I. INTRODUCTION#
In 1853 Emperor Napoleon III (1852–70), asked Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, to modernize Paris. Over a period of seventeen years (1853–70), Haussmann tore down and rebuilt 60 percent of Paris. He leveled many medieval buildings on the Île de la Cité. He disrupted the lives of Parisians, especially the poor, forcing 350,000 people from their dwellings.
In 1859 Haussmann stipulated precise dimensions for many of the new buildings. These edifices often served as residences and businesses for members of a powerful middle class. He constructed straight avenues and twelve boulevards to improve travel speed and facilitate trade. He gave thoroughfares sufficient width to discourage any Parisians daring to revolt from erecting barricades to block the advance of the emperor’s troops.
Haussmann wanted Paris filled with light and open-air parks. One of his engineers, Jean-Charles Alphand, created parks bedecked with woods, waterfalls, and walkways (Le Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, Le Parc Monsouris). Haussmann enhanced water and sewage systems and increased public lighting by adding 20,000 gas outlets. But the monetary undergirding for his renovation plans created huge debts and fueled rampant speculation. In 1870 Napoleon III, alarmed by social unrest, fired the innovative “modernizer.”
During the Restoration (after 1815), a number of Europeans, whether in France or elsewhere, wanted to reinstitute aspects of “Christian” Europe that had existed before the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. They understood that between the years 1789 and 1814, numerous long-standing institutions, traditions, customs, and beliefs had been rudely assailed. Nonetheless, they sought to restore the Old Order.
In their efforts to turn back the cultural clock, some “restorers” may have underestimated the durability of a number of changes that took place during the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rule. Moreover, they apparently did not foresee the extent to which the powerful forces of “modernization” would transform the physical, economic, political, social, and intellectual traits of Europe, making it difficult to reinstitute fully prerevolutionary institutions, values, and sensibilities.
II. “MODERNIZATION”: A CONTROVERSIAL CONCEPT#
Sociologists and historians often define “modernization” as a society’s complex and multiphased movement from an agricultural and rural or traditional condition to a “modern” industrial, technological society that is urbanized, democratic, and pluralistic. This was a social evolutionary theory of a society’s inevitable development and “progress” from a “traditional” to a “modern” condition and in the social and economic entailments of the Industrial Revolution that first appeared in England in the eighteenth century and then on the Continent, first in Belgium, in the nineteenth century.
Some critics of the modernization concept do not deny the existence of the phenomenon. Rather, they decry the “abuses” that can follow in its wake.
“Modernization” can weaken a person’s sense of corporate belonging to and identity with a family, a neighborhood, a church, or the local town.
It can wear down loyalties to worthy older customs, habits, and traditions.
It can afford a tool such as modernized weaponry with which allegedly “superior” (modern) peoples can subjugate allegedly “inferior” (traditional) peoples whose lands are coveted for their natural resources.
Modernization is also often linked to a disputed “secularization” premise that the evolution of a society inevitably results in progress and a turning away from religion.
Other critics complain that “modernity,” a concept closely associated with modernization, is frequently portrayed as a “Western,” European-centric phenomenon. They claim that at least its economic origins were Asian and that there were powerful non-Western economies before the nineteenth century. For these critics, history should be written, not from a European perspective, but from a world perspective that acknowledges the worth of other cultures.
Ideally, the historian should attempt to distinguish the oft-times competing perceptions some Europeans had of their colonization efforts (beneficial) as compared with the perceptions (exploitative) of those peoples colonized by Europeans.
Notwithstanding all these reservations, a consideration of the impact of modernization on European societies can offer significant insights into the origins of many of the religious and social conflicts that took place during the nineteenth century between Protestant and Roman Catholic “liberals” and Protestant and Roman Catholic “conservatives” as well as the disputes between secularists and agnostics and people of faith.
A. The Impact of Modernization on Nineteenth-Century Europe#
The forces of modernization began to set in, including the emergence of the “modern state.” These forces often disrupted rhythms of daily life and modified or transformed values, particularly of inhabitants of European cities.
