Johann Sebastian Drey. Praelectiones Dogmaticae (1815-1834). Gehalten zu Ellwangen und Tübingen (review)

Ever since the Reformation, German Catholics have had to struggle to maintain their theological authenticity as a minority group in the German cultural stream that ultimately matured in the Second Reich. Catholic theologians could maintain a defensive position through a rigorous adherence to Scholastic and subsequently Neo-Scholastic patterns of thought. They could also create a way for their faith to engage their culture in a more positive fashion. The Tübingen School of Theology adopted this latter impetus and looked for the positive contribution that a historicist, romantic, and idealistic culture could provide. Drey was the father of this school, which included Johann Adam Möhler, Franz Anton Staudenmaier, and Johann Kuhn. Subsequently, this nineteenth-century school of thought nurtured such theologians as Hermann Schell, Karl Adam, Johann Metz, and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI). This theological tradition has tended to see God in the "signs of the times" and so could support the "event-driven" theology of such scholars as Metz.

Seckler's very scholarly contribution to analyzing this tradition appears in his carefully edited text of the formerly unpublished Praelectiones. This work contains the notes of Drey's outlines of his systematic theology lectures. This collection of notes is critical as background for understanding Drey's Einleitung and Apologetik. Drey's reviews of the works of others have also allowed recent scholars to envision what Drey's systematic theology would have looked like as a formal treatise. Seckler, a scholar's scholar, has used virtually every published and unpublished source to help unpack the Praelectiones as a text containing Drey's seminal thoughts on the structure of theology as a discipline and on the interaction between theology and history. He and his colleague, Winfried Werner, have even found the class notes of some of Drey's students, which help establish the fact that Drey's scholarly reflections were what he actually taught.

Seckler has also carefully provided his readers with Drey's own publication plans concerning a work on systematic theology, which he viewed as a very crucial future project. The text of the Praelectiones itself has been very carefully edited in light of Drey's own usage of abbreviations and punctuation. Seckler's attention to such details can help inform the reader of the meaning of Drey's sometimes cryptic notations. Within the introductory portion of this work, Seckler has explicated a history of how the unpublished text has been used by such twentieth-century scholars as Josef Rupert Geiselmann and Josef Rief as they have analyzed the contributions of the Tübingen School. In light of the meaning of the Praelectiones, Seckler has uncovered some of the nuances in earlier works, which gave an inaccurate picture of what Drey was trying to do when he connected theology with historical developments.

In the final analysis, only Neo-Thomism, which assisted Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, and Drey's Tübingen tradition have remained dynamic forces nourishing Catholic theology for the past few decades. Both systems have exhibited healthy tensions that have proved vital as Catholic theologians wrestle with issues of methodology. Seckler helps his readers understand these tensions. He has very effectively embedded his edition of Drey's work into an array of lucid and incisive essays. He has also offered a model for younger scholars who want to reappropriate theological texts, by showing that mere translations are not enough. Finally, Seckler has reminded scholars involved in church history and in historical theology of the importance of the Catholic Tübingen School in the ongoing development of the intellectual life of the Church.