Martin Luther's Two Ways of Viewing Life and the Educational Foundation of a Lutheran Ethos. Leonard S. Smith
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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.
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