German carries the Luther Bible, one of history's most consequential single translations, whose German prose shaped the standardized language itself even as it made scripture directly accessible outside Latin-literate clergy, fueling the Protestant Reformation's spread and prompting the Catholic Church's own subsequent German biblical translations. German became the leading language of modern academic biblical criticism from the nineteenth century onward, with German universities pioneering historical-critical methods that examined scripture's authorship, dating and textual layers using techniques subsequently adopted worldwide by scholars regardless of native language.
German is also the language of Guido von List's Armanen runic system, published in 1906 and 1908, a modern reinterpretation of the historical runic alphabets that became influential within twentieth-century occultism and, more troublingly, within volkisch and later Nazi-era esoteric ideology, and of earlier German Rosicrucian and alchemical writing associated with figures such as Jakob Bohme, whose mystical German prose shaped subsequent Western esoteric Christian thought considerably.
Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, articulated across dozens of German-language lectures and books in the early twentieth century, added a further major modern esoteric system to German's religious and philosophical literature, one subsequently translated worldwide but composed originally in German philosophical prose steeped in German Idealism.