The paper presents texts from the period 1780-1792, in which theologians from Southern Germany draft concepts of freedom. The presented theologians are the rabbi Isaak Alexander, the Catholic theologians Eulogius Schneider, Benedikt Maria Werkmeister and Joseph Rendler, and the Protestant theologians Johannes Kern and Gebhard Ulrich Brastberger. They are geographically mobile - important cities are: Augsburg, Heidelberg, Regensburg, Salzburg, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Vienna, Würzburg - and are connected to different social spaces, the court, universities and schools, monasteries and parishes. Because of their social background, their education and often far-reaching interests that are not limited to theology and philosophy, they are very articulate representatives of the
emerging modern bourgeoisie. None of them has been examined in detail so far in his theological reference to the political and philosophical discussions and changes of his time and against the background of social and regional history. This paper focuses on an interpretation of the sources based on the critique of the Enlightenment and the interests of its social carriers. The concepts of freedom and the perception of social relationships and changes they illustrate are thus classified in their social function. By this means an argumentation common to all of them becomes clear, in which central elements of the emerging modern bourgeois consciousness are articulated: The judicial office of God is relocated into nature and the conscience of man. The fact that man makes God available in
his special function as a judge relates to a new conception of time. Apocalypticism is reinterpreted into a worldly, dynamic eternity. This corresponds to the growing experience of an accumulation of knowledge, world domination and property. The alleged universalism which the new, predictable, logically acting and omnigracious judge and planner God represents, masks the particularity of this accumulation. This judge God supposedly serving the common good is in reality biased. Via nature, history and conscience he ultimately dissolves in the civil law and state. Thus, all of the five theologians speak in principle of liberties, not of freedom.
emerging modern bourgeoisie. None of them has been examined in detail so far in his theological reference to the political and philosophical discussions and changes of his time and against the background of social and regional history. This paper focuses on an interpretation of the sources based on the critique of the Enlightenment and the interests of its social carriers. The concepts of freedom and the perception of social relationships and changes they illustrate are thus classified in their social function. By this means an argumentation common to all of them becomes clear, in which central elements of the emerging modern bourgeois consciousness are articulated: The judicial office of God is relocated into nature and the conscience of man. The fact that man makes God available in
his special function as a judge relates to a new conception of time. Apocalypticism is reinterpreted into a worldly, dynamic eternity. This corresponds to the growing experience of an accumulation of knowledge, world domination and property. The alleged universalism which the new, predictable, logically acting and omnigracious judge and planner God represents, masks the particularity of this accumulation. This judge God supposedly serving the common good is in reality biased. Via nature, history and conscience he ultimately dissolves in the civil law and state. Thus, all of the five theologians speak in principle of liberties, not of freedom.
No comments:
Post a Comment