Suchergebnisse

Der Artikel geht aus von einer Beschreibung der Rolle, die die evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR im Herbst 1989 gespielt haben. Die Wende ist keine »protestantische Revolution« gewesen, aber insbesondere in der Anfangszeit kam den Kirchen eine erhebliche Bedeutung für die politische Entwicklung zu. Bemerkenswert war, dass die Kirchen zu einem solchen letztlich politischen Beitrag bereit waren; der Autor argumentiert, dass hierfür die Erfahrung der Ökumenischen Versammlungen in den 80er Jahren eine bedeutende Vorbereitung geleistet.

It is conventional to see individualisation or privatisation as one of the chief responses to religion in modernity. In this paper, I explore a different line of argument, the attempt to align religion with the cohesion of communities. I take my starting point in antiquity, specifically Varro's idea of political theology and its critique in Augustine's City of God. I then show how these ideas were picked up and transformed by various thinkers since the seventeenth century: Rousseau, de Maistre, Boland, Comte, and Durkheim. It becomes clear that both liberal and conservative thinkers during these centuries found the notion attractive that religion is needed as a bond holding societies together. This created a problematic relationship between religious and political dynamics.

The concept of modernity has emerged as a major philosophical, theological, and sociological category of interpretation in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It was meant to embrace fundamental changes to the fabric of Western culture, including the rise of capitalism, liberalism, democracy, and secularity. From its inception, references to Luther and the Reformation have been a frequent element of this kind of theory. The first major theorist of modernity in this sense was arguably Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, who set the tone of subsequent contributions by aligning modernity with subjectivity. For him, the religious dimension of this development was crucial, and he was explicit in his claim that it was the Reformation that brought the turn to subjectivity in the realm of religion. A side effect of the turn to subjectivity was the alienation of the subject from the world. Modernity is thus deeply ambivalent, and so is Protestantism. Later thinkers developed these insights further, but also criticized the identification of Luther with the origin of modernity, pointing to continuities between his theology and earlier, medieval thought.