Johann Adam Möhler

When Johann Adam Möhler published Symbolism in 1832, one commentator called it "the severest blow ever dealt to Protestantism." It elicited a flurry of responses from both Protestants and Catholics, and the reactions ranged from praise to confusion and outrage. The most substantial answer came from Ferdinand Christian Baur, who published an entire monograph refuting Möhler. In response, Möhler not only began revising Symbolism, but also issued his own book-length response, New Considerations, which defended Catholic religion against Baur’s caricatures. After his untimely death at age forty-two, the fate of Möhler’s work lay largely in the hands of publishers and loyal readers, who for a time issued editions of the New Considerations as the second volume of Symbolism. This trend ended in the twentieth century when New Considerations went out of print. Now, for the first time, it has been translated into English, and readers can see how Möhler, the greatest Catholic theologian of his century, understood Catholicism and its most essential differences to Protestantism. Grant Kaplan’s excellent and artful translation also provides an introduction that puts Möhler’s final work in its context and explains its abiding relevance for Catholic theology and for contemporary ecumenism.

Johann Adam Möhler was twenty-nine years old and a lecturer at theCatholic seminary in Tübingen when he wrote Die Einheit in der Kirche(Unity in the Church) in 1825. Its two German editions and French translations influenced Catholic authors well into the twentieth century, and the book remains an important example of the early-nineteenth-century Catholic Awakening. In Unity in the Church, Möhler upholds a romantic view of the Catholic Church by describing it as the organic development of the life-giving Holy Spirit. This, he insisted, was the teaching of the earliest Christian writers, whom he discusses and quotes at length throughout the book. Although Möhler was primarily writing as an apologist for the Catholic faith against Protestantism, his work is marked by careful study of Protestant sources, respect for Protestant thought and thinkers, and a reconciliatory tone. In this book he uses the works of the church fathers to demonstrateto his contemporary Protestant opponents that the Scripturesarose from within the church and that the earliest heresies resulted as individuals separated themselves from tradition, which has as its life source the Spirit. The Spirit works through tradition as the source of the church’s mystical and intellectual unity, a unity which allowed for diversity, but which over time formed itself under bishops. According to Möhler, the principle of unity in the church must continue until it reaches its fullest form; thus, the unity of the episcopate and all believers must represent itself in one church and one bishop. A single bishop, the primate, is the center of the living unity of the whole church. This translation is aimed at individuals interested in the development of Catholicism in the modern world and in Catholic-Protestant dialogue and ecumenism generally. It is also an important work for historians and theologians specializing in Catholic historiography, the Scripture-tradition relationship, issues of church and state, and Catholic liberalism.

Drei Ziele. Es lassen sich wenigstens drei Ziele aufz hlen, die M hler bewu t oder unbewu t bei dem gro en Aufsatz ber Anselm geleitet haben, ein apologetisches, ein theologisches und ein ekklesiologisches Motiv. 1. Anselms Erziehung und Klosterleben; 2. Der Kampf f r die Freiheit der Kirche; 3. Die Scholastik des Anselm.

The thought of Johann Adam Mohler has had a major impact on the development of Catholic theology in the twentieth century, providing a crucial source of inspiration for theologians such as Karl Rahner and Yves Congar. Symbolism is Mohler's magnum opus and crowning achievement, in which he works through and illuminates central issues in theological anthropology and ecclesiology within the context of a critical dialogue with Protestant theology.