Daniel Wyttenbach: Tentamen Theologiæ Dogmaticæ

In Mein Daniel Wyttenbachs Memoria oder Lebens-Umstände, written in 1778, the author recounts his many years of work on the Tentamen, whose three volumes were published in Bern between 1741 and 1747. He presents his work as the result of his many years of studying Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's theodicy and Christian Wolff's philosophy. This "system", as he calls it, is a key work of the "reasonable orthodoxy" of theological Wolffianism in its Reformed (also "Calvinist") version which is closely related to the Lutheran variant by Israel Gottlieb Canz and Jakob Carpov, which he quotes throughout his work. Wyttenbach's "swan singing", as it was called by a friend from Bern who reviewed the text and helped him find a publisher, provides insights into the mental state of a theological Wolffian, for whom the philosophical and theological development in theology and among the critically reading public since the 1760s shattered the methodological and apparent dogmatic stability of his "reasonable orthodoxy" and who reoriented himself historiographically and ecumenically.