Bretschneiders Bibliothek

This is probably a long shot, but in the spirit of a recent post I thought it was worth asking.  I'm working on a paper that considers Karl Bretschneider's thought on reason and revelation in relation to its Enlightenment precursors.  The other day I ran across Verzeichniss der Bibliothek des Generalsuper. K. G. Bretschneider, which looks to be a catalogue of his personal library in Gotha.  This source would be a great help in determining exactly whom Bretschneider was reading; I'm especially curious to see which (if any) English philosophers he was reading, as he doesn't tend to cite these in his works. 

Unfortunately the volume doesn't seem to be digitized and I can only find it at the University of Tübingen, with a non-circulating status.  I've looked around a bit in some of the Thüringian archives online, but with no luck.  Does anyone know if this volume is available elsewhere, or is digitized somewhere?

A few items...

• In the latest issue of American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Gary Dorrien offers us a taste of his new book coming out this year. 

• As Princeton Theological Seminary moves into its presidential search, a letter to the selection committee calls for recognition of the evangelical presence at the seminary and consideration of this tradition and its commitment to mission as the "mother of theology." (letter pdf) 

• A new site archiving the work of Lucas Cranach, famous for his portraits of Martin Luther.

• Benjamin Guyer on "+Robinson and an Elizabethan Apocryphon"... I love the historical sobriety that suddenly and unexpectedly gives way to the last line of the penultimate paragraph, "— as if Elizabeth were some sort of proto-1960s hippie-dippie!"  

• Academic frustration with Elsevier has recently reached the point of broader cultural visibility, with many angry editorials and a petition.   Readers will know that this is not a new topic here, and of course I support its new-found momentum. The episode of Candide meeting Martin strikes me as an appropriate commentary: "He assembled them at his inn and gave them supper on condition that each took an oath to give a faithful account of his life-story; promising in return to choose the one who seemed to him most to be pitied and to have most cause for being discontented with his lot [...] He finally decided in favor of a poor scholar who had worked ten years for the publishing houses of Amsterdam, taking the view that there was no occupation in the world which could more disgust a man."

• Mike Allen has a new book coming out - an introduction and reader for the Church Dogmatics.

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philosophical libraries

I stumbled upon an amazing site the other day (via Early Modern Thought Online) run by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and the Università di Cagliari.  Biblioteche dei Filosofi is a database of the private libraries of great thinkers over the past few centuries.  The site includes Nicholas of Cusa, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Stillingfleet, Zwingli, Goethe, Arminius, and many others.  It looks like for most of the personalities, a pdf of a previously published index volume is included that lists the holdings of their personal library.  These are of course the old and out-of-copyright versions; for instance, Georg Reimer's 1835 list of Schleiermacher's library is included rather than the more recent critical editions. This site offers a lot for curious exploration, as well as useful research material.

The Biblioteche also has an extensive explanation of the project that is worth reading, and they are looking for contributors.

A few items...

...in the journal literature.

• A relatively new journal - The Journal of Episcopal Church Canon Law - is being published by the Virginia Theological Seminary.  

• The latest issue of the Scottish Journal of Theology is full of articles that look interesting... Najeb Awad on Augustine's de Trinitate as de Spirito Sancto ; Adam Eitel on Thomas Aquinas and Victor Preller ; John Webster on Torrance and Scripture ; and Kevin Hector on the Barthian controversy over trinity and election. 

• The forthcoming 2012 issue of Medioevo is a theme issue on "Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate
  and Its Fortune in Medieval Philosophy."

•  Medieval Mystical Theology, which replaced the Eckhart Review in 2011, will now publish two issues per year.

Jan. 9 - "Godforsakenness as the End of Prophecy"

I will be sharing a paper with the theology workshop here at the Divinity School, entitled "Godforsakenness as the End of Prophecy: a proposal from Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre".  If you're in the area, I'd be happy to see you there.

The Southern Cone and Anglican Unity

The ACNS has just released a statement from the province of the Southern Cone, which has approved the new Anglican Communion Covenant.  This is good news for progress in Anglican unity, and a change from the previous situation, when then-primate Gregory Venables signed the Oxford Statement and affirmed that "the current text [of the Covenant] is fatally flawed and so support for this initiative is no longer appropriate."

