Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Zachary Purvis (review)

Zachary Purvis makes a fascinating contribution to the historiography of the development of modern continental Protestant theology. Purvis focuses on the social and cultural formation of Protestant theology by way of exploring the impact of the Enlightenment on German academic culture, the role of the genre of the encyclopedia, and the evolution of the Romantic research university.

Purvis begins with the development of the Protestant university system in Germany in the wake of the Reformation. Much as their medieval predecessors had done, Melanchthon and others sought to organize the university curriculum around theology. As the Enlightenment took hold in Germany, Rationalists of all stripes were dissatisfied with this program of learning. By the 1750s, increasing calls to reform universities were heard. The goal of a university was seen to be as a center of systematic and rational investigation (Wissenschaft). Since theology relied on faith and empirically inaccessible supernatural causes, it was often argued that it could not count as genuine rational knowledge and therefore should be expelled from modern universities.

This call for reform and reorganization of German universities coincided with the development of the genre of the encyclopedia in the continental Enlightenment. Beyond the famous Encyclopédie (1751–1772) of the French Philosophes, other encyclopedias were created, particularly in Germany. In many cases, these numbered in the hundreds of volumes. The goal was to systematize all human learning into one great organic system. The implicit assumption of these works was that all human knowledge was one and could be discovered using scientific methods.

Both of these developments significantly affected how theology was taught and its place in the university. In a sense, theology had to prove itself to be a genuine Wissenschaft. For this reason, theologians came to emphasize the rational coherence of theology with other fields of secular thought. This partially took the form of Hegel's belief that all knowledge (including theology) could be fit into his Idealist system under the rubric of the self-realization of the Geist. It also took the form of a greater interest in comparative religion, as well as the study of church history and the history of Christian dogma.

Beyond these changes, many late Enlightenment and early Romantic theologians began to adapt the genre of the encyclopedia to the teaching of theology. The feeling among these academics was that for theology to be taken seriously as a Wissenschaft it had to be presented in an organic and systematic manner. Johann August Nösselt of Halle and Gottlieb Jakob Planck of Göttingen were some of the first academic theologians to adopt the genre of the encyclopedia to their pedagogical purposes. Friedrich Schleiermacher also developed a theological encyclopedia of his own during his tenure at the University of Halle as a professor of practical theology. Later he brought the same model to the University of Berlin. Also important was his highly influential Kurze Darstellung des Theologische Studiums of 1811. Here Schleiermacher reorganized the subject of theology itself into the three sub-disciplines: philosophical, historical, and practical theology.

Schleiermacher's model of theological education and use of the encyclopedia took hold at the University of Berlin and was also influential at the western extension of the same university at Bonn. There much of Schleiermacher's program was picked up by the Swiss theologian Karl Hagenbach. Hagenbach studied at both Bonn and Berlin, and eventually returned to his native Basel where he taught theology.

At Basel Hagenbach penned the most influential theological encyclopedia of the nineteenth century, Encyclopädie und Methodologie der theologie Wissenschaften. Not only was Hagenbach's textbook the most widely used encyclopedia of the era, but the author received multiple awards for the work from a number of German universities, including Berlin. The book was later translated into a variety of languages and widely used in seminary education outside the German-speaking world. This included an English translation used at a number of American seminaries.

For all the virtues of the...