Galatians (108–9). Here, above all, Ranke found the ideas of God’s efficacious power in history and the hiddenness of God in history. In Luther and his affect on his age, Ranke could see how the world was given “a new skin,” and how in such epoch-making men the individual merged into the general (111). In the ‘Luther Fragment,” Hinrichs concluded, one can find the seed (Keim) of Ranke’s “universal-historical view” (124). As James M. Powell more recently stated, Ranke’s “Luther Fragment of 1817 reflected a religiosity which saw the hidden expression of the will of God,” and throughout his life “he saw a divine meaning and purpose in history.” Powell, “Introduction,” xiv.
3. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 105, 221–22 n. 19.
4. Ibid., 47.
5. Ibid., 104.
6. Ibid., 104–5.
7. See especially the collection of essays edited by Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, Weber’s “Protestant Ethic”: Origins, Evidence, Contexts.
8. For the significance of Herder’s intensive study of Luther at the time when he (Herder) was the court preacher at Bückeburg (1771–1776) for the development of his view of history, see Smith, 167–71, and Embach, Das Lutherbild Johann Gottfried Herder, especially 74, 88, 162–69. For the significance of Ranke’s intensive study of Luther’s writings in 1817 for his whole way of viewing and writing history, see Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History, 47–57. For a brief summary of the significance of Ranke’s early research on Luther and the Reformation for both of these fields of study, how he (Ranke) was “the first to recognize the religious significance of the Reformer on the scale of world history,” and how Ranke’s later Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (1839–47) “marks the beginning of a new era of historical study” and “establishes a radically new basis for the study of the Reformation as well as for the interpretation of Luther,” see Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther: An Introduction to His Life and Work, 218.
9. For a discussion of the latter part of this huge question, see Smith, Religion and the Rise of History, chapters three, four, and five.
10. Nipperdey, “Luther und die modernen Welt,” 35.
11. Ibid., 23.
12. Ibid.
13. For Nipperdey’s second main point, that “the modern world is a world of reflection and knowledge” and the significance of the Lutheran tradition for this, see Smith, 134–35.
14. Nipperdey, 36-37.
15. Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, lv (Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 73). Hereafter the translated volume is abbreviated as “Historism,” and the original work (1936)—which was Meinecke’s third large intellectual history—is abbreviated “Historismus.” It is important for the reader to know, however, (1) that the usual translation of the word Historismus is “historicism,” and (2) that this is the translation that I use except when I am referring to this English translation or quoting a passage from it.
16. Meinecke, Historismus, 2. Cf. Historism, lv.
17. Meinecke, Historism, lv.
18. This question contains my understanding of the word ethos. It has no direct connection with the way the term is used in Elert, Christian Ethos, for here the word ethos is associated primarily with ethical conduct (see especially 334). In Elert’s larger (two-volume) and more historical work called Morphologie des Luthertum, however, the word ethos is used in a broader way. See volume 1 of Elert’s The Structure of Lutheranism, called The Theology and Philosophy of Lutheranism. My use of the term ethos, however, was derived from a verbal statement of Joseph Sittler, and most of this essay was completed before I became familiar with Elert’s work.
chapter 1
Luther’s Two Basic Ways of Thinking and Viewing Life
In Luther’s eyes, the individuality of our own life’s journey reflects the universality of the course of God’s word. He finds this connection between the individual and the universal prefigured in Holy Scripture, especially Psalm 119. Those who pray this psalm fully surrender their own destiny to the destiny of God’s word. They see their relationship to God as nothing else than a relationship to his word.
—Oswald Bayer19
To make a true historian, I think two qualities are needed, the first of which is a participation and joy in the particular in and for itself. . . . But this is not enough. It is essential that the historian also have an eye for the universal.
—Leopold von Ranke20
From the sixteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century, but increasingly less so since that time, one could usually distinguish a Lutheran from a non-Lutheran if he or she understood what you were talking about if you mentioned (1) that a Christian is both sinner and justified “at the same time,” (2) the connected prepositions in, with, and under, (3) the Small Catechism, and (4) the three articles of the Creed. A knowledge of these four notions is helpful not only for understanding the development of Lutheranism but also for the development of German education, history, literature, philosophy, and theology since the sixteenth century.
To see and to understand a distinctively Lutheran ethos and a distinctively Lutheran way of viewing life, one must begin with the life, the religious experiences, and the writings of Martin Luther. “Not since Augustine,” Jaroslav Pelikan rightly claimed, “had the spiritual odyssey of one man and the spiritual exigency of Western Christendom coincided as they did now.”21
It is common knowledge that Luther’s life and work were shaped by three religious experiences: (1) the vow he took in 1505 to become a monk when he was struck to the ground by a lightning bolt, (2) the awesome experience of his first Mass in 1507 when he became a priest, and, most of all, (3) the revolutionary experience associated with the idea called justification by faith, an experience that took place sometime after he received his doctorate of theology (October 19, 1512), and after he began lecturing on the books of the Bible at the University of Wittenberg.
At this time Luther was a late-medieval theologian who followed the via moderna, or the “modern way,” rather than the via antiqua, or the “old way.” While the representatives of the via antiqua were followers of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the representatives of the via moderna were followers of William of Occam (1300–1349).
Occam is famous in the history of philosophy for his nominalism and for the principle known as Occam’s razor. While the representatives of the via antiqua held that universal concepts were the expressions
