Ausdruck und Darstellung von Religion im Gebet

Johannes Greifenstein interprets the Christian practice of prayer aided by the aesthetic ideas of expression and representation. He does this by showing that when the concept of expression implies the thought of an already present content, the concept of representation conversely points to the perception of an object which was first created by it. The author begins by discussing the connected aesthetic problems by way of musicological and poetological discourses of the 17th and 18th centuries. Following that, he reconstructs Schleiermacher's understanding of prayer as expression and presentation of religion. Finally he outlines systematic perspectives of a theory of prayer, the relationship between the reference to God and to oneself, between thought and speech and between activity and passivity. Overall, the author maps out prayer within a process of transformation that has re-modeled protestant theology into an interdisciplinary field of study.