the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

managed, whereas the premodern mindset saw the world as providentially ordered, and
thus both inscrutable (“nobody knows the ways of the Lord”) and inalterable. 91
Nevertheless, Weigel’s world was on the cusp of this transformation, and there is a
fascinating possibility (as I will discuss at the end of Chapter 2) that Weigel himself had
begun to think of the world as contingent, governed by decisions and calculations. In this
context, the logic of Weigel’s self-defence can be reframed in terms of a riskmanagement
calculation: If he had testified (contingent decision, risk), then there would
have been a bad outcome for himself (danger) and not even any compensatory upside
(benefits). Furthermore, Niklas Luhmann suggests that the distinction between secular
and religious decision making is in fact the extent to which risk is taken into account. 92
As he writes, “one can refuse to be guided at all by risk-related distinctions—for instance
in the context of primarily religious or otherwise ‘fanatical’ ventures. But when one does
take risks into consideration, every variant in a decision making repertoire—that is to say
the entire alternative—is risky, if only with the risk of not grasping certain opportunities
that could possible [sic] prove advantageous.” In this light, the injunction to witness and
testify regardless of the risk to one’s life or safety is marked as a fanatical venture,
whereas Weigel accepts that some degree of calculation in religious life is acceptable.
Nevertheless, Christians who lived long after Christ’s death face a particular
problem, namely that the intervening centuries had produced such a flowering of
controversy that there was more than one Christianity for which one could offer oneself
91 On the history of the idea of risk, see Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996). See also Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture:
An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982). Hartmut Kugler, "Phaethons Sturz in die frühe Neuzeit: Ein Versuch über das
Risikobewußtsein," in Wege in die Neuzeit, (München: W. Fink, 1988), 122-145; Baruch Fischoff and John
Kadvany, Risk: A Very Short Introduction, ed. Oxford University Press (Oxford: New York, 2011).
92 Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory, trans. Rhodes Barrett (New Brunswick, NJ, London:
Aldine Transaction, 2005), 21.
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