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.When the Lutheran disputations began inearnest in the 1580s they were essentially basic affirmations of the principles of belief.In the following century the dialectic opened up, with candidates drawing on a range ofdisciplines, from history to geography to poetics, in order to engage the enemies of thefaith.Freshly minted neologisms were required in order to accommodate the spectrum historico theologica, exegetico theologica, and other mumbo-jumbo terms.9 And thiswas just one symptom of a general trend.Throughout the period of classical Lutheranorthodoxy, the theologians of the church extended the dialogue, and stretchedthe language and the concepts, in order to keep pace with intellectual developments.The thought at the end of the period was different in kind from the thought at the start,and this despite the fact that the basic purpose of the orthodox movement had been topreserve the core teachings of the faith.Lutheranism was especially predisposed to systematization.In the massive synthesesof Johann Gerhard, Martin Chemnitz, and Jacob Heerbrand we can see the effortsmade to bring the symbolic teachings of the church into harmony with the historicalteachings of Christianity, an exercise that was necessarily dialogic as the creeds, thechurch fathers, and the medieval authorities were re-examined in the midst of disputeswith Catholics and Calvinists.By the mid-seventeenth century, orthodox Lutheranismwas excessively discursive and referential, often proving points by amassing hugenumbers of authorities in the footnotes or (as with Hunnius) simply paraphrasingestablished texts.The culmination of this trend was Johann Andreas Quenstedt sDidactic, Polemical, or Systematic Theology (1685), a massive, all-embracing work ofdogmatics that set out to address every possible point of doctrine and place it in itshistorical context, ranging from the teachings of the ancient church to the works ofcontemporaries, Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed.Contrary to the intentions of theirauthors, which was to preserve the legacy unaltered and intact, works of this kindtended to open up the discourse.Lutheran thought constantly refashioned itselfthrough the modes of its own reproduction.10In essence, the issue of orthodoxy was historical rather than doctrinal, the centralproblematic of Protestant origins.How can a religion that is derived from timelessabsolutes be so closely bound up with human history? The constant need to justifyProtestantism and set it off from Roman Catholicism, which reached fever-pitch duringthe age of orthodoxy, was in large part in response to this question, and most ofthe apologists answered in the same vein: that there is a deeper history, the history of thetrue church, which has been buried for centuries beneath papal accretions.Thisapproach provided the magisterial Protestants with a plausible account of origins, andit inverted the charges of error and innovation and cast them back at the Catholics.Andyet even this narrative changed over time.178 RevivalsThe founder of Protestant historiography was Philipp Melanchthon, who was thefirst to invest the discipline with a theological imperative.Early histories of themovement, taking their cue from the anti-papalism of the humanists, had generallybeen moral or secular in approach.The Reformation was projected as the response ofChristian men against the fallacies and corruptions of Rome, a reading that sat wellwithin the history of the struggles between the German emperors and the popes.ButMelanchthon introduced an additional dimension, the idea that there had beena continual line of true teaching running throughout Christian history, a body ofbelief preserved and taught by the teachers of the faith that had been taken up by thereformers.With this, the two aspects of the magisterial narrative were established: onthe one hand, the idea that the faith had been preserved among select Christian men andwomen despite the efforts of the papacy; and on the other, that the history ofChristianity  that is, the history of the Catholic church  had been a history of decline,an enduring retreat from the purity of the apostolic faith.11The most influential histories in this vein were the works associated with the LutheranMatthias Flacius Illyricus, a former student of Melanchthon and one-time professor ofHebrew at Wittenberg, whose two mid-century projects, the Catalogus testium veritatis(1556) and Magdeburg Centuries (1559 74), established an interpretative template thatinformed Protestant historiography for over a century.Central to the analysis in theCatalogus was the idea of the witnesses to the faith (testes veritatis), the men and womenin the Christian past who had testified to the teaching of Christ despite the dangers ofexclusion or persecution.12 That they had been persecuted for their beliefs was theoutcome of the Roman Catholic Church having started to fall away from the true faithfrom around AD 300, and thus the history of Christianity according to the Catalogus wasessentially a trajectory of decline marked by the ineluctable rise of the papal Antichrist.Flacius went beyond Melanchthon in a number of respects, the two most significantbeing the emphasis he placed on the anti-papalism of the witnesses to the faith and thenotion that Protestant history was not just an account of the past but a study in prophecy.For the line of continuity represented in the witnesses has an obvious terminus in the riseof Luther, particularly within the context of Flacius s apocalyptical reading of the past,and this invested the work with a logic not featured in Melanchthon s work.All of historybecomes a battleground for the coming of Protestants.Flacius placed so much emphasis on the coming of the Protestants in general that hiswork had a broad appeal.It was easily appropriated by Calvinists and Anglicans, forinstance, to serve their agendas.The idea of the testes veritatis in particular became acentral concept in Protestant history, especially once it was adopted by the martyrologists.Both Foxe and Crespin drew from the Catalogus, for instance.By the age of orthodoxy,however, this notion of proto-Protestants rather than proto-Lutherans or proto-Calvininsts was proving problematic.It was allowing for too broad a church and thusundermining the authenticity of the witnesses in the process.13 By the late seventeenthcentury orthodox historians were already drawing back from the idea of a catalog of reformers before the Reformation in the general sense and looking more specifically forprecursors of their distinct confessions.But there was a more serious challenge to theFlacian art of history than the debates over the authenticity of the sources.At the turn of the century a survey of Christianity appeared that completely under-mined the historiographical paradigm established by magisterial historians such asRevivals 179Melanchthon and Flacius.Similar in approach to the Catalogus, but fundamentallydifferent in intention, was the Nonpartisan History of the Church and of Heretics(1699 1700) by the Lutheran Gottfried Arnold (1666 1714), the most eloquentvoice of the radical Pietists in the German lands.What distinguished Arnold s workfrom the magisterial narrative was his insistence that all church history was necessarily astory of decline, and that included the history of the Protestant church as well as theCatholic [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]