Haussmann’s renovation of Paris may serve as an illustration of the beneficial and less worthwhile changes one kind of modernization — regulated city planning — could elicit. Portions of Paris substantially took on a new look, quite different from what Paris resembled in the mid-eighteenth century. This earlier, smaller Paris, still had the feel of a walled, medieval town.
By the 1860s Paris, like a number of other French cities, was alarmingly overcrowded. Newcomers from the countryside often poured into impoverished, cramped neighborhoods. But Paris was now larger, boasting new and renovated sections. Eight arrondissements (districts) were added to Paris in 1860. Upper-middle and aristocratic elites lived in Haussmann’s apartment buildings that lined amply illuminated avenues or boulevards.
The upper classes of Parisian society enjoyed a greater sense of economic and political power. Nonetheless, they continued to fear potential revolts erupting among the “barbarians,” or the “people.” They were also scandalized by the “Bohemian” (a term first used in 1834) lifestyles of poets such as Paul Verlaine and Jean Rimbaud.
Poor artists and writers barely eking out a living had thronged into the Latin Quarter of Paris. They often championed the pursuit of a non-conformist, “free” lifestyle, unfettered from conventional, Christian, bourgeois restraints.
B. The Industrial Revolution, Modernization, and the Projection of European Power#
The “Industrial Revolution” (a term thought to have originated in the 1830s) first took hold in England (1780–1840). Coal was a principal fuel along with water and steam as sources of power. Modernization in the form of improved machinery (the steam engine) and technical innovations brought significant change to the lives of workers. The surge of patents issued in England charts but one indicator of a powerful technological revolution: 82 (1740–69); 924 (1800–1809); 2,453 (1830–40); 4,581 (1840–49).
For many factory owners, time was no longer viewed in terms of what could be accomplished manually during daylight hours, but in terms of how much time it took to produce an item by a machine. The craftsmanship of a single piece or item was often not as important as standardized, mass-produced exchangeable parts. A technological society could tend to make life impersonal.
Travel times for people and heavy freight diminished within countries due to improved road systems, the building of canals, and the use of trains, horse-buses, and trams.
In 1836 London had its first railway.
In 1840 Friedrich Harkort, a German businessman, even ventured the idea that “The locomotive is the hearse which will carry absolutism and feudalism to the graveyard.”
Europeans took advantage of new train services. By 1860 there were 300 million passenger trips by train in Europe; by 1880 there were 1,355 million.
Steamboats shortened travel time from months to weeks along rivers and across oceans. The Scot Henry Bell built the Comet, an innovative steamboat in 1812. The time it took to communicate across distances shortened dramatically. The American Samuel Morse made a telegraph machine in 1835; Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish immigrant to America, received a patent for an electric telephone in 1876.
During the nineteenth century the population of Europe more than doubled, from 187 million to 401 million.
England, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany continued to undertake major colonization ventures from Africa to Asia. During the last third of the century they sometimes scrambled and competed as “empire builders” to acquire overseas territories. Toward 1870 the word imperialism was first used to describe the control of European nations over colonial lands and peoples.
C. Modernization and Democratic Revolutions#
After 1815, efforts at restoring or reinforcing institutions from prerevolutionary Europe (1789) on occasion did meet with some success.
A number of “Christian” monarchies were reestablished.
The papacy, while greatly weakened during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, regained its footing and considerable respect.
In 1815 the Russian tsar Alexander I proposed the creation of a European “Holy Alliance” that had as its goal “the application of the principles of Christianity to politics” (Prince Metternich’s assessment).
Nonetheless, nineteenth-century monarchs and popes faced serious political and intellectual challenges. French revolutionaries were often blamed for sparking political and social unrest in other countries by providing examples of revolt. In the last half of the nineteenth century, conservative political forces could not halt movements toward state unification in Italy and Germany. Nor could they always thwart campaigns to extend personal liberties and voting rights to non-propertied people.