Most interesting, to me, is the status of the Southern Cone in its relationship with the North American churches, and how this affects its standing in the wider communion.  Last October I discussed the dismissal of the Southern Cone from ecumenical bodies because of its intervention in the affairs of other Anglican provinces.  Kenneth Kearon had inquired about this transgression of the Windsor moratoria, with no response.  In today's statement from the Southern Cone, however, we read:

the Southern Cone had held churches in North America under its wing for some time while the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) was formed. However, the Province has not maintained jurisdiction over any local churches there for over a year. As a result, all so called ‘border crossings’ by any provincial members ceased (as of October, 2010) even though the Southern Cone still remains in impaired communion with US and Canadian Provinces. It is hoped that the Covenant can now provide Communion stability. 

This is an argument I've been making for a while... that continuing Anglican groups who have been in a situation of oversight from other provinces need to get out on their own and move into the ACNA as quickly as possible.  Oversight from elsewhere, even if justified by Gospel purposes, means that these provinces remain delinquent as far as the Windsor Report and the canons of the Anglican churches are concerned.

If the Southern Cone is claiming that their border crossing ended in October of 2010, it's a shame that they never established communication with Kearon in order to prevent dismissal from the Unity, Faith, and Order Commission around the same time.  I'm not sure what their current status is in this body, but hopefully the organizational machinery can now start to turn in the direction of reinstating their delegate, if this process has not begun already.  The acceptance of the Covenant also raises questions about the future direction of GAFCON... that such an important province as the Southern Cone has affirmed the Covenant is hopefully a signal that minds are beginning to change from the rather harsh views that have come from conservative quarters about the viability of a covenanted Anglican future.

A few items...

We are happily away from immediate responsibilities of work and school for a few weeks -- a much needed holiday with family.  I've just finished reading H. Stuart Hughes' Consciousness and Society, which I have been meaning to get to ever since encountering it in the footnotes of Pauck's little Harnack-Troeltsch biography.  I would definitely recommend the book (with a few hesitations) for a survey of a pivotal period in recent intellectual history.  Interestingly, Hughes was pretty dismissive of Troeltsch, presenting him as a decidedly second-rate thinker throughout (a worthwhile criticism to consider, I think, though a bit too harsh as presented).  I am now into a much-needed rereading of Schleiermacher's On Religion, and then on to his Hermeneutics and Criticism. 

• Charles Morerod has been replaced by Serge Thomas Bonino as the general secretary of the International Theological Commission.  I mentioned Morerod earlier this year in relation to some odd statements about theology and philosophy.

• Hildegard of Bingen will be made a doctor of the church.

• Congratulations to two PTS theologians... W. Travis McMacken for successfully defending, and David Congdon for an editing  position with IVP.

• Difficulties have arisen between the Anglican Mission in the Americas and the Province of Rwanda. AMiA bishops have broken (and created schism?) with Rwanda.  Time will tell what future oversight will look like... perhaps a move towards ACNA?

•  The latest issue of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal is out, celebrating 25 years of the Ecclesiastical Law Society.  Included in the issue is a reprinting of the late Eric Kemp's "The Spirit of the Canon Law and its Application in England," which was given as the keynote address of the Society's first meeting and published in the first issue of the journal.

"What did patristic research look like 100 years ago?"

In commemoration of its fifteenth year, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum has published a theme issue on the historiography of the patristic period around 1911.  Included are articles on patristic scholarship in Germany, Armenia, Belgium, and Italy.  There are also articles covering important works published during this time such as the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum and the third edition of the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche.  The following is taken from the opening editorial:

The Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum/Journal of Ancient Christianity (ZAC) is celebrating its fifteenth “birthday” this year. On this occasion, the editors have decided to dedicate the thematic issue not to a specific topic from Early Christianity but to a question pertaining to research history: “What did patristic research look like 100 years ago?” The issue focuses, above all, on the German context, given that patristics played a prominent, if not central, role in German academic life of the late Wilhelmine period. This perspective is complemented by observations on the situation in Belgium and the Netherlands, Armenia and Italy. These angles are, of course, paradigmatic, and the selection was made for pragmatic reasons. For research on France and the English-speaking area, let us refer to the conference proceedings edited by Jacques Fontaine et al. (Patristique et Antiquité Tardive en Allemagne et en France de 1870 à 1930, Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1993) and to recent studies published by Elizabeth A. Clark, respectively. The contribution looking at Armenia shall serve as an incentive to produce analogous research for other linguistic areas as well. The same goes for the entire Russian speaking area.

A few items...

• Erik Peterson's Theological Tractates has been translated by Michael J. Hollerich and is out from Stanford UP.  Hollerich has a post up at Political Theology about the volume.

• David Brakke is moving to Ohio State University, and in the meantime will be teaching a spring course at the University of Chicago on Gnosticism.

•  Two forthcoming articles in Religious Studies on religious experience: 
• Gorazd Andrejč, "Bridging the Gap Between Social and Existential-Mystical Interpretations of Schleiermacher's ‘Feeling’" 
• Stephen Bush, "Concepts and religious experiences: Wayne Proudfoot on the cultural construction of experiences"

•  A cfp for an edited volume... Biblical Philosophy? Exploratory Essays.

J. Kameron Carter at the University of Chicago

This is a bit late notice, but J. Kameron Carter will be coming to speak for the Race and Religion workshop here at the University of Chicago tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 3 at 4:30, in Swift Hall.  He will be speaking on “Religion and the Future of Death; or, Fanon’s Eschatology”.  The discussant for the workshop will be Michelle Wright of Northwestern University. 


Thanks to Julius for pulling together the workshop this year, and especially for bringing Carter to the Divinity School.  Don't miss it!

Ecclesiology more ecclesiastical

My theological work over the past few years has maintained a consistently split personality; while a substantial portion of my personal research and publication has been ecclesiological in nature, this focus is virtually absent from my coursework and indeed from my public self-presentation as a student of theology.  "Ecclesiology" is sufferable as a sub-field of theology (or better, of jurisprudence), but I bristle at the ugly term "ecclesiologist" and the idea that theoretical accounts of the churches should occupy the majority of a theologian's career.

I began my pursuit of theology with a much more "ecclesial" temper.  A fervor for the liturgical basis of the Church's confession and a prioritizing of communio as prolegomenon to dogmatics is much of what allowed me to turn away from intentions of pastoral ministry and toward an academic career in theology.  Once I had realized theology as a churchly discipline and could better appreciate the ministerial function of this particular intellectual work, I was able to feel more at home with my own gifts and not as if I were playing an ill-fitting role (and badly) as someone aspiring to pastoral ministry. 

While I would not say that I now take theology to be any less "ecclesial" or theorizing about the church any less important so far as it goes, these commitments have certainly receded from obvious prominence in my theological work.  Indeed, while I still write about church structures a good deal, I don't hold nearly as many strong theological opinions about "The Church" as I used to, and I think that the popularity of ecclesiology as a theological sub-discipline is in many respects harmful to good theological work.  It too often leads to an unnecessary metaphysics of what is really a pretty mundane (if awe-inspiring) social structure.  And this sort of over-theorized ecclesiology isn't simply my diagnosis of the "ecclesial" camps in theology.  The various event-oriented ecclesiologies are just as concerned with a proper systematic account of "the Church," and therefore just as liable to making too much of the Church as a theoretical entity.

I obviously haven't given up on the theological importance of the churches.  I simply don't think that pursuing a theory of the Church tends to be very worthwhile or interesting.  There is no Ecclesia vera to speak of.  We only really have an Evangelium verum as a workable basis for enduring theological reflection.

