Dirk Fleischer. Zwischen Tradition und Fortschritt: Der Strukturwandel der protestantischen Kirchengeschichtsschreibung im deutschsprachigen Diskurs der Aufklärung, Teil 1 and 2. Waltrop: Verlag Hartmut Spenner, 2006. 900 pp. EUR 68.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89991-053-7.

Reviewed by Michael J. Sauter (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, A.C., [CIDE], Mexico City)
Published on H-German (November, 2007)

From Pietism to Aufklärung

This is an extremely specialized work and is not recommended for the general reader. However, specialists in the field will find some useful information on the relationship between church history (Kirchengeschichte) and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Germany, as well as a nice discussion of church history's slow emancipation from theology. In addition, Dirk Fleischer's observations on the religious origins of the eighteenth century's historical-critical methods are right on target. Eighteenth-century Germans learned to think about history as a time-bound, human product, in part through their encounter with religious-historical issues. For all its virtues, however, it cannot be said that Fleischer's work is particularly original in either its methods or in its choice of texts. Overall, this book is best read as a companion volume to Peter Hanns Reill's The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (1975), which argues that the German Enlightenment constructed history both as a specific form of knowledge and as an autonomous discipline that cultivated its own rules and methods. Fleischer takes off from this position and holds that the development of church history was a separate, complementary phenomenon to the rise of historical thought in Germany. In this way, he identifies church history a contributing factor to the creation of the modern world.

At the root of Fleischer's argument is Ernst Troeltsch's distinction between Altprotestantismus and Neuprotestantismus, the former characterized by slavish adherence to dogma and tradition; the latter, by the spirit of free inquiry and sensitivity to historical context.[1] Neuprotestantismus appeared in the course of the eighteenth century and, as far as Fleischer is concerned, is associated with not only the Enlightenment but also the process of modernization. Yet, modernization's definition is never quite fleshed out in Fleischer's text. One gets the sense that Fleischer understands modernization as the progressive emancipation of the individual's reason. If so, his position would extend many of Troeltsch's basic premises about modernity into current scholarship and it is not at all certain that this should be done. A more explicit analysis of "modernity" would help to situate this part of the author's argument more clearly within the literature and would give the reader an opportunity to grapple with modernity as an issue.

Fleischer does, however, define a clear chronological backdrop that orients the reader within the eighteenth century. He divides church history's rise into three periods: Transitional Theologians (1730-60), Neologists (1760-90), and Rationalism/Super-rationalism (1790-1830). This review will follow Fleischer's proposed chronology, although a comment on this chronology's relation to the book's larger argument is in order here. The book does not cover the last of the three periods, which is unfortunate, because its basic argument can only be proved by tracing church history through the rise of historicism in the early nineteenth century.[2] Indeed, the author expressly notes that deep continuities ran between these two intellectual movements. Nonetheless, in spite of this lacuna, the material on the first two periods is rich and well researched.[3]

Fleischer's analysis of church history in the eighteenth century takes shape against the problematic Troeltschian backdrop mentioned above; that is, for Fleischer, church history emerged from within theological circles and their development of critical approaches to Christian religious traditions and texts. For that reason, he begins his story with Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), whose (in)famous Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (UKKH [1699]) marked the beginning of what Fleischer quite rightly calls the "critical turn" within the German Protestant world (p. 23). Fleischer maintains that Arnold's work corroded the entire Lutheran establishment (Altprotestantismus) for two reasons. First, it attacked the power of a state-dominated church (Staatskirchentum) by justifying personal religious autonomy. Second, it justified research on church history by cultivating the idea that the critical writer must take a position that is independent (unparteiisch) of traditional dogmas and schools. Put another way, dogmas must be proven historically before the believer can accept them. Fleischer then anchors this point with a series of admiring citations from eighteenth-century figures such as the historian Johann Matthias Schroekh (1733-1808), the theologian Johann Salomo Semler [CHANGE] (1725-91), and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who resists all categorization. Fleischer's work thus allows us to imagine Arnold's text as holding the same position for German thinkers as Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) did for the French: namely, that of an arsenal of enlightened critical thought. It must be stressed, however, that this position is not particularly new. Arnold has been the subject of much study in general, and Peter Reill pointed out his significance for the rise of historical thinking over thirty years ago in the work mentioned above.

