Project Details
Projekt
The german society as reflected in theological ethics
Applicant
Professor Dr. Martin Laube
Subject Area
Protestant Theology
Term
from 2013 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 200984086
The subproject is based on the assumption that debates in Protestant theology and in the church are also debates about self-understanding and the interpretation of the contemporary society. While the first phase of the project focused on the fundamental crisis of orientation within German Protestantism in the 1950s and 1960s, the second phase deals with the 1970s and 1980s. The fundamental question of the project remains the same, i.e.: what normative images of society stood behind certain ethical debates and what do these debates show about the challenge in relating Protestantism to its surrounding society? The application includes two subprojects, both of which are intended as dissertation projects. The first subproject deals with the discovery of the idea of human dignity (Menschenwürdegedanke) in the field of theological ethics. It has been noted frequently that German Protestant theology introduced the idea of human dignity only gradually and relatively late, but an independent analysis of the reception of this idea has yet to be made. The second subproject is designed to discuss the Protestant dispute about the status confessionis. The declaration of a state of confessing is one of the sharpest weapons in protestant quarrels, drawn three times during the history of the old Federal Republic: in the 1958 debate about the nuclear armament, in the question on how to position oneself towards the apartheid regime of South Africa in 1977, and in the peace debate surrounding the NATO Double-Track Decision in 1982. All of these cases sparked fierce debates about the proclamation of the status confessionis. The basic idea of both of the subprojects is the assumption that the usages of these theological motifs show a peculiar ambivalence: In insisting on its Christian roots, the theological reception of the idea of human dignity could serve to stabilize the claim of a Christian prerogative over the fundamental values of the Federal Republic. Yet the idea of human dignity could also be used against its allegedly deficient secular counterpart in order to distinguish the churchs ethics from the pluralized society of the Federal Republic. In a similar manner, the proclamation of the status confessionis oscillates between both of these purposes, i.e. to charge a certain position ethically to enforce its thrust within a still widely Christian society, or, to the contrary, to establish the Evangelical church as a homogenous counterworld against the confusing mélange of a pluralistic society.
DFG Programme
Research Units
