Martin Luther’s Two Ways of Viewing Life
and the Educational Foundation of a Lutheran Ethos
•
leonard s. smith
MARTIN LUTHER’S TWO WAYS OF VIEWING LIFE AND THE educational foundation OF A LUTHERAN ETHOS
Copyright © 2011 Leonard S. Smith. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
isbn 13: 978-1-55635-992-7
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-687-6
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Smith, Leonard S.
Martin Luther’s two ways of viewing life and the educational foundation of a Lutheran ethos / Leonard S. Smith.
xiv + 80 p. ; 21 cm.—Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 13: 978-1-55635-992-7
1. Luther, Martin, 1483–1546—Influence. I Title.
br334.2 .565 2011
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
In memory of my parents:
The Rev. A. Leonard Smith
and Pearl Peterson Smith
Martin Luther on Writing
Ask a writer, preacher, or speaker whether writing and speaking is work; ask a schoolmaster whether teaching and training boys is work. The pen is light; that is true. Also there is no tool of any of the trades that is easier to get than the writer’s tool, for all that is needed is goose feathers and there are enough of them everywhere. But the best part of the body (which is the head) must lay hold here and do most of the work, and the noblest of the members (which is the tongue), and the high faculty (which is speech). In other occupations it is only the fist or the foot or the back or some other such member that has to do the work; and while they are at it, they can sing and jest, which the writer cannot do. “Three fingers do it,” they say of writers; but a man’s whole body and soul work at it.
—Martin Luther, “A Sermon on Keeping Children in School,” Works of Martin Luther (Philadelphia, 1931), 1:170.
(CF: LW 46:249 and WA 30:574)
Preface
This essay was originally written as a separate chapter for a larger historical inquiry called Religion and the Rise of History: Martin Luther and the Cultural Revolution in Germany, 1760–1810 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009). Although the present essay is a complete story in itself, as the title indicates, the reader will note that from the beginning the question of the relationship between religion and the rise of history has been of central importance for both inquiries. One of the reasons that this inquiry is published here as a separate story is because of the nature of the audience for which both inquiries were written.
Like the original study, this essay is written primarily for a general audience—students, teachers, professors, pastors, priests, and anyone interested in Western intellectual history, religion, and historical thought and/or in the Lutheran tradition from the time of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). Unlike the larger study, however, this study focuses just on these two scholars, one religious tradition, and one time period. Therefore it can more easily be used by students, teachers, professors, religious leaders, and others as a text or supplemental reading for a class, seminar, or group discussion.
Like the original historical inquiry, this essay is based on two main personal experiences from the early 1970s. The first personal experience took place when I was reading a passage from a young Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) who was answering (in 1828) a critic of his first work, his epoch-making Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494 to 1514 (1824). “This passage,” Ranke said, “is part of the attempt I have made to present the general directly through the particular without long digression. Here I have sought to approach no J. Müller or no ancient writer but the appearance itself, just as it emerges, only externally particularity, internally—and so I understand Leibnitz—a generality, significance, spirit . . . In and with the event I have sought to portray its course and spirit, and I have strained to ascertain its characteristic traits.”1
When I first read this passage in 1971, the reference to the general and the particular, generality and particularity, external and internal, appearance and spirit, and especially the way he used the prepositions in and with sounded very Lutheran to me. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the connected prepositions (especially for Lutherans)—“in, with, and under”—could be a key to understanding not only Ranke’s way of writing history but also the Lutheran tradition as a whole? Could Ranke’s way of writing history be called not only an at-the-same-time way of viewing and writing history but also an in-with-and-under way? Did not Ranke always try to present the general or the universal in, with, under, and through the particular? But why did Ranke refer to Leibniz in this passage?
The answer to the latter question soon came to me (1972) when a colleague was introducing Leibniz and the Monadology to a select group of first-year college students in a team-taught, interdisciplinary (history, literature, philosophy, and religion) honors course called “Humanities Tutorial.” As he helped those young minds picture those unique soul-like substances called monads, each programmed to do its thing in and through the composite body that it directed and within an organic, pluralistic, harmonius, and God-given universe that was the best of all possible worlds, the connection suddenly became clear!
At that moment I became quite excited, for now—for the first time—I could see the origins of the German idealist tradition and the main link between Luther and Melanchthon, on the one hand, and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1783), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Ranke, and the German idealist tradition through Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) and Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954) on the other. Now I could see how, at least is some respects, the Lutheran religious tradition was conducive to the rise of German “historicism” and to a distinctly modern type of Western historiography. Thus this passage from the young Ranke and these two experiences were the starting point of this decades-long historical inquiry.
The word “Historismus,” usually translated as “historicism,” became a word of central importance in Western historical thought primarily through the work of three great scholars at the University of Berlin during and after World War I: Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Meinecke, and Otto Hintze (1861–1940). Although each of these great scholars defined historicism in a different way, they agreed (1) that