Although Fleischer views Arnold as a resource for eighteenth-century criticism, he is careful not to reduce the rise of church history to just a few commentaries on the UKKH. Fleischer does a good job of situating the people who commented on Arnold within a broader European debate by emphasizing, for example, the rise of Deism and the return of Pyrrhonism in both France and England as challenges to both the Transitional Theologians of the early eighteenth and the Neologists of the late eighteenth centuries. For members of the former group, Deism and Pyrrhonism had to be defeated as part of larger project in defense of the faith. For the latter group, however, using history in defense of belief became less important than conducting history the right way; that is, pursuing a rigorous research agenda within the confines of a professionalized discipline could produce secure knowledge about the past, regardless of whether individual practitioners maintained their own Christian beliefs. In this sense, church history arose in response to challenges offered by critical thinkers as Richard Simon and René Descartes, while also being nurtured by a German cultural context shaped in part by the reading of Gottfried Arnold and in part by Germany's network of universities. Fleischer's text is best at dealing with the responses to the first of these currents; much more could have been done with the second. More will be said on this point below. Before continuing, it must also be noted that given Fleischer's understanding of the challenges that French and English thinkers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries presented to their counterparts in Germany, it would have been helpful for him to confront more directly the literature on radicalism, since the intellectual challenge presented by people such as Benedict Spinoza and Isaac Newton was deeply theological.[4]

Having outlined broadly the cultural contexts that affected the rise of church history, let us now turn to Fleischer's historical periods and the thinkers he includes within them. In the first period, that of the Transitional Theologians (1730-60), Fleischer identifies Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706-57), Johann Martin Chladenius (1710-59), and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693-1755) as key sources of new approaches to history.[5] According to Fleischer, all three contributed fundamentally to the creation and professionalization of church history by developing conceptual methods for evaluating texts and by requiring the application of minimum standards to research practices. Overall, Fleischer provides a thorough analysis of each theologian's works and effectively traces their subsequent influence on other historians/theologians. It is best to skip over the details of this discussion, since so much of it occurred between people known only to specialists. What is important about Fleischer's reading of this transitional period is his discussion of the intellectual tensions that motivated the broader discussion. On the one hand, Fleischer notes that both Baumgarten and Chladenius were Wolffians who combined Christian Wolff's deductively oriented philosophy with the Pietist emphasis on criticizing dogma. This pairing then produced scientific approaches to writing history, particularly in terms of source criticism (Quellenkritik). On the other hand, Fleischer also notes that Mosheim was doing the same thing without reference to Wolffian philosophy, going so far as to secularize his approach to church history so radically that history itself became an independent realm of human existence subject to its own rules. Put another way, church history followed different paths simultaneously, during the early eighteenth century. This is a most useful insight, because it reminds us of the vitality of the German intellectual community prior to 1750, a perspective that scholars are only beginning to cultivate.[6]

