The notion that the Reformers were “newly discovered,”¹ that Martin Luther experienced a “Renaissance” in Germany in 1919-21 with the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Weimar Republic, is a very paradoxical one. This rediscovery of the historical Reformation and its theology supposedly occurred at the precise moment that the historical method lost the pre-eminence that it had enjoyed in German theology throughout the nineteenth century. Particularly between the two wars, dogmatic theology replaced history as the dominant approach that shaped the other areas of Protestant theological study.

Wolfgang Trillhaas, a student of many of...

Karl Holl attended Ernst Troeltsch’s lecture of 1906 in Stuttgart.¹ Up until then he had written one slight essay on Luther.² Since Troeltsch afterwards added the part of the published 1911 pamphlet that treated Luther in substance, it cannot have offended Holl in 1906, but Holl was nevertheless offended. The point at issue was that Troeltsch's notion of modernity seemed inspired by a politics that wanted Germany to pattern itself on Anglo-American democracy. Undoubtedly, the institutions of related northern European Protestant peoples were modern and worthy of respect - Holl studied Calvin and British religious figures, and with his allegiance...

Walter von Loewenich, looking back at the previous decade of Luther studies from the vantage of 1948, singled out the excellence of a book by Otto Wolff,Die Haupttypen der neueren Lutherdeutung(The Main Types of Recent Interpretation of Luther; 1938). He called it “the best and most substantial study of this topic that we have in Germany.”¹ Loewenich noted Wolff's disparagement of the Dialectical Theology's contribution to Luther studies, but he countered that Wolff's own critique of Holl and others was heavily indebted to that theological school. Although he agreed with Wolff that Barth, Gogarten, and others in the...

Werner Elert and Paul Althaus, both professors at Erlangen University in the Weimar years, are the most conservative of our protagonists. Both politically and theologically conservative, they appeared to Holl students such as the young Robert Stupperich as “old fashioned.”¹ From their own point of view, however, they were determined to participate in adapting Lutheranism to the needs of their time. A stand-pat orthodoxy taught in the traditional manner of Melanchthon and theloci communeswas not a satisfactory theology for the twentieth century.² The authoritative confessions of Lutheranism had not lost their authority, but they could not be merely...

Emanuel Hirsch was one of the most brilliant theologians of his time, a scholar of vast learning and productivity. He wrote in all the divisions of theology, with the characteristic exception of Old Testament,¹ since he had a distaste for Jewish religiosity and legalism. His philosophical work was significant in its own right, and it also influenced the character of his theology. Although Hirsch repeatedly endorsed the post-war Protestant awakening with its assault on cultural Protestantism, he was, much more than Althaus, Elert, Gogarten, Earth, or even Holl, the heir of the intellectual, historicist theologians of the pre-war era. For...

A minimal conclusion from the present study is that Luther research was one of the battlefields where the Evangelical theological schools of the Weimar era aired their differences. Moreover, their different approaches, both to Luther scholarship and to the struggles within the German Evangelical church in 1933-34 (to be described in the epilogue), confirm that three distinct schools were in conflict: the Karl Holl school, which has subsequently been called the “Luther Renaissance,” the Dialectical Theology, and the confessional Lutherans. Although there was friendly exchange between the confessional Lutherans and the Luther Renaissance and both used theZeitschrift für systematishe...

This study is about the origins of an interpretation of Martin Luther which arose in the Weimar years and dominated not only in Germany but also in the United Kingdom and North America until the 1960s, and which is still a strong minority position among scholars in these countries to the present day. It is not a study of the origins of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, there is some point in seeing how our protagonists divided when confronted with the destruction of democracy and the emergence of the totalitarian state in 1933.

Emanuel Hirsch endorsed Hitler early an existential choice,...