D. Modernity and the Rise of “Natural Knowledge” and “Secularism”#
Especially after 1848, intellectual revolutions in the name of “modernity” and “evolution” gained further momentum.
In some uses the word modernity simply alludes to the most up-to-date and progressive school of thought in a field of knowledge. More particularly, it often refers to the most recent scientific and technological advances.
The word evolution could reference the assumed “natural” development of numerous entities from a simple to a more complex form, including an idea, society, institution, philosophy, religion, or living beings.
A variety of thinkers became genuinely enthralled by and promoted modern, new ways of looking at the world.
They extolled the authority of “natural knowledge” as opposed to “revealed knowledge” and metaphysics.
They hailed “modern science” for producing multiple benefits for humanity.
They wanted to pursue “objective,” empirical scientific research untethered from religious strictures.
They cited “reason” as a final authority in assessing what is “truthful,” what is “right,” and what is “useful.”
They frequently touted utilitarian values, especially the value that what brings happiness to the greatest number should be sought and esteemed.
They rather naïvely believed that the mastery of nature through scientific research would bring happiness and well-being to humankind.
New academic disciplines emerged, such as sociology, to give natural, scientific explanations of the origins of societies and the general history or evolution of human relations. Older disciplines such as history were “professionalized.”
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) of the University of Berlin advocated intensive archival research and the quest to write a “total history.” He established an important goal for historians: after a rigorous assessment of primary documents, they should recount history “as it really happened.”
The seminar system he inaugurated became a centerpiece for learning historical methodology. New professional societies for historians were founded in Europe and the United States. University professors attempted to apply the rules of “modern historical scholarship” to their work. As practitioners of “objective” history, many of these scholars tried to exclude their own religious beliefs from influencing the way they did history. They bracketed out any reference to God and divine providence as causative agents in history.
In his Data for Ethics (1879), Herbert Spencer, the originator of the expression “the survival of the fittest,” attempted to build the case for the existence of “natural ethics.” He said these ethics should be grounded in a scientific study of humanity’s evolution, and he claimed that they are not necessarily incompatible with “theological ethics.”
In an essay of 1880, “Science and Culture,” Thomas Huxley, the author of Man’s Place in Nature (1863), argued that the emergence of “natural knowledge” was the defining trait of the age. Huxley criticized contemporary British academic culture when it closely identified scholarship with the humanities and classical studies while neglecting the importance of science.
In 1923 Clement Webb, Oriel Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford, seconded Huxley’s perception regarding the import of natural knowledge.
E. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species#
The appearance of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) created a turning point in the scientific, intellectual, and religious history of nineteenth-century Europe. The book advocated a theory of organic evolution, even though the specific word evolution appears only once in its pages. The volume seemed to represent the best of natural knowledge and modern science. Darwin’s arguments appeared based on scrupulous empirical and impartial research.
Darwin (1809–82) attended the University of Edinburgh and Cambridge University and in student days viewed himself as a Christian. He did not “doubt the strict and literal truth of the word in the Bible.”
At first, he thought he would be a physician. Then he considered a career as a Christian cleric. But in 1831 he signed on as a naturalist for voyages of the Beagle (1831–36). Along the coasts of South America, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia, he made “observations in Natural History and Geology” later published in his Journal of Researches. He studied Sir Charles Lyell’s important work Principles of Geology (1830–33).
In 1838 Darwin pondered Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Malthus had proposed that, if population grows exponentially while food production grows only arithmetically, a struggle for survival would ensue among peoples. Darwin became convinced that the hostile environment of nature set the stage of the struggle for survival of the fittest within and between species.
In 1858 Darwin was stunned when he read an article by Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913), who proposed views about evolution that were nearly identical with his own. It is probably fair to say that Wallace and Darwin were the cofounders of the modern evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, it was Darwin’s Origin of Species, based on careful research dating back to the 1830s, that elevated the theory of evolution to a new status of respectability within the wider scientific community.
In Origin of Species Darwin, who had earlier abandoned the Christian faith and had apparently experienced “no distress” in doing so, challenged a central belief of contemporary naturalists: the independent creation of each species (that is, by God).