Although it sounds counter-intuitive, this is why ecclesiology should be more ecclesiastical.  Not because the ecclesiastical structures of the churches are infused with some metaphysical import... quite the opposite, actually.  Because the churches do not exist on the basis of an ideal ecclesial form, theological reflection upon the churches is best served by an emphasis on the nuts and bolts of the structures of Christian life in community.  I came around to this stance in my work on problems in Anglican canon law.  The specifics of polity are usually absent in more rarefied discussions of ecclesiology, which trade much more in talk of "Spirit" and "unity" and things that somehow, whole cloth, "make the Church".  The problem with codification is that it doesn't make for nearly as dramatic a statement.  A Church doesn't stand or fall on the particularities of ordination rubrics the way that it does in the case of big themes like "Constantinianism" or "Theosis."  The latter will preach.  Quibbling about the former runs the risk of joining those theologians who talk about angels dancing on pinheads.

But pursuing a preachy ecclesiology of grand schemes runs the risk of seeing the churches through the lens of overwrought categories and thereby missing out on the more mundane theoretical work that actually helps the myriad communions of our Gospel to work alongside one another in conscious structural tandem.  I've come to really enjoy picking apart small problems with ecclesial structures and not worrying so much about what it means to "be the Church".  Solving these problems can actually get some real work done.  Offering yet another vision de Ecclesia might inspire or provide a new vocabulary for describing our communal situation, and I don't want to minimize that.  But we have more than enough of such visions at our disposal already, and in any case the practice of this sort of ecclesiology comes pretty naturally to any reader of the Scriptures or hearer of the preached Word.  In contrast, there is a real lack of good technical work of an ecclesiastical bent, and I think that theological reflection on ecclesiology would be best served by tending more toward these ecclesiastical concerns.

A few items...

• Notre Dame announces its first endowed chair in Byantine theology.  The chairholder will have joint appointments in the Medieval Institute and the Theology Department. 

• Travis has posted a rough translation by Matt Bruce from the newly published Eberhard Busch Tagebuch 1965-68.  The volume offers biographical material on Busch's work with Barth.  And good news... Tom Kraft has confirmed that T&T Clark is working on a translation.

• Two recent articles on Schleiermacher... Robert Merrihew Adams on philosophical aspects of his Christology, and Johannes Wischmeyer on his involvement with the founding of the University of Berlin. [the second link goes straight to a pdf download]

• Cardinal Levada, prefect of the CDF, is retiring.  

• There has been a lot of discussion on blogs about George Monbiot's article on academic publishing, which I mentioned a few days ago.   Anthropologi.info has a post worth reading that summarizes a number of responses.  Many involve open access solutions, either official ones or personal posting articles in violation copyright agreements.  I continue to think that a sustainable market of scholarly literature is possible and useful, and that individual scholars can do the most good by 1) avoiding publishing in journals that perpetuate the problem (I know this can make it tough for theologians when so many of our journals are at presses like Wiley-Blackwell), and 2) writing to the editorial boards of those journals and letting them know about your concerns.

•  A conference at the University of Chicago Divinity School on Eriugena and Creation, in honor of Edouard Jeauneau of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies.

Bibliographic notes: Röhr, Ernesti

I have tried to avoid writing too many posts of the following sort, out of concern that they would be unhelpful or uninteresting to most readers.  But the problem of resource availability has been on my mind lately... instigated in its present iteration, I think, by Robert's comments on interlibrary loan services.  So bear with me if the particulars of this post are irrelevant to you.  You may still be interested in my introductory remarks, and may resonate with "the chase" in its narrative aspects even if your own bibliographic pursuits are taking you elsewhere.

Apart from books that are in print or otherwise widely available, a good deal of the textual material used by the deeper-digging scholar is going to be difficult to find.  This may be because a text is terribly old yet not one of those lucky Digitized, or because it is an orphan secondary source from more recent decades.  Scholarly journals from previous centuries (as I'll mention below) can also be a huge pain to track down unless your library has a pretty extensive collection.  You'll find (some of) them in digitized form, but the (lack of) cataloging work on them is so bad that one can only make heads or tails of dates and issue numbers with some difficulty.