The most significant implication of Fleischer's analysis is that pluralism dominated German academic life throughout the eighteenth century. This pluralism was, in part, geographic. Mosheim was professor at Göttingen, Baumgarten at Halle, and Chladenius at Erlangen, and physical separation encouraged the development of institutions that facilitated communication, such as journals and newspapers. Moreover, the great number of German universities encouraged scholars at different schools to stake out unique positions on both the meaning and methods of church history. One of this work's greatest failings is the failure to include adequately the larger print world that nurtured and was inspired by academic debate. Although Fleischer explicates the major texts well, he rarely embeds the inter-book debate within other forms of media, in spite of his reliance on the works of Reinhart Koselleck and Jürgen Habermas for his understanding of the eighteenth-century public sphere.[7] Indeed, consistent with Habermas' arguments, one can find a broad and vigorous debate about church history in eighteenth-century Germany's journals especially through the seemingly ubiquitous German book review. A search of the University of Bielefeld's indispensable online collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals "Retrospektive Digitalisierung wissenschaftlicher Rezensionsorgane und Literaturzeitschriften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts aus dem deutschen Sprachraum," yields, for example, 199 contemporary articles on "Kirchengeschichte" alone.[8] A more thorough encounter with both the literature on the public sphere and other kinds of eighteenth-century sources might have yielded new ways of understanding the canonical debates on which Fleischer concentrates.[9]

With this in mind, we now turn to Fleischer's second historical period: the Neologists (1760-90). Non-specialists will recognize neither the historical category nor the major players in the field. Neology was originally a pejorative term applied by orthodox Lutheran theologians to other Lutheran theologians who sought to bring critical methods of analysis to the understanding of the Bible and church history. This name soon came to define an entire group of critical thinkers that included Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem (1709-89), Johann David Michaelis (1717-91), August Friedrich Wilhelm Sack (1703-86), Johann Joachim Spalding (1714-1804), Johann Gottlieb Toellner (1724-74), and, most significantly, Semler, whose Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canons (1774) Fleischer identifies as the fundamental text in the elaboration and application of historical-critical methods to church history. In this period, Fleischer again identifies three major figures as fundamental to the development of historical thinking within church history, Christian Wilhelm Franz Walch (1726-84), Johann Matthias Schroekh, and Semler. Throughout this part of his work, Fleischer emphasizes the continuity within the world of church historical thinking. Schroekh, for example, was both Michaelis's and Mosheim's student at Göttingen and finished his education in Leipzig before settling down in Wittenberg as a professor. Walch studied at Jena before coming to Göttingen to teach, where he came under Mosheim's influence. Semler, for his part, studied under Baumgarten at Halle and eventually became a professor there as well. Again, it is not necessary to consider the details of the debate, but we should note Fleischer's emphasis on the progressive secularization and professionalization of historical thinking within each scholar's work. Using individual studies of each, Fleischer finds within the discipline of church history the growth of "enlightened" and secular attitudes toward history. This insight has two important aspects. First, Semler and company began to recognize that people were situated within their own time, which in religious terms meant that God originally spoke to his people in a language that was appropriate to their place in time. This notion is called "accommodation theory" and meant, among other things, that since eighteenth-century Germans were not ancient Jews, all historical work had to recognize the differences between these peoples' times. Second, certain methods of historical analysis became essential for doing this type of historical work--methods that were universal regardless of whether the author was actually a committed Christian.

As was the case with the Transitional Theologians, Fleischer's analysis of Neologist church historians is competent and thorough throughout. There is no doubt that Semler and his contemporaries developed ways of understanding the human being's basic historicity because of their collective interest in their church's past. This conclusion applies particularly well to Semler, who used church history to develop a particularized notion of religion that he called Privatreligion, a theory that justified individual research into religious texts in order to deepen one's own religious understanding.[10] Moreover, this search for a deeper spiritual engagement with one's religion was inseparable from the researcher's understanding of himself as a historical being. Here, we have uncovered the real importance of Fleischer's work: namely, that systematic research by the Neologists and their forbears into the early church encouraged the development of mental habits and professional techniques that the nineteenth century would transform into historicism.

