Troeltsch Ernst (1865–1923), German philosopher and historian whose primary aim was to provide a scientific foundation for theology. Educated at Erlangen, Göttingen (under Ritschl and Lagarde), and Berlin, he initially taught theology at Heidelberg and later philosophy in Berlin. He launched the school of history of religion with his epoch-making ‘On Historical and Dogmatical Method in Theology’ (1896). His contributions to theology (The Religious Apriori, 1904), philosophy, sociology, and history (Historicism and Its Problems, 1922) were vastly influential. Troeltsch claimed that only a philosophy of religion drawn from the history and development of religious consciousness could strengthen the standing of the science of religion among the sciences and advance the Christian strategy against materialism, naturalism, skepticism, aestheticism, and pantheism.
His historical masterpiece, Protestantism and Progress (1906), argues that early Protestantism was a modified medieval Catholicism that delayed the development of modern culture. As a sociologist, he addressed, in The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912), the twofold issue of whether religious beliefs and movements are conditioned by external factors and whether, in turn, they affect society and culture. From Christian social history he inferred three types of ‘sociological self-formation of the Christian idea’: the church, the sect, and the mystic.
J.-L.S.