Big projects to make texts available should of course be supported.  We need more volumes digitized, more reprints available, and more sophisticated ways of sharing amongst libraries.  But it's also imperative to foster a less sophisticated network of sharing.  Small libraries, the grooming of physical book collections, showcasing one's treasured acquisitions... all sound quite antiquated and are usually associated with those Luddite backwaters continuing to dismiss the digital humanities.  I don't understand why that needs to be the case, though.

In "Unpacking My Library", Benjamin writes, "Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter."  He is speaking here of the appreciation inherent in personal ownership of objects,  but I would argue that books get their due from the less efficient private circumstances of hoarding and sharing in another sense as well.  Such smaller-scale curating opens up knowledge of these books as much as it closes them off.  The researcher grasping for clues in various library catalogues and database searches will appreciate the odd bibliographic glimpse when it comes along, and register the information in their own inner catalogue of texts to be recalled.  These texts aren't a part of my private collection, but my story of pursuing them is something of a private recollection that goes beyond the vocation of a public collection.

So, following are bibliographic notes on two texts that I have run across or failed to run across in various formats:  Johann August Ernesti's treatise on the threefold office of Christ, and Johann Friedrich Röhr's review of Schleiermacher's 1820/21 Glaubenslehre (as well as, by extension, the journal in which it was published).

Johann August Ernesti, de Officio Christi Triplici (1768, 1773, etc.)

Ernesti's treatise is often cited as a marker for general dissatisfaction with the doctrine of Christ's threefold office on the basis of the ambiguity introduced by metaphorical language to the doctrine of atonement.  The work is easily enough found included in his Opuscula Theologica (1773) pp. 411-438.  The original 1768 edition is barely extant and I haven't found it at all online.  What I didn't realize until a few weeks ago was that Ernesti's treatise was also translated into German and published in 1775.

I stumbled upon a reference to a Gedanken über einige Stücke in der Lehre von Jesu Christo by Ernesti and was suspicious about the topical similarity, so I checked into it.  The page length seemed wrong considering the Latin was less than thirty pages, but it turned out that the publications was actually two essays: "Ueber die Genugthuung Jesu Christi" and "Ueber das dreifache Amt Christi."  These essay titles are not going to show up in any catalog.  In fact, even the Gedanken by Ernesti might not show up in a catalog.  A number of the (few) worldwide holdings for this title are bound with a 1790 work by Johann Friedrich Jacobi.  The copy at the University of Chicago is actually bound between Jacobi's work and a German translation of Edward Gibbon.  Luckily, the catalogers at the University of Chicago know what they're doing and actually have separate bibliographic records for Jacobi, Gibbon, and Ernesti that all cross-list to the same LC number.  Otherwise, when I went to the catalog with the alternate Ernesti title and a mere suspicion in hand, I would have reached a dead end.  Ueber das dreifache Amt would be hidden under the Gedanken, which in turn would have been hidden under the completely unrelated title by Jacobi.

Following are some pictures of the volume.  I have not been able to find the German translation digitized anywhere.  You can see that in a few places a reader has corrected or expanded upon Ernesti's citations.  I haven't gone back to the Latin to see if it was an original mistake or one made in the 1775 version (or, for that matter, whether the redactor was the one mistaken).

Johann Friedrich Röhr,“Besprechung Schleiermachers Glaubenslehre", Kritische Prediger-Bibliothek 4 (1823), 371-394, 555-579.

This search has been less successful.  Röhr was a rationalist theologian and editor of the journal Kritische Prediger-Bibliothek.  It was in this venue that he published his review of the first edition of the Glaubenslehre in 1823.  Schleiermacher knew and worked with Röhr in other editorial capacities, although he didn't think much of the latter's review of the Glaubenslehre.

The review is reprinted in the critical edition of Schleiermacher's works, KGA 7.3, pp. 505-523 (I've mentioned the usefulness of KGA 7.3 in a previous post).  Some of the later volumes of Kritische Prediger-Bibliothek are easy enough to find in the United States, and the easiest way to do so is the link through Harvard's library to the digitized versions (as I said above, you can find these by searching through Google Books, but the metadata on these searches is so awful that it takes a good deal more sorting out).  I have not had any luck finding any of the volumes from the 1820's, though.  If you're studying in Continental Europe you may have more luck.  The journal is listed in a number of German universities, but it's listed as a serials title and I'm not sure what individual issue holdings are available.

