Walter Schmithals

Walter Schmithals (born December 14, 1923 in Wesel ; † March 26, 2009 in Berlin ) was a German Protestant theologian .

Vita

Since 1934 Walter Schmithal's family lived in Freudenberg , Krs. Siegen . He graduated from high school in 1942 in nearby Olpe . From 1942 to 1945 he served as a soldier and was taken prisoner of war .

1946–1950 Walter Schmithals studied Protestant theology in Wuppertal , Marburg and Münster , which was joined by the vicariate in Minden and Wuppertal from 1951–1953 . 1953–1963 he was pastor of the parish Raumland in the district of Wittgenstein / Westf. active.

Walter Schmithals received his doctorate in 1954 . In 1962 the habilitation followed . He was then a lecturer at the theological faculty of the University of Marburg (1963–1968 / 1968 apl. Prof.) and 1968–1989 full professor for the New Testament at the Church University of Berlin , where he took over the post of rector from 1970–1972 and 1987–1988. Since 1993 he has been emeritus at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

Schmithals died in Berlin at the age of 85. His grave is in the Berlin-Friedenau cemetery.

Working as a theologian

The focus of his many years of research was the interpretation of the Gospels and Paul's letters .

Focus of his scientific work

Schmithals mainly dealt with the New Testament and early Christianity and always carried out his theological-scientific work in close relation to the pastor's practical work. As a private lecturer in Marburg, at the request of the students in the winter semester 1964/65, he showed an exercise "Exegesis of selected sermon texts". He continued this exercise as a study group every semester until his retirement, for a long time in community with his Old Testament colleague AHJ Gunneweg . His commentary on the Gospel of Mark, elaborated “for the sermon”, is essentially a product of this working group. His numerous sermon meditations also point to the close connection between theological science and church practice.

Political-theological discourse

Schmithals often commented on current ecclesiastical-theological problems within his area of ​​expertise. As far as these affected the political area ( German division , peace movement , 1968 movement , RAF , retrofitting , etc.) he decidedly took the view that political decisions could not be derived from theological premises. Politics is a matter of reason and morality and in this respect not specifically Christian. There are Christian politicians, but no Christian politics. Theological justifications for concrete political decisions are therefore always advanced or imposed and represent an abuse of the Christian. The peculiar Christian contribution to politics consists in giving the message of the politicians, who are at the mercy of the political constraints and who have not mastered the consequences of their decisions to testify to the free grace of God, which also allows the guilty and the failing to be justified.

Schmithals also wrote articles based on the New Testament on questions of demythologizing , ecumenism , the nation , the European idea , assessing Islam and other topics.

dissertation

In the course of his scientific work in the narrower sense, Schmithals turned to almost all of the New Testament writings, examined their historical background and in many cases also presented individual exegeses. His dissertation dealt with the gnosis in Corinth . When it appeared in 1956, this study was in line with the times and, which is unusual for dissertations, reached three editions in a short time. For in the entourage of Rudolf Bultmann, who determined the theological discussion at that time, there was great interest in Gnosis in general and especially in relation to New Testament writings. Schmithals followed up his dissertation in two different ways with further work and very soon opposed some of the consensus prevailing in New Testament science.

Theology of Paul

On the one hand, he tried to prove that the opponents whom Paul opposed in his letters were in all cases representatives of a Jewish-Christian gnosis who penetrated his congregations during the so-called third missionary journey. In doing so, he questioned the “Tübingen” view of history, which continues to determine FC Baur, according to which the corresponding passages of the Pauline letters for the first Christian generation represent a fundamental conflict between Jewish Christians (“Judaists”) and Gentile Christians , between Peter and James and Paul , testify between Torah piety and freedom from the Torah . He replaced this historical image with the idea of ​​a diverse and peaceful community of Jewish-Christian communities that lived and proselytized within, and Gentile Christian communities that lived outside the synagogue . This community was agreed upon at the initiative of Paul at the so-called Apostle Council ( Gal 2 : 1–10  LUT ) and lasted until the exclusion of the Jewish Christians from the synagogue, which took place in the course of the rabbinical restoration of Judaism as a result of the destruction of the temple . It enabled Paul to found Gentile Christian communities and at the same time guaranteed that the Christian message would be preached to his fellow citizens in the synagogue. The activities of the Jewish-Christian Gnostics in the Pauline congregations, on the other hand, were only an episode, which of course heralded the great controversy between the main church and Christian Gnosis, which reached its climax in the second century.

