Abstract
Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch, Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2013; 336 pp.: 9780199641918, £75.00/$150.00 (hbk)
Nineteenth-century German theology is not very well known in England, partly because of the paucity of books translated into English (and the selective nature of those that were), and partly because of Barth’s condemnation of the direction of German theology after Schleiermacher. Sociologists of religion, by contrast, have been more respectful of Weber and Troeltsch, possibly not appreciating the intellectual context from which they came. Zachhuber’s book is a detailed corrective for such ignorance, tracking a particular project to which Germans after Kant attached great importance – the idea of theology as Wissenschaft, usually rendered in English as ‘science’, a translation that conceals as much as it illuminates. Translated from the author’s doctoral thesis at Humboldt University, Berlin, it is not easy reading, but very rewarding. Part I is a full discussion of Baur and the Tübingen School, distinguishing between two programmes, not always compatible, which Zachhuber calls ‘Idealist’ and ‘Neo-rationalist’. David Strauss was more a representative of the latter than the former, seeking to use anti-supernatural criticism to question the historicity of the New Testament narratives; the driving force seems to have been that only so could the ‘Catholic synthesis’ of traditional theology be destroyed and replaced by a ‘progressive’ development, in which it was entirely natural that divine incarnation in a particular individual was replaced by the divine incarnation in humanity as such at the end of the Life of Jesus. This reminds the reader that Zachhuber’s story is essentially a Protestant one, even though the Life horrified conservative Lutherans as much as Catholics. Although this point is not made by Zachhuber, it also explains why the Kulturkampf of the 1870s was seen by both Catholics and Protestants as a struggle for civilization. Part II discusses Albrecht Ritschl and the Ritschl School. Ritschl is, as it were, the member of the Tübingen School ‘who got away’. By using works that have never been translated into English, Zachhuber illuminates the character of his theology so as to go far beyond the traditional cliché about ‘theology as value-judgements’. Moreover, by emphasizing the centrality of the kingdom of God in Ritschl, he clarifies the links between the latter and those in the next generation, such as Harnack and Herrmann, the latter being a teacher of both P. T. Forsyth and Karl Barth. The shift back to the teaching of Jesus, as distinct from the supernatural elements in his life and ministry, provided the link with various versions of the ‘social gospel’, facilitating Ernst Troeltsch’s account in The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. The original aim of ‘scientific theology’, that it should be ‘without presuppositions’, was quietly dropped in a way which fits in with early twentieth-century philosophy. This book provides the historical detail for a story usually told in a simplified and abbreviated way: it deserves the time necessary for careful reading.