Download or read book Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology written by Mark Chapman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-11-09 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology written by Mark David Chapman and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapman assesses the German liberal theological tradition in the early years of the 20th century, concentrating in particular on the work of Ernst Troeltsch.
Download or read book Studies in the Theological Ethics of Ernst Troeltsch written by Max A. Myers and published by Edwin Mellen Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Christian Faith written by Ernst Troeltsch and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ernst Troeltsch and the Future of Theology written by John Clayton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1976-08-12 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ernst Troeltsch and Comparative Theology written by Echol Lee Nix and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ernst Troeltsch written by Hans-Georg Drescher and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernst Troeltsch, who was born in 1865 and died suddenly and prematurely in 1923, on the eve of a visit to Britain, is undoubtedly one of the most important theologians and philosophers of the twentieth century. Having suffered a loss of prestige with the eclipse of liberal theology after his death and the predominance of Karl Barth in a world overshadowed by Nazi Germany and the Second World War, he has now come into his own again, so that this first full-length biography is particularly welcome. Hans-Georg Drescher traces Troeltsch's life from his birth in Augsburg, distinguished university career and meteoric rise to be professor of theology in Bonn, through his twenty-year activity as professor of theology in Heidelberg to his final change of faculty and appointment as professor of philosophy in Berlin. In connection with each major period of Troeltsch's life he analyses Troeltsch's major theological and philosophical work, much of which has never been translated, and the impact of his study is heightened by a series of contemporary photographs. Here, then, is a vivid picture, not only of the thinker who was virtually the first to tackle on a broad front the many problems for religious belief and practice raised by the rise of the modern historical consciousness and the relativity that goes with it, but also of German university life in all its facets before, during and immediately after the First World War. Hans-Georg Drescher is Professor of Protestant Theology in the University of Dortmund.
Download or read book The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch written by Christopher Adair-Toteff and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘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.
Download or read book From Dogmatics to Liberal Theology and Religionswissenschaft written by Richard Edward Harry and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book Liberal Theology written by Peter Crafts Hodgson and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this incisive work, distinguished theologian Peter Hodgsonreflects on the precarious yet vital role of theology today andits nearly lost and sometimes discredited tradition of liberalthought, especially liberal theology. Liberal theology has beenthe main thread of Christian thinking over the last 200 years, butit threatens to be obscured by a rising tide of conservative andeven fundamentalist Christianity, on the one hand, and a secularmaterialism, on the other. Hodgson's sure-footed work offers a way of seeing our religiousand political situations together. He calls for liberal theology toreinvent itself and to fulfill its crucial historical roles as a mediatorbetween Christian commitment and the cultural situation andas a critical lens through which to retrieve and reconstrue keyChristian doctrines. The heart or root of Christian commitment, Hodgson finds,lies in its radical vision of freedom – God's, nature's, and ourown. In the end, Hodgson's proposal embraces not only theologybut Christianity itself and its relevance to today's mostpressing problems.
Download or read book Faith Without Certainty written by and published by Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. This book was released on with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book lays out the basic characteristics of liberal theology, delving into historical and philosophical sources as well as social and intellectual roots. Ideal for readers who want a better understanding of liberal theology, a religious tradition that is rooted not in authority but in one's own experience and conscience.
Download or read book Religion in History written by Ernst Troeltsch and published by Fortress Texts in Modern Theol. This book was released on 1991 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Against False Apologetics written by Brent W. Sockness and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 1998 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brent W. Sockness takes as his point of departure the judgment frequently encountered in twentieth-century theological literature that the last great German liberal Protestant systematic theologians prior to the rise of dialectical theology, Wilhelm Herrmann (1846-1922) and Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), represent antithetical and paradigmatic alternatives in modern Christian theology. Going beyond the usual 'explanations' which invoke abstract allegiances (Kant vs. Schleiermacher, Marburg vs. Heidelberg neo-Kantianism, Ritschlianism vs. the History-of-Religions School), the author undertakes an exhaustive analysis of the nearly thirty years of mutual commentary, critique, and polemic which transpired between Herrmann and Troeltsch in both published and unpublished sources. Sockness charts the contours of their relations from their first encounters among the 'Friends of the Christian World,' through their increasingly hostile exchanges in the first decade of the century, to their personal reconciliation after the War."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Christ Without Absolutes written by Sarah Coakley and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1988 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Future of Liberal Theology written by Mark D. Chapman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2002: Two hundred years after the publication of Schleiermacher's epoch-making Speeches, The Future of Liberal Theology presents a comprehensive and critical re-assessment of the past, present and future of the liberal tradition in Christian theology. In dialogue with the different forms of liberalism emerging from the Enlightenment, each of which is carefully defined, distinguished international theologians draw on a range of perspectives which represent the diversity of liberal theology. Discussing the criticisms of liberalism offered in the twentieth century, and engaging with contemporary theological debate which is often deeply hostile to liberalism, the conclusions offered for liberal theology range from the deeply pessimistic to the thoroughly optimistic. Students, clergy, and theological educators more broadly will value this critical reflection on the current state of theology and suggestions for its future course, together with the serious engagement with issues in theological education, which this book presents.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Theology of Religions written by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2009-08-20 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does Christianity relate to other religions? Beginning with a consideration of the biblical perspective, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen offers a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse explanations proposed by teachers of the church down through the ages. This indispensable guide is for anyone seeking to grasp Christianity?s relationship to world religions.
Download or read book Elasticized Ecclesiology written by Ulrich Schmiedel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study confronts the current crisis of churches. In critical and creative conversation with the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), Ulrich Schmiedel argues that churches need to be “elasticized” in order to engage the “other.” Examining contested concepts of religiosity, community, and identity, Schmiedel explores how the closure of church against the sociological “other” corresponds to the closure of church against the theological “other.” Taking trust as a central category, he advocates for a turn in the interpretation of Christianity—from “propositional possession” to “performative project,” so that the identity of Christianity is “done” rather than “described.” Through explorations of classical and contemporary scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and theology, Schmiedel retrieves Troeltsch’s interdisciplinary thinking for use in relation to the controversies that encircle the construction of community today. The study opens up innovative and instructive approaches to the investigation of the practices of Christianity, past and present. Eventually, church emerges as a “work in movement,” continually constituted through encounters with the sociological and the theological “other.”