On the other hand, Schmithals radicalized the literary-critical analysis of the authentic Pauline letters, which had already formed a basis for his study of the Corinthians . While today, as a rule, either the literary integrity of these Pauline letters is presupposed or a single literary-critical operation is usually only carried out in extreme cases, Schmithal's criteria of plausibility determine the judgment about the solution of the numerous literary problems that the interpreter of the letters is faced with . He assumed that all of Paul's main letters were written in a limited period of time during the third missionary journey and that they were probably published on the basis of a copy book . The editor had more than 20 large and small letters from the apostle. These have it to a collection of seven letters - summarized and even in the first century, with - a sacred number 1 Cor 1,2-b  LUT on and Romans 16.25 to 27  LUT discharged published. Some additions from his hand suggested that in this way he wanted to present and offer the legacy of Paul to the Jewish Christians who were excluded from the synagogue.

Consensus and contradiction

If Schmithals placed himself with these two tendencies in his work largely outside the prevailing scientific consensus, this was all the more the case with his analysis of the Gospel tradition , the " synoptic tradition". Towards the end of the 19th century the view prevailed that the oldest gospel writings, namely the Gospel of Mark and the source of verses used by Matthew and Luke , were preceded by a broad layer of oral transmission of the words and deeds of Jesus. Around 1920, Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, in their investigations into the history of form , which met with general approval, analyzed this oral, “synoptic” tradition, as encountered in the Gospels according to Mark, Matthew and Luke, in detail, reconstructed the versions of the individual pieces of tradition and tried to determine their "seat" in the life of the community. Schmithals, on the other hand, pointed out that these oral traditions are nowhere to be found where they should be encountered, namely in early Christian literature outside of the Gospels. It was also not possible to convincingly determine their “seats” in the life of the community. The attempt to transfer the laws of the written tradition to the oral one is methodologically inadmissible. Accordingly, it has been largely given up in the meantime to ask the question of the “seat in life” and to reconstruct the oral versions of the individual traditions. But in New Testament science, as a rule, the hypothesis of oral tradition as such is still adhered to, although it has lost the basis of tradition.

In contrast, Schmithals advocated the view that the synoptic tradition was essentially literary from the start, that is, it was fixed and handed down in writing. This view enabled a relatively precise reconstruction of the history of the tradition and its bearers and forces.

Source of verdict and synoptic

Schmithals is convinced that the source of the spell goes back to a group of Galilean followers of Jesus who, like John the Baptist, worshiped him as a prophet and recorded his words and instructions. These records have grown over time, depending on the historical challenges such as the outbreak of the Jewish war , the destruction of Jerusalem , the exclusion from the synagogue, etc. this group was faced with. These followers of Jesus are said to have understood Jesus' death as the fate of a prophet confirming his message; the "kerygma" of death and resurrection was still unknown to them, and accordingly they should not have known Jesus as the Messiah / Christ . The Gospel of Mark, on the other hand, is based on a basic script that has translated into poetic narrative the theologically reflective confession of Jesus, rooted in Peter and in Jerusalem's Jewish Christianity , who died for the salvation of men and was raised to Christ through his resurrection. This basic script was written soon after the year 70 as a manual for the mission in the field of Hellenistic Jewish Christianity. According to Schmithal's point of view, the evangelist Mark edited this basic scripture one generation later in such a way that he tried to explain, primarily with the help of the various motifs of his theory of the secrecy of the Messiah, why the followers of Jesus, whose traditions refer to the source of the saying, allowed the confession Jesus as the crucified and risen Christ could have remained hidden. Subsequently, the source of the sayings was published in its final version, in which its older tradition was baptized, as it were, through additions of some kinds, that is, it was placed in the light of the Christ message. It seems, according to Schmithals, that at the time when both communities were excluded from the synagogue, the traders of the source of sayings were integrated into the specifically Christian community.

