Carey Senior Faculty Fellow 2003-04
Thomas Albert Howard (History)
Gordon College
Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German
University
This research project analyzes the rise of the modern German university
from the standpoint of the Protestant theological faculty, focusing
especially on the University of Berlin (1810), Prussia's flagship
university in the nineteenth century. The evolution of theology
from a confessional, praxis-oriented enterprise—and the hallowed
"queen of the sciences"—in the medieval and early
modern period, to a diminished and often disparaged area of academic
commitment by the early twentieth century, is explored through an
approach that combines intellectual and institutional history. Despite
its reduced status, Protestant theology exhibited considerable adaptive
capacity in the face of myriad modernizing and secularizing forces,
especially those of the centralizing Prussian state and a new "research
imperative" that transformed the German academic landscape
in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. This transformation
prized innovation and discovery over tradition, and specialized
expertise over more general forms of inquiry. By the eve of World
War I, the impact of these hallmark shifts of the modern German
university was apparent on higher education the world over, having
affected the United States with particular force in the 1870s.
In its focus on theology, this study will reframe debate on nineteenth-century
theology and university development. On the one hand, historians
of modern German higher education rarely consider the fate of theological
study, except to suggest its sudden obsolescence in contrast to
more institutionally vigorous humanistic and natural scientific
modes of inquiry. However, exclusive attention to dynamic fields
like chemistry, history, classical philology, physics, and medicine
tends, by virtue of the choice of subject matter, to result in histories
of the modern German university whose main story line is one of
excessive discontinuity. In contrast to historians, theologians
and scholars of modern religious thought have long been attentive
to the profound intellectual significance of nineteenth-century
German Protestant theology and thought. However, if theology is
often neglected by historians of the modern university, it is also
true that theologians—by virtue of a penchant to treat "great
men" and "great texts" rather ahistorically—have
frequently failed to provide richly contextualized accounts of the
social, intellectual, and institutional conditions in which modern
academic theology in Germany took root. We are often left, therefore,
not only with modern university histories short on theology, but
stories of modern theology short on university history. The view
that the two profoundly hang together is the foundational thesis
of this study.
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