The book more generally spelled out a theory, yet it appeared to countermand the biblical creation accounts of plants and animals recorded in Genesis 1 and 2. A number of Darwin’s Christian critics charged the scientist with subverting the Christian faith by bringing discredit on the Bible. Other believers sought to demonstrate that Darwin’s theories could be aligned with Scripture and Christian theology.
Darwin did not profess to deny God’s existence. In fact, he struck out against anyone who would argue that creation was due to blind chance. Controversy still exists regarding whether or not Darwin was in fact a theist, an agnostic, or covertly an atheist. In his two principal books he indicated there was a “creator.”
A full-scale reaction against the worth of “science,” “reason,” and “modernity” had already begun to emerge. In The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914, J. W. Burrow describes the multiple and complex forms this reaction took, including a movement in the arts ironically called “Modernism.”
F. Atheistic Attacks on the Christian Faith#
In the nineteenth century Christians sometimes found themselves swept up in a world of bewildering changes. They witnessed their cherished traditional religious beliefs assailed by unbelieving philosophers and social critics. Authors ranging from Karl Marx to Friedrich Nietzsche launched spirited attacks on the Christian religion.
Ludwig Feuerbach, a “loner”, provocative philosopher, and author of The Essence of Christianity (1841), in many ways reduced God to man. He argued that “God” is, after all, the projection of certain qualities of humans:
“God, as the quintessence of all realities and perfections, is nothing else than the quintessence, comprehensively summarized for the assistance of the limited individual, of the qualities of the human species, scattered among men, and manifesting themselves in the course of world history.”
With this premise in mind, Feuerbach indicated that when we pray, we do not actually pray to a “god” exterior to ourselves, but instead are engaged in “self-catharsis.” He also argued for the materialist menu: we are what we eat.
Nietzsche (1844–1900), another loner German philosopher, also made the case for atheism. However, he did so not as a “modernist,” but as an “unmodern.”
The son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche received a solid education in theology and philology at the University of Bonn and the University of Leipzig. A reading of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) and Michel de Montaigne’s skeptical arguments reinforced a growing disdain for traditional Christian values.
Nietzsche emphasized nonrational forces as the source for creativity, true living, and art. He identified himself as a follower of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility. He indicted Christianity with its emphasis on humility and its alleged creation of false guilt as a “religion of the weak.” In reality, he said, people are driven to release their strength, thereby exercising a “will for power.” The Übermensch (superman) is the person who lives with the most vitality and creativity and does so liberated from useless, unprovable Christian morals. Nietzsche argued that “one cannot believe [the] dogmas of religion and metaphysics if one has in one’s heart and head the rigorous methods of acquiring truth.”
Despite urging caution in making definitive judgments, Nietzsche claimed that “God is dead,” no absolutes exist, “there are no facts, only interpretations,” and man should be “translated back” into nature.
Proponents of “comparative religions” argued that Christianity should be studied, not from a confessional perspective, nor as the religion, but scientifically analyzed and described as one of a number of religions. They often assumed that religions “evolve” from a primitive to a more complex stage of development.
G. The Coining of the Words Secularization, Secularism, Agnostic, Eugenics, and Anti-Semitic#
By the second half of the nineteenth century, words such as secularization, secularism, agnostic, eugenics, and anti-Semitic began to penetrate the vocabulary of Europeans.
The word secularization became identified with an emerging “modern” separation of morality from a traditional grounding in religion.
In the journal Reasoner, which he founded, George Holyoake coined another term, “secularism” (1851) as “the improvement of life by material means.” In 1883 Professor W. G. Blaike of New College, Edinburgh, observed that Holyoake’s form of secularism, now deemed a utilitarian movement, while not necessarily atheistic, took little note of religion.
Thomas Huxley introduced the word agnostic to distinguish skeptics from atheists. In 1883 he indicated what he had meant by the term he had coined years earlier: “Some twenty years ago, or thereabouts, I invented the word ‘Agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with utmost confidence.”