So in the case of Röhr's review we can benefit from the prominence of Schleiermacher's work in modern theology and the surrounding literature that it draws to the fore as a result.  But everything else published in the Prediger-Bibliothek during the 1820's remains relatively inaccessible.  There may not be anything groundbreaking in this collection of texts, but surely some published sermons or editorials of the period would be useful to scholars.  Which is, again, why I find this sort of bibliographic note-taking worthwhile.  No current readers of the blog may have any immediate need for this information, but someone who is searching for one of these texts a few years from now could stumble upon my remarks and make a connection to the material that otherwise wouldn't have happened – despite all of the hard work that libraries, Google, and publishers are doing to get the work out there.

The library cannot afford it

Roger Pearce links an article from The Guardian about the pricing of academic journal literature.  The focus is mostly on Elsevier, but also discusses pricing at different publishers and highlights problems for both libraries and independent researchers:

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a "keep out" sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch's paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier's journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That'll be $31.50.

The other day I posted about a happy migration away from Elsevier by an intellectual history journal.  Two years ago I had written to the editor of The History of European Ideas and requested that they consider taking this very step.  I'm glad they did eventually, and I encourage you to look at my letter and take similar action with the journal Modern Theology, published by Wiley-Blackwell and one of the most well-read systematic theology journals today.  Modern Theology charges U.S. libraries $824 for a yearly print and online subscription; libraries in the UK pay £498. The EU pays €633, the developing world pays $483, and all other parts of the world pay $1121.  This is the most expensive English-language theology journal I'm aware of.  The institutional subscription is more expensive than the Elsevier-published History of European Ideas.  Bill Cavanaugh is one of the editors for Modern Theology, and not the sort that I would imagine as unreceptive to these sorts of concerns.

As I've stated in previous posts about the sustainability of academic publishing, these prices are dwarfed by science publications and are not the biggest contributors to the buckling of library budgets or the unavailability of literature to scholars.  But this doesn't really matter if you're at a small seminary that doesn't subscribe to any chemistry journals.  In such institutions, it's Modern Theology that's making your academic research needs unaffordable.

And it's not just the small institutions.  Here at the University of Chicago, home of the new Mansueto Library and one of the world's great research library systems, we are dealing with budget issues that make subscriptions difficult.  In June I mentioned that the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon had ended its open access status earlier this year because they couldn't afford to keep it up.  The BBKL now has an option for institutional subscription to the online version, and I recently emailed our bibliographer about the possibility of the University of Chicago getting such a subscription.  Although I had received positive responses to all previous purchase requests that I had made over the past few years, this time she replied that, unfortunately, there is no new funding for electronic resources requiring ongoing payment.  With a subscription of €300/year... much less than a year of Modern Theology... the online BBKL is still unavailable.

Library budgets will not only cut the most ridiculously expensive resources, or the least useful.  Cuts like this always come in odd places, and they come alongside funds allocated to expansion projects elsewhere in the institution.  This means that any number of resources are currently in danger for scholars- from the obscure journal subscription, to the small book series that isn't carried through the library's new vendor, to the 10-hour/week shelving job that pays your bills as a student, to the ILL book that can't be shipped to you without charge because funding for that program has limited the number of monthly requests you can make.

I am not opposed to various open access ventures, and I make use of them frequently enough.  I am also glad that pdf's of articles flow more freely through personal channels amongst scholars than they do through publishers or libraries.  But I'm not convinced that having a scholarly literature market is in itself the problem.  It's not the publishers charging $40 for a hardback that make research inaccessible to people (either by personal acquisition or through local institutions), and if we could create a situation where publishers make a living off of doing what they do while libraries can do what they do within the means of their funding, the result is going to be much more fruitful than an entirely open access situation where everyone expects literature to be completely free... that is, where no one is willing to fund a common effort to edit, print, or curate scholarly work.

UPDATE: Since posting on this, at least two other blogs have weighed in on the article... New APPS and Savage Minds.