Lehner's edition of Knutzen"s Philosophischer Beweis marks a significant contribution to scholarship in 18th-century German philosophy and theology. K., who at age 21 had his own academic chair, is today known mostly as the onetime teacher of Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Hamann. Still, traces of K. do surface. When Kant refers to the "physico-theological" proof in his Critique of Pure Reason, he had in mind K. whq in 1748 formed a "physico-theological society," to which Kant himself for a time belonged.
K.'s primary significance in the history of ideas was his attempted mediation between the rationalism of Christian Wolff and the pietism of such figures as Joachim Lange and August Hermann Francke. Philosophischer Beweis, K.'s most important work, makes a very reasoned, almost mathematical argument for the need of Special revelationa need that happens to be met in Christianity, and in Christianity alone. Whether or not one finds K.'s work as convincing as its title suggests, it is impressive as Christian apologetics, providing arguments, among other things, for the credibility of the resurrection and the writings of the NT.
Also included here are K.'s Vertheidigte Warheit der Christlichen Religion gegen den Einwurf: Daß die christliche Offenbarung nicht allgemein sey (a 1742, shorter work originally appended to Philosophischer Beweis) and Betrachtung über die Schreibart der Heiligen Schrift (1747). The first was composed directly in response to the German translation of Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), and the second to advance K.'s understanding of the style of Scripture in terms of divine humility (Herunterlassung). In this respect K.'s theology may have had a greater influence on Hamann than Hamann scholarship has hitherto observed, since Hamann's own hermeneutics of Scripture and creation is defined by precisely this notion of divine humility qua selfemptying. It is good and helpful to have these welledited texts at hand.
Copyright © 2008 by Verlag Traugott Bautz