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, agnosticism became an attractive alternative stance for English students and members of the upper classes in Victorian England who had gnawing doubts about the truth of the Christian religion.
In 1883 Francis Galton introduced the word eugenics to designate efforts to make the human race better by “improved” breeding. Galton, a scientist and evolutionist, indicated that eugenics would favor the fittest human beings and suppress the birth of the unfit.
In the 1880s the word anti-Semitic entered German vocabulary.
III. INTERACTING WITH MODERNIZATION AND MODERNITY#
A number of Christians became more than a little suspicious that “modernity” and “secularization” apparently went hand in hand. Certain materialists had made this specific claim.
In 1874 John W. Draper published History of the Conflict between Science and Religion, in which he claimed that religion is an implacable enemy of reason and scientific advances.
Historian T. C. W. Blanning has argued that some traditional elites, including Christians, actually experienced a “crisis of modernization” that raised doubts about their status in society. He noted that European society witnessed the “decline or collapse of its old political, religious, or social masters” and the emergence of intellectuals who sought to find “a secular substitute for or supplement to ‘revealed religion.’”
At the same time, few Europeans could deny that aspects of modernization and modernity — advances in science and technology, for example — had brought genuine benefits to humankind. For many Christians who desired to uphold “the faith once delivered,” discerning what stance to take toward modernity, especially as represented by science, constituted a perplexing challenge.
The problem was intensified due to the work of Charles Darwin. Believers encountered scientists — some of whom were Christians of good standing — who told them Charles Darwin was correct: human beings had not descended from Adam and Eve but evolved from “ape-like” creatures.
How could Darwin’s views be meshed with the teachings of Genesis 1 and 2?
A. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce: God the Author of the Book of Nature and Scripture#
Christians such as Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805–73) were quick to claim that Darwin’s teachings were incompatible with Christian revelation.
In 1860 Wilberforce published in the Quarterly Review a well-crafted and lengthy response to the Origin of Species. He praised Darwin’s remarkable research and engaging writing style, and he even indicated that “Mr. Darwin writes as a Christian, and we doubt not that he is one.” Nonetheless, Wilberforce did not hesitate to criticize specific claims of Darwin as erroneous and examples of the scientist indulging his “fancy.”
Wilberforce believed that God is the ultimate author of both the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. Thus the two should not contradict each other. In this light, Wilberforce argued that Darwin’s application of the principle of natural selection to man, given its apparent conflict with scriptural teaching, must be rejected.
In October 1860 Wilberforce and Huxley engaged in a famous debate at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford regarding the merits of Darwin’s theories. Huxley shrewdly portrayed Wilberforce, the cleric, as meddling in “scientific” matters beyond his training and competency.
When Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he traced his ancestry from a grandfather or through a grandmother to an ape, Huxley coyly replied that he would prefer to have that kind of ancestry than from a man [by inference Wilberforce] “highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion.”
B. Darwinism and the Search for Truth#
The debate over Darwin’s work took many turns. Some critics wondered if he was right in affirming that evolutionary processes moved toward perfection. Why, they asked, did not “natural selection” sometimes provoke “devolution”? Other critics were dismayed by the fact that a number of its partisans claimed that Darwin’s teaching demonstrated the truth of naturalism or provided a rationale for various forms of racism (Social Darwinism) and even eugenics (the elimination of inferior offspring).
Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, author of General Morphology of Organisms (1866), introduced Darwinism to Germany. In 1899 Haeckel, a brilliant zoologist, published The Riddle of the Universe, in which he argued a case for monism, a basic unity between organic and inorganic nature.
He denied the immortality of the soul and the existence of a personal God.
He promoted infanticide, suicide, and the elimination of the unfit.
Using a hundred lithographs drawn from nature (1904), Haeckel campaigned for the teaching of evolutionary biology in Germany as an established fact.
