Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology

Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology PDF Author: Mark Chapman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191554367
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This is the first discussion in English of the ethical implications of German liberal theology in the early years of the twentieth century. It avoids pejorative interpretative categories (such as `culture protestantism'), seeking instead to understand a much neglected period on its own terms. The leading figure, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), is treated as a `public theologian', engaging at many different levels with his social and political context and trying to ensure that religion could continue to shape the future course of history. To understand his context he made use of the tools of the emergent discipline of sociology and also entered into dialogue with philosophers and historians. Troeltsch's public theology is contrasted with other liberal models of theology, particularly those of the New Testament scholar Wilhelm Bousset and the systematic theologian Wilhelm Herrmann, who were far more reluctant to engage seriously with their context and as a result isolated religion from its wider social and intellectual setting. Troeltsch's theological solution is also compared with Max Weber's sociological response to the problems of modernity: Troeltsch's ideas of cultural synthesis are seen as both constructive and critical and as having much to contribute to contemporary social and political theology.

Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology

Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology PDF Author: Mark Chapman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191554367
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This is the first discussion in English of the ethical implications of German liberal theology in the early years of the twentieth century. It avoids pejorative interpretative categories (such as `culture protestantism'), seeking instead to understand a much neglected period on its own terms. The leading figure, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), is treated as a `public theologian', engaging at many different levels with his social and political context and trying to ensure that religion could continue to shape the future course of history. To understand his context he made use of the tools of the emergent discipline of sociology and also entered into dialogue with philosophers and historians. Troeltsch's public theology is contrasted with other liberal models of theology, particularly those of the New Testament scholar Wilhelm Bousset and the systematic theologian Wilhelm Herrmann, who were far more reluctant to engage seriously with their context and as a result isolated religion from its wider social and intellectual setting. Troeltsch's theological solution is also compared with Max Weber's sociological response to the problems of modernity: Troeltsch's ideas of cultural synthesis are seen as both constructive and critical and as having much to contribute to contemporary social and political theology.

Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology

Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology PDF Author: Mark David Chapman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191697593
Category : Christian sociology
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Chapman assesses the German liberal theological tradition in the early years of the 20th century, concentrating in particular on the work of Ernst Troeltsch.

Studies in the Theological Ethics of Ernst Troeltsch

Studies in the Theological Ethics of Ernst Troeltsch PDF Author: Max A. Myers
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Is there a future for liberal theology?. That was a question which Ernst Troeltsch asked in print, overtly or indirectly, in almost every piece on theology that he wrote. This study explores the doubts Troeltsch had about the study of religion, the religious life, about science as applied to culture, and the future of civilization.

The Christian Faith

The Christian Faith PDF Author: Ernst Troeltsch
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 9780800632090
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The first English translation of Troeltsch's Glaubenslehre. The first attempt to do systematic theology from a deep Christian commitment with full awareness of Christianity's social and historical relativity.

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch PDF Author: Christopher Adair-Toteff
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783086505
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
‘The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch’ is the first collection of essays in English devoted to the thinking of Ernst Troeltsch. The eight essays are written by scholars who have been recognized as major contributors to works on Troeltsch; many of them have published books on his theology. These essays are devoted to exploring Troeltsch’s ethical, sociological and political ideas in addition to his theological concepts. The collection aims to depict Troeltsch as a major sociologist and important philosopher in addition to being one of the most significant German theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology

Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology PDF Author: John Clayton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521210744
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
A reassessment of the theology of the German Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) and of his significance for contemporary theology. The six papers here presented were originally delivered at an international colloquium on Troeltsch held at the University of Lancaster. The contributors focus on the fundamental issues raised by Troeltsch which remain central to theology today and seek to engage him as a discussion partner in a continuing debate. Troeltsch has been unduly neglected as a theologian, a fact which is due partly to the dominance of the 'dialectical' theology of Barth and Bultmann in Germany after the First World War. This book seeks to remedy this state of affairs by dealing critically with Troeltsch's theology as well as constructively with the issues. The papers fall into three groups: in the first Troeltsch is considered as a Christian theologian; in the second are studied the possibilities of systematic and historical theology along Troeltschian lines; in the third the questions of what makes Christianity Christian and of Christian claims to exclusive truth are examined in the light of Troeltsch's work. Each of the contributors is a noted Troeltsch scholar and the book contains an extensive bibliography, which adds to its usefulness to students and scholars alike.

