Shepherds of the Empire: Germany’s Conservative Protestant Leadership, 1888–1919 by Mark R. Correll (review)

The one-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I aroused a discussion not only about the question of responsibilities regarding the outbreak of the war but also about the ideological and philosophical foundations for war in Germany that led to enthusiasm for it. Interestingly, the role of the Christian churches in promoting Kriegsbegeisterung in 1914 did not become a significant part of those discussions. This absence is startling because academics, clergy, and theologians associated with the German protestant churches played a particularly significant part in this process.

Enthusiasm for war was shared across an otherwise segmented German Protestantism. Conservatives and liberals, confessionalists and unionists, traditional and critical theologians—they all were united in the conviction that it was one’s Christian duty to support this war. Scholars have already widely discussed the participation of leading liberal theologians like Adolf von Harnack in fostering enthusiasm for war. Therefore Mark R. Correll sets his focus on conservative theologians and their influence on the clergy in Wilhelmine Germany. He analyzes the theology of Adolf Stoecker, Martin Kaehler, Adolf Schlatter, and Christoph Blumhardt, at that time four well-known theologians and churchmen. He then demonstrates the influence of these theologians on the preaching of Protestant clergy in Wilhelmine Germany from 1888 to 1918. The aim of the study “is to present a picture of the dissemination of theological ideas from their inception in the universities and the church hierarchy through the pastors and finally to the parishioners” (15). Correll wants to reconstruct a “believing community” (15) initiated and inspired by these theologians. He argues that this community “played a key role in deciding that the discourse of faith and morality was a discussion of German national faith and morality more than an individual’s faith and morality” (8).

The structure of this study provides two major difficulties. First, Correll’s selection of the theologians ignores a major part of Protestant conservatism. To be sure, he shows the heterogeneity in its theology: Stoecker was a fiercely nationalistic court preacher; Kaehler and Schlatter were independent academics; and Blumhardt was a premillenarist preacher who joined the Social Democrats. Still, the story of the confessionalists—especially the so-called Erlanger Schule—remains untold in this study. Interestingly, there is one instance when Correll mentions their influence on Kaehler (48), but it does not lead him to further analysis. The second difficulty lies in Correll’s analysis of the sermons, which suffers from the lack of a profound methodology. Of the sermons analyzed by the author, most were held by pastoral candidates as part of their Second Theological Examination. Correll did not give any explanation as to why he considers just the sermons of a random group of young theologians. It is questionable if they can provide a truly representative picture of clerical sermons at that time.

Correll puts great effort into characterizing these conservative theologians as thinkers who wanted to combine the core of Christian faith with modernity in order to build a society based on Christian principles. But his assumption that “the believing theologians developed an effective community and apparatus for political influence” (183) is too general to be verified by an analysis of either the writings of theologians or the sermons of clergymen. His study is too narrow in focus to be able to distinguish as carefully as is needed between the diverse elements of church structure and theology. Correll frequently mentions the phrase “the German Protestant Church” in the singular (i.e., 9) despite the fact that there was no such church in Germany. The heterogeneous system of different Protestant Churches in Germany was one of the main reasons for the susceptibility of German Protestantism to nationalistic thoughts. The process of political unification in the 1860s evoked a great desire among Protestants for a singular German Protestant Church to serve as an equivalent to the new German nation-state. Stoecker was...