Tērbatas personālisma ietekme uz latviešu teoloģisko vidi 20. gadsimta pirmajā pusē: personālisma psiholoģija kā reformu avots teologa Jāņa Sandera
The Influence of Dorpat Personalism on Latvian Theological Thought in the First half of the 20th Century: Psychology of Personalism as the Bases

Summary/Abstract: In the first half of 20th century Latvian theologians discussed the need to reform the Lutheran church. In the forefront was an idea of a Latvian national church. But the issue was not just about the need for new choir songs or altars. In the atmosphere of reform more topical became dogmatic problems. To make ground for change, scholars focused on a variety of theo- retical issues. Part of the Latvian theologians had been educated at the University of Dorpat. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the University of Dorpat featured School of Personalism. Its founder was a German philosopher Gustav Teihmuller, and one of his students was the first academically educated Latvian philosopher Jacob Osis. At a time when ideas of Darwinism, Positivism, Marxism spread in the University, the Personalists stood for the primacy of spirit over matter and postulated the value of personality. The young Latvian theology students listened with interest to lectures of the philosophers. Teihmuller’s philosophy became the theoretical basis for reform proposals advanced by a Latvian pastor, doctor of theology Janis Sanders, expressed in his works. After graduating from Dorpat, while living in St. Petersburg, he expressed words of appreciation for Teihmiller’s philosophy in his Baznīcas Vēstnesis publications. In Russia Janis Sanders spent a substantial part of his life. At that time, a philosophical environment in the country began to form, in which Russian Personalism currents played an important role with sources found in Dorpat. Russian philosophers founded Societies in St. Petersburg, in which they discussed relationship between dogma and mind, also the church’s role in society. These issues were important in Janis Sanders` reflections being based on Teihmiller’s work, which constitutes a conceptual link between the Latvian theologian and Russian philosophers. Returning to Latvia, where Janis Sanders was a professor in the Faculty of Theology and lectured on Teihmuller, he actively expressed the need to establish a Latvian church, to purify Lutheranism from its irrational aspects, and to abandon the dogma of the Trinity. The leading Latvian theologians had turned to phenomenology of religion, so Janis Sanders` vision of reform, his references to personalistic psychology, provoked disagreement; as a result Janis Sanders had to leave his position in the church. The conflict between Janis Sanders and Latvian leading theologians can be viewed as a conflict between philosophy of Personalism and Phenomenology of religion. However, a closer examination of both directions reveals that these trends are founded on many common denominators: the recognition of the presence of God’s ideas in man, focusing on person’s inner world, instants of irrationalism. Therefore a question arises about Janis Sanders` teaching within the context of ‘personalistic psychology’.

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