With this "literary" conception of the synoptic tradition, Schmithals returned to a state of research on which theologians such as Christian Hermann Weisse , Gustav Volkmar and Bruno Bauer used the "traditional hypothesis" of Johann Carl Ludwig Gieseler and David Friedrich Strauss in the first half of the 19th century had refuted and Weiss also founded the two-source theory with lasting success. In general, he based his investigations on the principle that the good had long been found, usually on a thorough account of the history of research. These insights into the history of research are often used by those theologians who by no means agree with the conclusions that Schmithals draws.

To the Gospel of John

This also applies with regard to his treatment of the Gospel of John , which does not appear unconventional to the same extent because one can speak less than ever of a consensus in the assessment of this last of the Gospels. According to Schmithals, three layers can be distinguished in the Gospel of John. It is based on a Gospel from the last decade of the first century, the author of which, in view of the exclusion of Jewish Christians from the synagogue, is in a violent dispute with rabbinic Judaism and defends the church's confession of Christ against it. A generation later, when the church had to deal with a Christian Gnosis, a second hand turned the older scripture against the Gnostics of his time. She had identified the Jews of the older Gospel, noticeably expanding the Gospel and partially changing its material, with the Gnostic opponents present at the time, and added the three letters of John to the newly designed Gospel; these deal directly with gnosis. An antignostic " Bible canon " from the Gospel and three letters, possibly as a targeted alternative to the corresponding "canon" of Marcion , was created. Later, an editor put the Gospel of John in the form of the "favorite disciple" under apostolic authority in order to prepare for its inclusion in the canon of the New Testament , which the Church was then compiling.

Conclusion

Altogether one can characterize Schmithals' scientific work with the words with which W. Bousset described the work of William Wrede in 1907: “He had a reluctance to move on rutted tracks; he was always suspicious of supposedly generally accepted truths and dogmas that threatened to creep into his science without justification. He didn't think he'd taken the trouble to check the foundations of new ones, where most of them happily continued building. "

Contributions to public debates

Schmithals was one of the few German theology professors who spoke out about current debates in the daily press at the end of the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century.

In 1999 he declared that the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification was "more seeds of hope than a happy harvest". On the question of the doctrine of justification, “a comprehensive consensus” between Catholics and Lutherans was still pending.

In the discussion about the suspension of the Catholic priest Gotthold Hasenhüttl in 2003, he announced that the communion between Catholics and Lutherans was theologically impossible.

In the discussion about the film The Passion of the Christ , he defended the director Mel Gibson against accusations of anti-Semitism.

In the cartoon controversy , Schmithals argued that there is no Islam that is compatible with European civil liberties.