In all of this, Fleischer is on solid ground, although his arguments are more an extension of existing literature on the German historical school than startling reinterpretations of it. Nonetheless, some problems lurk in this part of the text. First, a small problem; the entire work seems to have been written to justify Semler's status as a church historian par excellence. Semler is certainly deserving of greater fame among scholars of the eighteenth century. He was a major figure in Germany during the second half of the century and contributed to a variety of intellectual disciplines, including history. One does wonder, however, why almost a third of the text is devoted to him. This lopsided structure suggests that author was reading other church historians through his desired endpoint. More balance in the presentation of the major thinkers would have circumvented this problem. Second, and ironically, a fundamental problem stems from Fleischer's historical apparatus. Although the book's subtitle is "der Strukturwandel der protestantische Kirchengeschichtsschreibung im deutschsprachigen Diskurs der Aufklärung," Fleischer so heavily emphasizes the intellectual lineage of church history that he barely deals with actual structures, particularly as they relate to his understanding of the public sphere.

Here it will be of use to return to Koselleck and Habermas. Although these scholars disagreed about the nature of the eighteenth-century public sphere's influence, both grounded the public sphere's origins in concrete social and economic structures: Koselleck in changes in the ancien regime's sociability (the rise of salons and Freemasonic lodges), Habermas in the rise of a bourgeoisie with both money and leisure to found reading clubs and coffee houses. Whatever critiques one may make of their respective approaches, both scholars put the structures of public discussion into a specific context, which made it possible to speak of real structural change. These approaches are in strong contrast to the absence of an institutional context in Fleischer's work. Although he provides basic background information for each thinker, such as place of birth, education, and work history, this information is rarely integrated fully into the textual analysis. As a result, the reader gets little sense of who these theologian-historians were and how their intellectual labors related to the world in which they lived. Fleischer's handling of Semler's life is a prime example. While at Halle, Semler served as both a professor and an administrator, which meant that he was beholden to his educational background, his scholarly interests, and institutional and political pressures at the same time. Fleischer recognizes the significance of this multifarious contextual backdrop, but does not integrate it into his vision of Semler's work, except to note that it may explain Semler's political conservatism. To the extent that Semler was beholden to the powers that be, his political conservatism may have been essential to his historical imagination, rather than ancillary to it. In sum, in taking a one-dimensional view of the eighteenth-century's social and political structures, Fleischer not only undermines his search for the "Strukturwandel" but also limits the historical depth of his own analysis.

These criticisms aside, this work offers real value to specialists in historical thought, as well as scholars interested in the German Enlightenment. On these grounds it is a recommended read.

Notes

[1]. Ernst Troeltsch, Schriften zur Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Moderne Welt (1906-1913) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001).

[2]. For a useful, short overview of historicism, see Georg G. Iggers, "Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term," Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 129-152. See also Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968).

[3]. For a work that relates theology directly to the rise of historicism, see Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[4]. See, for example, Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981); and Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Fleischer cites neither of these works.

[5]. Fleischer's insistence that theology is part of the process of Enlightenment is in basic agreement with David Sorkin's "Reclaiming Theology for the Enlightenment: The Case of Siegmund. Jacob Baumgarten (1706-1757)," Central European History 36 (2003): 503-530. Unfortunately, Fleischer does not cite this work. Although neither is cited, Sorkin's most recent works on theology and the Enlightenment could have supported Fleischer's own argument. See, for example, David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). In particular, it would have been interesting to compare the German-Jewish experience with the German-Protestant one.

[6]. On this point see also Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early-Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[7]. Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Baden-Baden: Suhrkamp, 1959); and Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).

[8]. At http://www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/diglib/aufklaerung (Accessed October 20, 2007).

[9]. For an overview, see Anthony J. La Vopa, "Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe," Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 98-115.

[10]. On this issue readers may wish to consult Gottfried Hornig, Johann Salomo Semler: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Hallenser Aufklärungstheologen (Tübginen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996).

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Citation: Michael J. Sauter. Review of Fleischer, Dirk, Zwischen Tradition und Fortschritt: Der Strukturwandel der protestantischen Kirchengeschichtsschreibung im deutschsprachigen Diskurs der Aufklärung, Teil 1 and 2. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13915

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