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The History of Twentieth-Century Christianity as a Challenge for Historians*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2011

Hartmut Lehmann
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Extract

One hundred years ago, the discipline of church history was well established within institutions of higher learning in Western societies. The heirs of Leopold von Ranke and Philip Schaff were well versed in the range of topics that church history comprised. Church history was an integral part of the study of theology. Church historians published handbooks and had their own journals. All church historians—those with a Catholic and those with a Protestant affiliation, the members of state churches, and those belonging to church bodies, built on the principle of voluntarism—seemed to have a common agenda. This was the story of Christian churches throughout the centuries.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , September 2002 , pp. 585 - 599
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2002

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References

1. Lehmann, Hartmut, ed., Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa. Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997)Google Scholar; McLeod, Hugh, Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 (New York: St. Martin's, 2000)Google Scholar.

2. This observation characterizes the state of Church history in Germany; it is not true to the same degree for church historians in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States, nor for the church historians in countries such as South Africa, Ghana, or Nigeria.

3. Noll, Mark A., The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002)Google Scholar.

4. The first scholar who used this term was Eric Vögelin, in 1938: Die politischen Religionen, new ed. by Opitz, Peter J. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993)Google Scholar. In the past few years, Hans Maier has led a research team at the University of Munich in which the dimensions of the concept “politische Religionen” were investigated and discussed.

5. Bergen, Doris L., Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Lindt, Andreas, Das Zeitalter des Totalitarismus (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1981)Google Scholar.

6. Lehmann, Hartmut, “Hitlers evangelische Wähler,” in Lehmann, Hartmut, Protestcm-tische Weltsichten. Transformationen seit dem 17. jahrhundert. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 130-52Google Scholar.

7. I develop this argument in more detail in Lehmann, Hartmut, “Grenzziehungen und Grenzüberschreitungen im Pietismus,” Pietismus und Neuzeit (PuN) 27 (2001): 7–18Google Scholar.

8. Riesebrodt, Martin, Die Rückkehr der Religionen. Fundamentalismus und der ‘Kampf der Kulturen’ (Munich: H. C. Beck, 2000), 47Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., 45.

10. As a model case study see Medick, Hans, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen 1650–1900. Lokalgeschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996)Google Scholar.

11. At Duke in April 2001.