Schelling and Luther

Abstract

Although it would be a stretch to consider FWJ Schelling a Lutheran, he shared some critical features of Luther’s critical engagement with Catholicism. This essay engages this mutual confrontation, and then discusses the new horizon, what Schelling dubs the Johanine Church, the church for everyone and everything, that is the latent promise of the Lutheran (and Pauline) confrontation with the Petrine (or Catholic) Church. As such, this essay is an exercise in what Schelling called philosophical religion, a fruit of his late turn to positive philosophy.