By contrast, many scientists proposed that Darwin’s thought was not fixed but was evolving and a “theory.” Nor did it mandate atheism or monism. In the Ascent of Man (1894), Henry Drummond thought belief in God and belief in evolution are compatible. He criticized naturalists for claiming otherwise. Drummond referenced a raging debate regarding the thesis that traits acquired through contact with the environment could be inherited.
As the twentieth century dawned, the debate over Darwinism continued, with various parties claiming victory. Authors of two articles devoted to evolution in The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910–15), an American publication, claimed that Darwinism was “dead” and cited European scholars to that effect. Many other commentators heartily disagreed. Some preferred Drummond’s earlier perspective.
Under mounting cultural and intellectual pressures, those Europeans who wanted to be “modern” and “scholarly” and remain “Christian” sometimes attempted to make accommodations in the way they expressed their faith.
Early in the century, Protestant “liberal” theologians in particular recommended new ways of describing the Christian faith.
Later in the century, so-called Catholic “modernists” argued that the Roman Catholic Church needed to accommodate its teaching to the “advances” in knowledge made by biblical critics and evolutionists and partisans of democracy. In 1910 Pope Pius X condemned modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.”
Faced by dramatic changes—whether political, social, or intellectual —some nineteenth-century European Christians often felt the need to define and defend their faith in new ways. These were not always easy tasks. Those Christians who attempted to align the Christian faith with the “rules of modern scholarship” discovered that those rules on occasion sheltered strong naturalist presuppositions. Roman Catholic neo-Thomists and others who continued to emphasize evidential apologetics and theistic proofs were on occasion accused of promoting reason’s rights as if they had not been affected by the Fall.
Anglo-Catholics and participants in the Oxford Movement felt no such need to adjust their beliefs. They sought to reaffirm the authority of their respective churches. They emphasized the critical importance of confessions, creeds, and Scripture.
On July 14, 1833, the Anglican divine John Keble preached a famous sermon, “National Apostasy,” that triggered the beginning of the Oxford Movement. Another leader of the Oxford Movement, Vicar John Henry Newman, who later converted to Roman Catholicism (1845), was concerned about subjecting Christian doctrine to human judgment as liberalism apparently did.
Ultramontane Roman Catholics such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis Veuillot called on the Catholic faithful to submit more fully to the authority of a restored papacy.
IV. THE RISE OF PROTESTANT LIBERALISM#
From the publication of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Speeches to Religion’s Cultured Despisers (1799) to Adolf von Harnack’s What Is Christianity? (1899–1900) and Auguste Sabatier’s Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit (1901) and beyond, “Protestant Liberalism,” an international theological movement with distinguished representatives exercised a significant influence on many Protestant professors, pastors, students, and laypeople — especially in Germany, but also in Switzerland, England, France, the United States, and other countries and on the “Western” mission fields.
Protestant liberals by no means concurred with each other on every point. Students often disagreed with their teachers on specific issues, and various schools of thought and opinions emerged. Nonetheless, Protestant liberals believed in common that they offered to Europeans intellectually viable alternatives to
what some thought were the discredited theologies of “orthodox” (“Scholastic”) Protestant Christians
what some thought were the subversive proposals of radical biblical critics
A number of Protestant liberal scholars boldly announced that their theology captured the essence of religion — that is, our feeling (intuition) of total dependence on God. It allowed for the acceptance of responsible modern scholarship, including biblical criticism (and after 1859, Darwinian evolution), while it simultaneously remained faithful to essential evangelical beliefs.
Some argued that they were recovering the true teachings of the historical Jesus as distinct from the religion about Jesus that Paul and the early church had created and that orthodox Christians mistakenly identified with true Christianity.
Orthodox theologians offered cogent criticisms of the various schools of Protestant liberalism. Nonetheless, not until the publication of Karl Barth’s Commentary on Romans (1919) did Protestant liberalism’s grip on certain Protestant faculties of theology in Europe seriously begin to loosen.
Barth specifically criticized the theology of Schleiermacher, whom he perceived to be the chief architect of liberal theology.
At the same time, Barth honored Schleiermacher’s greatness as a theologian: “The first place in a history of theology of the most recent times belongs and will always belong to Schleiermacher, and he has no rival.”
