Theology and cultural science: An Introduction to the works of Ernst Troeltsch

正準備進入近代神學作為知識學的研究，在網上看到一段關於特洛爾奇的文字，抄錄如下：

Ernst Troeltsch is a classical diagnostician of modern culture. His works in many fields include writings on theology and philosophy, the history of culture, and politics. As a theologian in Heidelberg and a philosopher in Berlin, Troeltsch went beyond the limits of traditional disciplines. He wanted to lay the foundations of an historical science of culture which, from an analysis of modern society, was intended to obtain normative orientation for behavior relevant to the present.

Born in 1865, Ernst Troeltsch began his publication activities as a Protestant theologian. His comprehensive formulations of questions in regard to the science of culture grew out of the problems of a modern, historical-critical theology. A critical theology which took the modern period's revolutions of thought seriously would have to found Christian claims of validity in new ways. Troeltsch wanted to set Christian tradition free, without any dogmatic limitation, for a critical historical view. Through radical historicizing he at the same time wanted to point out its lasting present importance. His work is characterized by the conviction that Christianity in the culture of Europe and America presents a non-relinquishable guarantee of the freedom of the individual in regard to all those modern tendencies which threaten freedom.

In order to comprehend the special characteristics of the modern period, Troeltsch did research on the religious motivating forces involved in the origin of modern culture. He investigated the importance of Protestantism for the origin of the modern world -such was the content of a well-known lecture at the Convention of German Historians in 1906 (Protestantism and Progress: a Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World) .In his The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches he also illuminated the special cultural importance of the various Christian denominations and their ethics. Having become sensitive to the fractures and contradictions of modern society, he drew a picture of the present in which the experience of crises at the turn of the century was characteristic. Rationalistic technology serving a particular purpose, capitalistic economics, and the bureaucratization of politics were diagnosed by him as limitations of the freedom of the individual. As the result of his historical and sociological analyses, Troeltsch considered the processes of growing pluralization to be irrevocable. Nevertheless, in the variety of value orientations vying with one another, he looked for basic ethical convictions which would give a new form to the relationship, full of tensions, between the freedom of the individual and the political order. In numerous studies on Historicism and its Problems, he sought to reconcile with each other practice-oriented, individualizing universal history, and the problem of the validity in naturallaw of ethical norms, and to formulate a modern "cultural synthesis." Troeltsch had a decisive influence on the theoretical founding of parliamentary democracy in Weimar on the basis of this concept of a "European cultural synthesis." Also in its relations to politics his work directs one to the center of the controversies regarding the importance of culture within the historical sciences of culture.

A complete edition of Ernst Troeltsch's writings has been desirable for a long time. Troeltsch himself had published between 1912 and 1922 three volumes, the Collected Writings. After his death in February of 1923, Hans Baron edited a fourth volume and various collections of Troeltsch’s political and historical writings. Up to now they have provided the basis for how his work has been received. Nevertheless, the older editions only offer an excerpt from the works, which were published in numerous places, and they frequently present Troeltsch’s texts only in an abbreviated form revised by another person. The new complete edition will thus follow historical-critical principles and for the first time make all texts published in print by Troeltsch available in a critical form adequate to scholarly demands. Troeltsch's literary remains were destroyed for the most part. Nevertheless, several hand copies of Troeltsch’s writings have been transmitted in which Troeltsch had noted numerous corrections and supplements. In addition to the various printed versions of a text, the complete edition will also document these hand-written marginalia. It will also contain Troeltsch's dictated Heidelberg lectures in theology as well as the parliamentary speeches and public statements which he made and expressed from 1910 to 1914 as a representative of Heidelberg University in the First Chamber of Baden, as well as in 1919 as representative of the German Democratic Party or as undersecretary of the ministry of culture in the Prussian National Assembly. The historical-critical edition will make Ernst Troeltsch’s letters available, of which only a small part has been printed up to now.

Finally, it will also contain his academic evaluations and the appeals written by him in regard to the politics of scholars.Ernst Troeltsch .Kritische Gesamtausgabe will be jointly edited by theologians and historians. It is intended to help make the work of a Protestant intellectual of the classical modern period better available who displayed a broad effect in very disparate contexts of discussion within the disciplines. One hope connected to the critical edition of his work is that the inner unity of the historical sciences of culture may be advanced. Texts of the early 20th century are made newly available which can provide strength for orientation in the debates of the late 20th century in regard to self understanding.