On the Development of Hermeneutics in the Enlightenment

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Barth (Theology)

Prof. Dr. Claus Osthövener (Theology)

Deistic concepts of religion systematically assume that humans, within the boundaries of their natural cognitive facilities – that is without the supernatural expectations of a transcendental revelation – are capable of accessing a sphere which is uniquely deserving of the distinction of divinity. Research on the development of concepts of the religious in esotericism in and throughout the Enlightenment continues through other means in this project field. It shall be shown here how, through the paradigmatic cooperation of the Baumgarten students Johann Salomo Semler, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant, the critical, historical as well as moral, aesthetic and psychological methods of bible exegesis mature to a level where bible hermeneutics becomes a metahistory of theology. In this manner, the methods of biblical interpretation – as opposed to the traditional allegorical methods of exegesis – are also bound with anthropological strictness to human cognitive capacities and are thereby gradually released from the faithful acceptance of a religion of revelation. Religious criticism here is not a criticism of ideology, but – in terms of Kant – a critical examination of the limits to which each person is capable and in need of a rational religion. In the multi-faceted genesis of hermeneutics in the second half of the eighteenth century this indicates not only the modern transformation of the general understanding of rationality but also the modern transformation of the notion of religion.