Works

• The Gnosis in Corinth , Göttingen 1956, 2. neubearb. Edition 1965; 3. rework. 1969 edition, engl. 1971
• The Church Apostle Ministry , Göttingen 1961, engl. 1969
• Paulus and Jakobus , Göttingen, Göttingen 1963, engl. 1965
• Paul and the Gnostics , Hamburg 1965, engl. 1972
• The theology of Rudolf Bultmann , Tübingen 1966, 2nd edition 1967, engl. 1968, Italian 1972
• Miracles and Faith , Neukirchen 1970
• The witness to Christ in today's society , Hamburg 1970
• Reason and obedience , Hamburg 1971
• Jesus Christ in the proclamation of the church , Neukirchen 1972
• Die Apokalyptik , Göttingen 1973, engl. 1975, Italian 1976, Japanese 1986, Spanish 1994
• The letter to the Romans as a historical problem , Neukirchen 1975
• The one thing that is needed , Neukirchen 1977
• Achievement (together with Antonius H. Gunneweg ) , Stuttgart 1978, engl. 1981
• The Gospel according to Markus , Gütersloh 1979
• Herrschaft (together with Antonius H. Gunneweg), Stuttgart 1980, engl. 1982
• The theological anthropology of Paul , Stuttgart 1980
• The Gospel according to Luke , Zurich 1980
• The Acts of the Apostles of Luke , Zurich 1982
• Confession and Conscience , Berlin 1983
• New Testament and Gnosis , Darmstadt 1984, Italian (revised) 2008
• The letters of Paul in their original form , Zurich 1984
• Introduction to the first three Gospels , Berlin 1985
• The Letter to the Romans , A Commentary, Gütersloh 1988
• Paolo. Lettera ai Romani , Torino 1990
• John's Gospel and John's letters , Berlin 1992
• The Dead Sea Scrolls , Stuttgart 1993
• Lineage Schmithals, von Schmidthals, Schmidthals , self-published 1993
• Theological history of early Christianity , Stuttgart 1994, engl. 1997
• The Evangelists as Writers , Zurich 2001
• Paul, the Gospels and Early Christianity , Leiden 2004
• Christmas, Göttingen 2006
• Karl Johann Philipp Spitta letters to his bride (1836-1837) , Göttingen 2008

Complete bibliography

• 1952–1982 in: Confession and Conscience (1983); Pp. 185-208
• 1983-1992 in: Theologische Literatur Zeitung 118 (1993), Sp. 1089-1095
• 1993–2002 in: Paulus, die Evangelien und das Urchristentum (2004), pp. 805–814

To Walter Schmithals

• PB Boshoff: History and Theology, Walter Schmithals on the Unity of the New Testament ; San Jose, California, 2001
• Andreas Lindemann: Belief and Action. Reflections on Christian ethics following Walter Schmithals. Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 21 (2004), pp. 124-139
• Ulf Lückel: Walter Schmithals † ; in: Wittgenstein. Leaves of the Wittgensteiner Heimatverein e. V. 97 (2009), vol. 73, p. 151f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Schmithals in the catalog of the German National Library
• www.walterschmithals.de
• Photography by Walter Schmithals [1]

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Martin Doß: History of the chair for literary, religious and contemporary history of early Christianity. Theological faculty, seminars and institutes, history of the chair for literary, religious and contemporary history of early Christianity, Humboldt University, Berlin, February 9, 2010, accessed on August 2, 2012 . 
2. ↑ W. Schmithals: Sin bravely, believe bravely. The Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation defuse a central point of contention in the Reformation . In: Berliner Zeitung, October 30, 1999.
3. ↑ W. Schmithals: As often as we eat, we don't come to an agreement . In: FAZ No. 183, August 9, 2003.
4. ↑ W. Schmithals: Not the Jews, God himself delivered Christ. Mel Gibson doesn't have to fear the anti-Semitism charge. However, the fundamentalists' unhistorical reading of the Bible is problematic . In: Die Zeit No. 10, February 26, 2004.
5. ↑ W. Schmithals: Islam means state religion. The protest against the Danish caricatures unsettles Europe: Can we hope for an Islam that is compatible with our civil liberties? Die Zeit Nr. 7, February 9, 2006, accessed on August 2, 2012 : “It is strict monotheism that excludes a connection between authentic Islam and open democracy. To deny this would mean transplanting the Trinitarian image of God into Islam, a syncretism that is abhorrent for Muslims. Therefore it is imperative for sober insight not to combine the hope of a multicultural society with the dream of a Euro-Islam. Certainly there are Euro-Muslims who, of course, are often watched with suspicion among their fellow believers; there cannot be a Euro-Islam. "