Eighteenth-Century Neology

This chapter summarizes key aspects of neology, the main expression of the German Protestant theological Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century. Neology construed Christianity as a practical, ethically oriented religion, consonant with modern knowledge and grounded in the self-reflective experience of the pious, reasonable subject. Steering a course between Protestant Orthodoxy, Pietism, and freethinking, proponents deployed history as a useful tool for their apologetic and reconstructive efforts. Historical scholarship offered a means of rethinking the nature and authority of scripture, of distancing the claims of the dogmatic tradition, and of recasting theology as a progressive academic enterprise. In historicizing scripture and creeds, neology shifted focus from dogma to the religious experience of the believing subject. While many of its concepts were developed in a more secular direction in later German intellectual history, neology’s central concerns were taken up by the liberal Protestant tradition of the following century.