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In Baden, around 230,000 people
belonged to the Lutheran Church and around 62,000 to the Reformed
Church. In the anniversary year of the Reformation (1817), several Baden
parishes demanded a union of the separate churches. The Grand Duke then
convened a general synod. It consisted of 44 members elected by the
congregations. Six members, including Hebel, were appointed by the Grand
Duke. This first general synod in Baden unanimously decided to merge.
On 2 July 1821, the time had come. The synod members - 23 Lutheran and
21 Reformed - entered the Karlsruhe City Church to the sound of
ceremonial bells. In addition to Prelate Hebel, his friends Engler,
Fecht, Hitzig and Sander were also present. According to the minutes,
‘accompanied by the organ, the first two and the sixth verse’ of the
hymn ‘O Holy Spirit enter us’ were sung, after which Prelate Hebel
‘stood before the altar and in his prayers implored God Almighty for his
blessing and assistance in this highly important work.’
During twelve days of meetings, the issues of a common textbook, a
church constitution, the liturgy, parish regulations and church assets
were discussed. The treatment of constitutional issues led to fierce
disputes and serious tensions, as both the president of the synod,
Minister of State Carl Christian von Berckheim (a former scholar of
Hebel from Lörrach), and Grand Duke Ludwig were strict representatives
of the state church system and opponents of church co-determination or
self-administration. However, this is precisely what the synod attempted
to institutionalise. According to one synod member during the
negotiations, they wanted to prevent ‘such an important organ of church
life [...] from being dependent on any arbitrariness.’ But the synod's
resistance was in vain. In order not to jeopardise the union, it finally
gave in. The state-church line prevailed.
On 26 July 1821, the representatives involved signed the deed of union.
The first to sign was the prelate of the now united Baden regional
church, Johann Peter Hebel.
What was missing was a common schoolbook. As early as 1814, an
adaptation of the ‘Biblical History for Children’ by the Catholic priest
Christoph von Schmidt was therefore considered. Hebel had not
inconsiderable reservations about this, which he expressed in his expert
opinion: 'My remarks on the biblical history book to be introduced with
modifications in our schools biblical history book by Schmidt'
summarised. He was of the opinion that Schmidt's book was not popular
enough.
He also criticised the ‘carelessness of the style’, by which he meant
the sometimes effusive and pathetic language as well as a lack of
empathy with the capacity of ten to fourteen-year-old pupils. Hebel's
suggestion to write his own Protestant textbook met with approval.
He immediately began work on the Biblical Stories. Always keeping his
addressees, the youth, in mind: ‘When I wrote, I imagined my old
schoolmaster Andreas Grether in Hausen and myself and my fellow pupils
under the shadow of his staff [...] and asked us, including myself as a
schoolboy, for our judgement.’ Work came to a standstill unusually often,
not only because of his many official duties. It was not until February
1823 that he was able to send his publisher Cotta the Old Testament and
then the New Testament in May. As a condition, he demanded that ‘the
local Lyceum publishing house [...] reserve the right, if this biblical
history is introduced as a schoolbook, to print and sell the required
edition for the Protestant schools in the country on its own account.’
Both volumes were published in December 1823, predated to the following
year in a first edition of 3,000 copies.
The Biblical Histories, which are still ‘waiting to be categorised among
the classic texts of German literature’, according to Walter Jens, were
intended to ideologically overcome the union of Lutherans and Reformed.
But a remarkable tolerance towards Catholic and Jewish inhabitants of
the Grand Duchy of Baden was also expressed. However, not everyone
agreed with Hebel's invitation to an independent search for truth.
Orthodox theologians in particular soon took offence at the unyielding
radicalism of the Biblical Stories, in which the heart ‘may still beat
Christianly even after the Enlightenment’ (Reinhard Wunderlich). Hebel's
neological view was clearly reflected in the stories.
Already in the first story (Creation of the Earth), God receded
completely into the background - entirely in the tradition of Herder,
who sought to mediate between scientific evolution and the creation myth
of the Bible. Instead of ‘God separated the light from the darkness’ (as
it says in the Bible), Hebel formulated: ‘At first, the light or
brightness gradually separated from the moving mass.’
