The Lutheran "orthodoxy" asserts its firm place in the post-Reformation church and theological history. In contrast to Pietism and the Enlightenment, there was a historically comprehensible quantity called "Orthodoxy", which - so the assumption continues - embodied all that, against which Pietists and Enlightenmentists then stepped in their place in the best Reformation tradition and with increasing success. This antagonism and the underlying developmental teleologism are demonstrably due to the positional ties and theological-political concerns of historiographical drafts that are still effective today, such as those according to G. Arnold, for example, LT Spittler, GJ Planck, K. Hase, F. Chr. Baur, A. Tholuck and finally by E. Troeltsch. In view of this, the career of the relevant category is traced as a central idea, construction and counter-concept and analyzed by merging institutional-theoretical, theological-historical and conceptual-historical approaches in order to question its historical resilience and scientific linguistic suitability.