Johann Salomo Semler, the German Enlightenment, and Protestant theology's historical turn

This dissertation investigates the early career of University of Halle theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725-91), generally regarded as the founder of historical-critical theology and a leading spokesman of the German Enlightenment. Viewing Semler's developing thought in relation to the institutional and political-religious environment of mid-eighteenth-century Halle and Prussia as well as the broader intellectual context of the European Enlightenment, the study analyzes his transformation of theology into a Wissenschaft, a scholarly enterprise centered on historical study. The thesis argues that Semler advocated historical criticism in an effort to bring about the revitalization of theology in an environment dominated by Pietism and the nascent Aufklarung. Semler initially seized on history for apologetic purposes. Historical study promised to defend biblical revelation against the attacks of deists and freethinkers and, still more, against the subjectivity of "enthusiastic" Pietists, whose hermeneutics neglected the historical sense of Scripture. But Semler soon saw the potential of historical criticism to reform the Lutheran confessional tradition, including its approach to biblical interpretation. In his hands, critical history became a tool for both deconstructing confessional orthodoxy and reconstructing Christian theology so as to meet the perceived intellectual and moral demands of the day. In doing so, Semler drew heavily on the tradition of Christian humanism. Associated paradigmatically with Desiderius Erasmus but still vital in the eighteenth century, the humanist tradition combined philological and historical study with a latitudinarian religious stance that stressed non-dogmatic, individualized, and ethical expressions of faith. Semler's achievement was to wed Christian humanism to Lutheran theology, thereby effecting a metamorphosis of the confessional theological tradition. The thesis concludes that Semler's attempts to combine an a priori conception of "moral Christianity" with an historical-critical approach to Scripture proved unstable and, ironically, re-introduced the problem of subjectivity that his hermeneutics had been designed, in large part, to mitigate.