confessing Church and of the 'Deutsche Christen' were not open to liberal thinkers such as Troeltsch. During the Nazi era, therefore, Troeltsch's legacy survived outside Germany in the countries of the western world from where it was reimported into Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Among other places, the University of Chicago was a centre of learning where Troeltsch's works were read and studied. It was from Chicago that Brian Gerrish made major contributions towards a better understanding of Troeltsch's works. Among postwar German scholars no one did more to rediscover Troeltsch than Trutz Rentdorff from Munich. At present the huge body of Troeltsch' s works is being edited in two projects. One is the Paris project, led by Heinz Wismann, Pierre Gisel and Jean-Marc Tetaz, who have begun to produce a French edition of most of Troeltsch's writings. The first volume of the French edition appeared in print in 1996. The other is the Augsburg project, led by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Trutz Rendtorff. It is in Die Soziallehren, a book of almost 1000 pages, that Troeltsch developed his famous distinction between Churches as the institutional representation of organised religion, of sects as the social embodiment of the voluntary principle and of mysticism as the clearest expression of religious individualism. Troeltsch argued that the