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Introduction

The appeal to national character is generally a mere confession of ignorance, and in this case is untenable. . . . It was the power of religious influence, not alone, but more than anything else, which created the differences of which we are conscious today.

—Max Weber1

The gigantic historiographical work of Leopold von Ranke grew out of the ground of a Lutheran kind of spirit [Geistesart] and religiosity.

—Carl Hinrichs (1950)2

In his brilliant and provocative study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in the years 1904 and 1905, Max Weber (1864–1920) made the striking claim that it was “the power of religious influence, not alone, but more than anything else,” that created the national differences of which we are conscious today. At the present time, however, the religious origins of these national differences are not easily discernible since for centuries they have been trans­formed by what Weber called a process of “rationalization,” and Entzauberung.

For Weber, the phrase Entzauberung der Welt, or the “disenchantment of the world,” suggested a process of taking the magic out of life.3 Since he believed (1) that civilizations were based on religions, (2) that originally religion was based on magic, and (3) that the basic tendency of Western civilization was the increasing tendency to rationalize all aspects of life, rationalization and disenchantment were two sides of the same coin, or the same basic tendency. Since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, however, this two-sided process has taken place in different ways within different religious traditions.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber explored the relationship between Calvinism and modern capitalism. Here he did not claim that the Calvinist ethic was the cause of modern capitalism, but he did show that some Calvinist beliefs were conducive to the development of a capitalist spirit and to the rise of modern capitalism as “an historical individual” (individuum) or as “a complex of elements associated with historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance.”4

Those religious beliefs that were conducive to the development of this aspect of modern life, he called rational, and those religious beliefs that were not conducive to the development of this particular aspect of modern life, he called traditional. In order to show how a particular religious ethic was instrumen­tal for the develop­ment of modern capitalism, however, he had to create an “ideal type” (his and Otto Hintze’s basic term for what Western scholars today call a model) not only of a Calvinist sense of calling but also of a Catholic and a Lutheran sense of calling as well.

For Weber, Calvinism was more rational than Catholicism and Lutheranism for the development of modern capitalism partly because it eliminated all “magical” means to salvation. For the Calvinist, he argued, the sacraments were not a means to the attainment of grace.5 This complete elimination of salvation through the Church—which Weber believed was by no means developed to its final conclu­sions in Lutheranism—“was what formed the absolutely decisive difference from Catholicism.” According to Weber, “That great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world, which had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came here to its logical conclusion.”6

Through this “ideal-type” or “model-building” methodology, which Weber created at this time, he was able to suggest how the rationalizing of a particular religious tradition influenced the development of one of the main characteristics of the modern Western world. Although many scholars have participated in the debate concerning religion and the rise of capitalism that began with this book,7 few historians, philosophers, and theologians have attempted to examine other aspects of Western thought in a similar way. Since both Johann Gustav Herder (1744–1803) and Leopold von Ranke developed their basic historical outlooks especially at the time when they were deeply involved in a study of Luther’s writings,8 is it possible that “a Lutheran kind of spirit” was “traditional” in regard to the development of modern capitalism, and, at the same time, “rational” in regard to the rise of a specifically modern kind of historical consciousness?9 And, most of all, is it possible to capture and portray the nature of a distinctively “Lutheran kind of spirit and religiosity” in a relatively brief story and essay?

In an insightful essay concerning “Luther and the Modern World,” Thomas Nipperdey (1927–1992) suggested that the modernizing potential of Lutheranism was actualized in a “second phase of Protestantism,” a phase that coincided with the rise of the modern world since the late eighteenth century. Like Max Weber, Nipperdey believed that “the disenchantment of the world and the rationalization of our conduct of life . . . did not take place against religion but rather the reverse, through religion.”10 This hypothesis, he suggested, could be substantiated by looking at Luther, for Luther “established themes of life, a grasping of the world, social-norms, and behavioral patterns which in all forms of his church remained virulent.” For Nipperdey, Luther’s “intensification of religion is one of the most important roots of the modern world, of the modern type of human being.”11