The poet told the biblical stories in his own language: briefly,
naturally and vividly. He literally used his ‘imperceptible’ finger of
instruction with the help of his art of speaking aside. In doing so, he
by no means distanced himself from Luther's translation of the Bible.
From Hebel's perspective, the original Luther text was nothing outdated.
He made this clear by emphasising individual sentences from Luther's
translation of the Bible, which he could assume were familiar, in the
typeface. He presumably wanted to make it easier for pupils to memorise
them in religious education lessons. Otherwise, Hebel modernised the
text in various places. David's older brothers were ‘in the army’, for
example. In another story, David collected the ‘Freikorps’, and two
mites, he explained in ‘Die Witwe am Gotteskasten’, were ‘as much as a
penny’.
Hebel's understanding of sin stood in complete contrast to orthodoxy.
For him, it was a mistake, but at the same time a necessary step on the
path to maturity. As God's pupils, people were good by nature, but sins
were important for the educational process, in which the aim was to get
a better grip on weaknesses. However, according to Hebel's neological
view, man was not a being to be patronised or cared for.
Rather, man had reason and was in a position to decide freely. For him,
sin was an act of freedom. Sins were thoughtlessness, unreasonable
behaviour, false stubbornness ... This had to be explained. For Hebel,
the aim of this enlightenment was to achieve a transformation, similar
to Kleist's essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, in which he called for a
renewed eating from the tree of knowledge. Hebel's corresponding passage
in the story of the Fall of Man reads as follows: ‘For when they had
lost their innocence and sinned, they could never enjoy the peace of
life and the blissful childhood pleasures of paradise. Those who have
lost their innocence can no longer be happy in any paradise. It was no
longer possible for them to taste the rejuvenating fruit of the tree of
life.’
However, Hebel moved paradise into the future. For him, the ‘promises’
of the Bible were the seed of hope for a better world. He concretised
this hope more precisely in ‘A Walk by the Lake’ (Der ,Spaziergang an
den See), a key text for his idiosyncratic theology: ‘How he will have
all cannons taken away [...] and all swords turned into ploughshares.’
The didactics of the Bible stories was the same as in Hebel's calendars.
He always arranged the individual stories in pairs under a certain theme,
so that two stories explained each other alternately. Sometimes the
accent was twofold. The positive was thus doubled. In other paired
stories, he emphasised his ‘ethics of error’ through the contrast: in
one story a person acted well, in the other badly.
To Hebel's great delight, the Catholic Church in Breisgau asked him for
the right to use his Bible stories in religious education. Only the
sentence in the decision - ‘Germanised by D. Martin Luther’ - had to be
deleted.
However, there was rumbling in his own church. For the particularly
pious zealots, man as Hebel saw him, namely as a mature partner of God,
was incompatible with Luther's ‘sola fide, solus Christus’ (by faith
alone, through Christ alone). The fundamentalists were particularly
annoyed by the idea that people were free in their decisions and actions
or needed a school of religiosity. The biggest stumbling block, however,
was the last eight words of the story ‘The Crucifixion’: ‘You don't know
what to say?’
Wasn't that a call for tolerance of unbelievers?
The stronger the orthodox current became in the Baden regional church,
the louder the voices became that incited the church people to distance
themselves from Hebel's Bible poetry.
Pietist parents then launched a petition campaign in 1849 (!), most of
which were pre-printed petitions from 28 parishes in Baden, demanding
‘the removal of Hebel's Biblical Stories and the introduction of the
Holy Scriptures in schools’ according to Luther's familiar translation.
On the grounds that Hebel's stories were not faithful to the Bible and
their presentation
to one-sided rationalism, their use in schools was no longer permitted
from 1855.
was no longer permitted from 1855.
Quoted from: Franz Littmann, Johann Peter Hebel - Humanität und
Lebensklugheit für Jedermann,
Sutton Verlag, Erfurt, 2008 |
