Theology, history, and the modern German university

Abstract

Successive genealogists of theology have long explored the significance of the University of Berlin’s foundation in 1809/10 and, in particular, the instrumental voice of Friedrich Schleiermacher in reconfiguring theology as a modern university discipline. In recent years, a handful of important monographs have further elucidated the meaning of Wissenschaft (unsatisfactorily translated as ‘science’ in English and defining, broadly speaking, a common ethos/standard of intellectual endeavour across academic disciplines) as well as the ‘historical turn’ in German and Englishspeaking theology – notably by Johannes Zachhuber, Zachary Purvis and Joshua Bennett. Vander Schel and DeJonge offer this insightful and complementary volume – the first in Mohr Siebeck’s new Christentum in der modernen Welt series – that features a series of essays giving both cogent overviews of the philosophical and methodological dynamics of this crucial context for modern theology’s development and relationship to the research university. Much of the material within offers lucid surveys: Jacqueline Mariña’s essay on ‘Kant, Schleiermacher, and the Study of Theology’ and Christophe Chalamet’s contribution on Karl Barth would be very helpful reading for any graduate student trying to understand the task of theology since the Enlightenment, for example. Other contributions offer more focussed accounts of individual theologians and church historians that elucidate the whole and offer teasing pathways for future conversations, on occasion with rich personal and contextual detail. See, for example, Zachary Purvis’s illuminating reassessment of the charmingly donnish August Neander, whose extraordinary output and influence came to define religious historicism within Germany and beyond (see also Joshua Bennett’s recent article on Neander in the Historical Journal in this respect). Articles on Baur (Peter Hodgson), Ritschl and Eduard Zeller (Zachhuber), as well as the Roman Catholics J.S. Drey and J. Kuhn (Grant Kaplan) and, at the other end of the century, Harnack (Jonathan Teubner) and Troeltsch (Christian Polke), offer fresh and up-to-date readings in the greats of nineteenth-century German theologian, from Tübingen as much as Berlin. These are complemented by several articles on German historicism abroad with an overview of Newman’s influential redefinition of the university by Matthew Muller and Kenneth Parker, the German impact on British theology (via the Cambridge theologians Connop Thirlwall and Julius Hare, in particular) by Mark Chapman, and the role of Henry Boynton Smith in the United States as a ‘transatlantic bridge-builder’ by Annette G. Aubert. These perhaps sit less convincingly within the volume; the influence of German historical theology in its changing forms on English-speaking theology arguably extends beyond the remit of the title and seems somewhat confined to the mid-nineteenth century, thus losing something of the international dynamism of Protestant historical theology at the turn of the twentieth. There might also have been a helpful article or introduction on the development of the German university more generally, although most articles are helpfully attentive to the changing political contexts of what were state institutions.