Shepherds of the Empire: Germany's Conservative Protestant Leadership--1888-1919

4. Receiving the Ancient Beliefs in the Modern Day: Adolf Schlatter’s Life and Work

4 Receiving the Ancient Beliefs in the Modern Day Adolf Schlatter’s Life and Work In 1885, the relatively obscure Bern theologian Adolf Schlatter burst onto the wider theological landscape with an encyclopedic study of the New Testament’s use of the word belief. From this point on, Schlatter became the most esteemed and prolific believing theologian of his generation. The great neo-orthodox voices that followed—Emil Brunner, Paul Althaus and Karl Barth, to name a few—acknowledged the intellectual debt they owed to Schlatter’s work. Schlatter’s historical insights have found a greater lasting audience than any other scholar of his age, even the significantly more widely read contemporary, Adolf von Harnack. Schlatter fulfilled the ideas of Kähler and wrote a believing systematic theology using the most sophisticated academic tools available. His theology was recognized in his lifetime for its daring independence from the field and its adherence to the faith of Protestant orthodoxy. However, despite the accolades he won during his career, despite the praise offered him by the leading lights of the following generation, and despite his continued renown as an authority about first-century Palestinian history, generations of theologians after Schlatter’s death in 1938 all but ignored his greatest works: his histories of New Testament thought and his systematic thought on dogma and ethics. Adolf Schlatter was the first of the believing theologians to create a wholly modern systematic theology, even as it retained the core traditional doctrines of the church. His background made him a perfect candidate to redefine Protestant theology. He was born in Calvinist Switzerland, moved to Lutheran Union Prussia, and finally ended his life in Lutheran Pietist Baden-Württemberg. This 83 broad Protestant perspective gave him the tools he needed to free believing theology from its inflexible Reformation moorings. In his theology, Schlatter followed Kähler’s lead and credited the word of God with its divine character because of its role in creating a relationship between the creator God and God’s human creations. Schlatter wrote that the Bible acts as the conduit of expressing God’s qualities to humanity. According to this definition of the Bible, the Bible brings the believer into a personal relationship with God. Finally, Schlatter developed a systematic ethics with a specificity and thoroughness that no other believing theologian had attempted. He defined ethics as the loving response to God’s relationship. Schlatter understood ethical behavior in the light of his theology of the word of God because the believer discovers ethical mandates from the Scriptures as they reveal God’s will to the reader. Schlatter eventually turned his whole experience as a systematic thinker to explaining and supporting the German war effort in the First World War. His thought encouraged many troops on the front and families who stayed behind. Yet despite Schlatter’s monumental work, he quickly faded out of the theological limelight following the First World War. The dialectic theologians of the 1920s laid Schlatter’s monumental systematic works aside in their general rejection of nineteenth-century theology. Despite individual calls to reappraise Schlatter’s place in the German theological pantheon, he has remained a generally forgotten and ignored voice in German theology. “My Experience with the Bible”: A Biographical Overview of Adolf Schlatter’s Life Reflecting on his own life, Schlatter divided his major formative experiences into four categories, or better said, four relationships. Importantly, the first relationship he described was his relationship with the state, which was the relationship over which he had the least control. Through his life, his relationship with the state changed from it being a benign presence in his childhood, to it being an employer when he served in both the pastorate and the university, and finally to the state being the exactor of great sacrifice during the First World War. Schlatter described the other three relationships with joy and thankfulness for the role they played in his life. His relationships with the Scriptures, with the church, and with nature were love relationships that he freely joined.1 Together, these four relationships colored the theological 1. Schlatter’s special emphasis on nature brings our discussion to an interesting tangent to Frederick Gregory’s inspection of the specifically German interaction of theology and science in Nature Lost? Schlatter fell comfortably into the orthodox understanding of nature that Gregory describes through the 84 | Shepherds of the Empire questions he asked and defined...