Spurensicherung

The attempt to affirm one's own confessional identity indicates a critical endangerment of this identity and is always an answer to a concrete historical uncertainty or provocation. However what is often overlooked is the fact that the answer is also contingent upon history and thus historicizes itself at once by updating the history of confessional identity. The history of the Protestant affirmation of identity is still to be found in many kinds of evidence. Preserving this evidence, not only archiving it but at the same time reading it historically and interpreting it critically, is one of the main functions of the history of the Protestant church and Protestant theology. Albrecht Beutel combines fourteen of his studies on Protestantism's history of identity which provide various examples of how to preserve this evidence.