Ernst Troeltsch and Comparative Theology

Ernst Troeltsch and Comparative Theology PDF Author: Echol Lee Nix
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433108372
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Ernst Troeltsch and Comparative Theology examines the methodological attempts of Ernst Troeltsch and Robert Neville for discerning Christian normativity. The investigation of Troeltsch focuses on his treatment of the absoluteness of Christianity and highlights the crisis brought upon absolute religious claims by the study of the history of religions. By rejecting both the supernatural-exclusive apologetic of orthodox Protestantism and the evolutionary apologetic of liberal Protestantism, Troeltsch insists that theology's method should be the history of religions' method (die religionsgeschichtliche Methode). Like Troeltsch, Neville agrees with historical inquiries, but, contrary to Troeltsch, Neville advances an axiological hypothesis to thinking, which is founded in valuation. Neville explains the role of valuation at the imaginative level of thinking and relates it to his theory of normative truth in religious symbols. This study shows that Neville begins with Troeltsch's methodological presuppositions but achieves more normative theology than Troeltsch, especially on ways in which God is engaged in symbolically shaped thinking and practice. Both thinkers offer creative insights for theology that make possible a critical comparison of truth claims regarding the validity of Christianity in and for a historically conscious age.

Christ Without Absolutes

Christ Without Absolutes PDF Author: Sarah Coakley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Can Christians continue to worship Jesus Christ as the full, final, and "absolute" revelation of God in an age of historical relativism, an expanding universe, and the impinging of other world faiths on Western culture? This bold and penetrating study goes to the heart of the debate between traditionalists and liberals such as Ernst Troeltsch who would answer "no." Coakley argues that a liberal approach to Christology in fact opens up many new and liberating possibilities for the future of Christianity.