For Nipperdey, Luther was not “the father of the modern world,” but he created something that Nipperdey and the sociologist Eisenstadt called a “modernizing potential” or a mentality” that strongly favored “the rise and establishment of the modern world since the late eighteenth century when other modernizing factors—economic, political, and institutional—appeared and as the pre-modern elements of the world and also the old Protestantism became weaker.” In this “second phase of Protestantism,” Nipperdey claimed, “the Lutheran modernizing potential became actual.”12

In this helpful essay, Nipperdey summarized how the modernizing potential of Lutheranism was actualized under six main points, just one of which can be emphasized here.13 First of all, the modern world is individualistic, and here Luther’s “personalistic faith” contributed to an “inner freedom” that not only helped to make the individual independent but also contributed to the development of what “we Germans” call Lutheran Innerlichkeit, or inward looking. According to Nipperdey, the theme of life for Luther and Lutheran Christians was “God and the soul, not God and the world as with the Calvinists”; and he also thought that the secular German ideal of Bildung, or education as “self-cultivation” and “self-realization,” followed from this Lutheran Innerlichkeit.14

Now Nipperdey was certainly right when he insisted that the modern world is “individualistic” and that Luther’s “personalistic” faith contributed to this characteristic of the modern world. But since the words “individuality,” “individualism,” and “individualizing” are modern words that convey a multitude of meanings and connotations, is there a less “loaded” word or term that we can use for Luther’s very particularizing way of thinking and viewing life?

In his “Preliminary Remarks” to Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936), Friedrich Meinecke claimed that the rise of historicism was “one of the greatest intellectual [geistige] revolutions that has ever taken place in Western thought.”15 Historicism, he said, deserved to be ranked alongside the Reformation as the second great achievement of the German Geist,16 a word that can be translated either “spirit” or “mind.”

Like Ernst Troeltsch and Otto Hintze, Meinecke associated the term historicism with the concepts of individuality and development (Entwicklung); but like his two friends, he defined this term in his own way. For Meinecke, historicism was (1) “nothing else than the application of the new life-governing principles achieved by the great German movement extending from Leibniz to the death of Goethe—to the historical world”; (2) “more than just a method of the human studies, for life and the world appeared differently when one had become accustomed to viewing things in this new way”; (3) “the substituting of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history”; and (4) based on a feeling for the individual or a sense of individuality that it created.17 For Meinecke, Johann Gottfried Herder was the key figure for the rise of this new historical outlook, an outlook that culminated in the work of Leopold von Ranke.

It is significant that in this very influential intellectual history Meinecke did not attempt to show in any detail the significance of Martin Luther for what he called the second great achievement of “the German Geist,” that he did not mention or discuss either the Gospel of John or the word logos, and that he did not emphasize the significance of Luther’s love for the particular and the significance of his dynamic way of thinking, teaching, preaching, and viewing life for Hamann, for Herder, or for their age as a whole. The main tradition on which he did focus was the significance of Neoplatonism for the rise of historicism, but were the ideas that he traced in this history also based on a distinctly Lutheran way of viewing life?

In the year 1982, a study group representing the colleges of the American Lutheran Church asked Joseph Sittler (1904–1987) the following question. “Dr. Sittler,” they asked. “How is Lutheran higher education distinctive?”

First of all, Sittler suggested that teachers should train minds to see particulars and “percepts” before they teach concepts. Second, he suggested that Lutheran distinctiveness was not really a matter of doctrine. Rather, he said, it was “an ethos, an ethos that has kept alive the dialectic of the mystery of life.”

Is there a Lutheran “ethos” or a disposition, character, attitude, spirit, or set of values that Lutherans share as a specific people, culture, or group that distinguishes them from other groups?18 If so, can this ethos be seen and portrayed as a particular way of thinking and as a way of viewing life? If so, how have Lutherans maintained this ethos through the centuries?

1. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 88–89.

2. Hinrichs, “Rankes Lutherfragment von 1817 und der Ursprung seiner Universal-historisichen Anschauung,” 299. See also Hinrichs, Ranke und die Geschichtstheologie der Goethezeit, 106–11. According to Hinrichs, the chief problem for this “Lutheran Christian with an active religiosity” was and remained how to connect the singular and the particular with the general, the universal, and the absolute (106). The first main source and help that Ranke found in solving this problem was Luther, especially Luther’s interpretation of Psalm 101 and his commentary on Paul’s letter to the 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.