He reads the newspaper.

The third to last footnote in Heinz Schilling's most recent book, "Christianity and the emergence of modern Europe.

Departure into the world of today", refers to a conference report on the Humanities page of the FAZ. The article was published on October 27, 2021, the book on February 14, 2022 - the author must have inserted the reference into the manuscript at the last minute.

The conference in Münster dealt with the careers of professional politicians with a degree in theology.

The fact that there are still prominent "theologians-parliamentarians", "although almost exclusively of the Protestant denomination", proves for Schilling the continued existence of his subject, the interlocking of the social apparatuses of church and state,

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

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The new book, originally published by the Catholic Herder Verlag, is an overall presentation of Schilling's life theme, but assembled from older treatises.

Assurance that the templates had been reviewed and updated would be a formality, or even a euphemism, from other authors.

Schilling, on the other hand, who could be stylized as a born historian of the Reformation because of his gift for thorough controversy, continues the discussion and uses the footnotes for references to new publications that bring something really new, and for objections to fellow researchers.

The highest good

His Augsburg colleague Johannes Burkhardt, known as an expert on the connection between religious warfare and state-building, has to admit that it remains an anachronism, even as a thought experiment, to address the desire of seventeenth-century theologians according to the standards of “historical peace research”. should have called the war the work of the devil.

According to Schilling, this "deliberately ignores the fact that in confessionalism it was not peace but the purity of faith as the guarantor of eternal life that was the highest good of theologians and many lay people".

In Peter Schäfer, the former director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Schilling found the thesis that not only the modern, pseudo-scientific anti-Semites, but also the Christians had persecuted the Jews on racist grounds;

Schilling disagrees, citing a Luther study by art historian Volker Herzner published in 2021 by a regional history publisher.

For Schilling, the basic datum of older Christian-Jewish relations is the reciprocity of suspicion and rejection.

A message has just come in that Schilling will perhaps mention in the next book: the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Woelki, has given up his resistance to non-denominational religious instruction.

The denominational difference has largely lost its formative power in everyday life.

This gives rise to an assumption about the conditions of the concept of confessionalization: its inventors also credited it with the power of a key concept because it opened up their own living environment to them.

Schilling describes himself in this sense as a diaspora Protestant who grew up in Catholic Cologne: his curiosity was aroused when he was slapped in the face in kindergarten because he had prayed “wrongly”, with his hands folded (“Protestant”) and not with his hands together ("Catholic").

He received his doctorate in Freiburg,

habilitated in Bielefeld and taught in Osnabrück and Giessen.

Since 1992, as Professor of Early Modern European History at Berlin's Humboldt University, Schilling has had the experience of being a diaspora Christian.

For others

With the Reformation and Enlightenment as two steps towards secularization, freedom came into the modern world: there is some truth in this popular view of the history of Christianity as a whole, but a great deal that is wrong in its details.

In order to explain this, Schilling has always written for a non-specialist audience: before reunification, two volumes in Wolf Jobst Siedler's German history or, after retirement, biographies of Luther and Charles V.

In the new book, a long quotation from Nietzsche stands for the seemingly plausible anti-Christian view of history.

Right in the middle is the sentence: "A religious person thinks only of himself." The reader encounters the antithesis at the very end.

"One is a Christian for others": That was the motto of von Schilling's teacher at high school.

The proof of the life motto of the man, who is "recognisably Catholic" in the eyes of the student, is the very last footnote: the obituary of the retired senior director of studies from the "Aachener Zeitung".

What this Helmut Lobeck suggested, who was also co-author of a short history of the city of Cologne, has now been in effect for more than sixty years, because this Monday Heinz Schilling will be eighty years old.