contrasted to the doctrine of Protestant orthodoxy that trust must be
preceded by knowledge and assent. Herrmann admits that some of
this doctrine goes back to Luther, but he also stresses that Luther
basically understands faith as primary trust and appropriation which
is not preceded by epistemic judgement.^206 Like Ritschl, he can
employAnerkennungin this context as relating to the false alternative
of a merely epistemic assent.^207 At the same time, he employs the
traditional picture of lord and servant to illustrate the nature of
adequate religious recognition:
The Christian can only communicate with God through a complete
submission. Every inner motive that aims to give God something
else than the recognition of honour...means turning away from God.
We can only come into contact with our God when we know we are
dependent on him in the depth of our lives.^208Herrmann considers that through this complete submission humans
can become free.^209
Remarkably, Herrmann thus connects the early Christian and
medieval ideas of a non-philosophical conversion and submission
with Schleiermacher’s view of absolute dependence. While Herrmann
can be considered as a modernist and liberal Protestant, he also
continues the long traditions of religious recognition. At the same
time, Ritschl and Herrmann do not employAnerkennungas a con-
sistent theological concept. When the concept appears at the heart of
their own theological claims, it highlights the primacy of religious
appropriation, an event that does not concern our objective know-
ledge of the world but creates the subjective condition of genuinely
religious perception.
We can highlight only a few influential books of leading theolo-
gians in our selective analysis of twentieth-century theology. The
leading biblical scholar of this period was Rudolf Bultmann, who
pleads for the demythologization of biblical language and promotes
the moderate wing of dialectical theology, a counterweight to earlier
cultural Protestantism. We will look briefly at two articles that
Bultmann contributed to the standard dictionary of the New
Testament edited by Gerhard Kittel.
(^206) Verkehr, 173–4, 178. (^207) Verkehr, 177.
(^208) Verkehr, 194. (^209) Verkehr, 214.
The Modern Era 157