From Dogmatics to Liberal Theology and Religionswissenschaft

From Dogmatics to Liberal Theology and Religionswissenschaft PDF Author: Richard Edward Harry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The present study revisits both historically and analytically the work of Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), centering its interpretive lens primarily around his various theoretical and methodological contributions to Religionswissenschaft. Roughly analogous to what we today would call or recognize as the wide-ranging and arguably loosely-knit field of religious studies, Troeltsch's approach to Religionswissenschaft was an expression of foundational epistemological debates that affected the entire disciplinary matrix of the emerging cultural (Kultur-) or human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Troeltsch transcribed how the study of religion had reoccupied deep philosophical issues connected to the eighteenth-century question of the relationship between the Enlightenment ideal of Reason and the traditional or premodern theistic self-understanding of Western civilization. The dissolution of the dogmatic Christian worldview and its adjoining conception of Church authority was the starting-point for Troeltsch's multipronged justification of Religion as a viable category. The autonomy of scientific socio-historical inquiry meant that the operative "theoretical horizon" of the History-of-Religions School had turned "comparative" while being irreversibly "expanded to include the totality of human religions"; Troeltsch's liberal theology would also have to forego conversation-stopping appeals to "supernatural revelation" (übernatürlichen Offenbarung) (1991b, 87-88). Troeltsch's framework for Religionswissenschaft matured during the late nineteenth century and through the First World War. He was an early twentieth-century heir of German Idealism, suffering through a generational post-Hegelian philosophical malaise that culminated in collective fears about civilizational anomie, a crisis of values and meaning. Troeltsch interpreted Nietzsche's madman prophecies about the death of God-viz., the onset of European Nihilismus and the "overcoming" (Überwindung) of Christian metaphysics, morality, and culture by means of a triumphant will-to-power-as a condensed symbol and direct assault on both Enlightenment rationalism and Western religious consciousness. Haunted by Relativismus (both ethical and epistemological), Troeltsch's socio-cultural writings on the conflict-ridden modern "spirit" (Geist) had a taste for melodramatic mandarin themes of spiritual bankruptcy and cultural collapse. Sadly, the tragic course of historical events would prove that he was no alarmist: Troeltsch presciently foresaw that this profound irrationalist deformation in German philosophy was linked to a budding propensity for post-truth barbaric statolatry. Troeltsch retraced these cultural anxieties, which were aggravated by the dizzying pace of accelerated social change, to the modern scientific disenchantment of the cosmos and its heightened sense of "historical consciousness" (historische Bewußtsein)-defined loosely as a deepening insight into the plurality of worldviews and the contingency of religious reasons, cultural values, and practical forms of rationality. Troeltsch wrote seriously about "Die Krisis des Historismus" (1922) as an epistemological and cultural problem, and he fully integrated this concern into his thinking about Religionswissenschaft, Kulturgeschichte, and the post-WWI future of Europäismus. Troeltsch finalized his career in Berlin as a prestigious philosopher of culture dedicated to building a democratic Weimar Republic, critiquing nationalist power politics, and situating Christian liberal theology and ethics within the broader socio-historical discourse of comparative Weltreligionen. Analytic respect for the content of Troeltsch's constructive project reveals systematicity and coherence. Regarding the nature of historical consciousness and its relationship to religious consciousness, the foundational concerns of Religionswissenschaft steered Troeltsch headlong into many longstanding and definitive problems within the Western philosophical tradition. "The systematic study of religion," Troeltsch summarized in 1922, exhibits its greatest depth and power in the way it summons the mind to confront the antinomy of "metaphysics and history," placing "both sets of problems in intimate crossfertilization" (1991b, 366). The constructive portion of Troeltsch's Religionswissenschaft settled on critical idealism, a Baden Neo-Kantian conception of transcendental freedom and rationality that made ample room for faith while limiting philosophy's traditional metaphysical ambitions. Hegel's ontological excesses and theological oversteps rendered his teleological philosophy of history into a crude self-glorification fantasy, but Troeltsch found it important not to throw the idealist baby out with the Absolutist bathwater. Functioning as a Neo-Kantian "value theory" (Werttheorie), Troeltsch's Religionswissenschaft offered an epistemology and philosophy of culture which presupposed a normative conception of rationality that seeks out universal validity in its basic ends or value-orientations. Moreover, Troeltsch's philosophy of religion reincorporated Schleiermacher's mystical notion of "religious consciousness" (religiöse Bewußtsein) right into the very heart of Kant's tripartite economy of practical reason-that is, operative within and underlying rationality in its self-legislating theoretical, moral, and aesthetic forms. Troeltsch believed it was necessary to be suspicious and critical toward all concrete claims of Absoluteness, but idealism's obsession with the problem of normative rationality and its relation to das Absolute could not be completely vanquished or pragmatically deflated. Troeltsch's Werttheorie operates formally as a species of epistemological transcendentalism, holding that autonomous and valid ideals provide some sort of a priori bulwark against historicist relativism in its many guises (1999, 45). Troeltsch ultimately endorsed Platonismus-an ontologically grounded metaphysics of value-and theistic Personalismus. These overbeliefs carried him beyond the sphere of Religionswissenschaft proper, but Troeltsch nevertheless saw the scientific discipline as being compatible with a liberal and non-dogmatic Christian lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and faith (Glaubenslehre).

Religion in History

Religion in History PDF Author: Ernst Troeltsch
Publisher: Fortress Texts in Modern Theol
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
These essays, only two of which have appeared previously in English, reflect Troeltsch's vast knowledge and deep insight into modernity, which led him to discern the radical implications of historicity for religion and theology. His thought remains a resource, a guide, and a prod in an ongoing theological quest.