A. Friedrich Schleiermacher: The Emergence of “Modern Theology”#
Often hailed as the “father of modern theology,” Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was born into the home of a Moravian pastor in Breslau, Silesia. His father served as a Reformed chaplain at the Prussian court. Schleiermacher received a “Pietistic” education before attending the University of Halle (1787).
There he followed intently debates between advocates of Immanuel Kant and Christian Wolff and became acquainted with the biblical criticism of Johann Salomo Semler, who was still teaching at the university. His reading fare was extensive, ranging from Plato to Spinoza. Schleiermacher in the main turned his back on his Moravian upbringing.
In 1796 Schleiermacher assumed the position of chaplain at the Charity Hospital in Berlin. He frequented the heady intellectual centers of Berlin, where his closest associates included Friedrich von Schlegel, Moses Mendelssohn, Henriette Herz, and other partisans of German Romanticism.
Schleiermacher was a brilliant theologian, a Greek scholar, a churchman, an eloquent preacher, and a German patriot critical of Napoleon’s imperialistic aggressions. He attempted to create an innovative theology, set of ethics, and method of hermeneutics that took into consideration many of the issues raised by German Romantics such as Johann Gottffied Herder, by Kant, by Neologian biblical critics, and by unbelieving contemporaries.
Beginning in 1804, he served brief terms as a professor at the University of Halle and the new University of Berlin, then ministered at the Holy Trinity Church of Berlin before returning to teach as a professor and dean at the University of Berlin in 1810. He also lent support to Frederick William III’s efforts to create the Prussian Union (1817), which brought together Lutheran and Reformed Christians.
In the early 1790s the state of German Protestant theology was far from auspicious, despite the fact that Germany boasted seventeen Faculties of Theology. The Neologian Semler said as much. One commentator complained bitterly that in the hands of Semler’s disciples the doctrine of accommodation had become “the most formidable weapon ever devised for the destruction of Christianity.” Until 1815, Neologian theology exercised a considerable appeal for German students.
Schleiermacher was impressed by Kant’s assessment of reason’s limitations. By contrast, he was not persuaded by the German philosopher’s attempt to rebuild theology on the basis of “morality,” including our sense of “oughtness” (the so-called “categorical imperative”).
Nor was Schleiermacher convinced by the arguments of orthodox Christians that the Bible is infallible. His study of the works of German biblical critics helped elicit this judgment.
At the same time, Schleiermacher worried about Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Theory of Knowledge (1794) and the “Atheism Controversy” it apparently fostered. Schleiermacher thought his unbelieving contemporaries had been so impacted by aspects of contemporary German culture that they evidenced little interest in religion.
In On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), Schleiermacher as an apologist for religion tried to woo educated moderns of his day to reconsider its worth.
He complained that they did not bother to consider religion’s merit because they thought it lacked any persuasive rational warrant.
He called on these unbelieving contemporaries to reflect on another kind of warrant for “religion”: the feeling or intuition of utter dependency on the “One,” or the “World All,” a feeling that preceded any rational construction of dogma.
In a later edition of his book, Schleiermacher identified the “World All” more closely with the God of Christianity. Theologian Jack Forstman indicates that Speeches “marks the beginning of the era of Protestant Liberal Theology.”
He believed theology should be practical, that is, useful for the Reformed Church. He criticized the reduction of religion to simply knowing and assenting to a body of rationally deduced doctrines. Rather, religion embraces immediate feelings of the infinite.
In The Christian Faith (1821–22), he provided the most sustained presentation of his theology. In this book he hoped to demonstrate that “every dogma truly representing an element of our Christian awareness can also be formulated in such a way that it leaves us uninvolved with science.” Schleiermacher wanted to preserve Christian dogma from falsification by the contemporary scholarship of any age. He indicated that the essence of piety is “the consciousness of being absolutely dependent or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God.”
Schleiermacher’s theology was Christocentric. He declared that “Christ alone is our Savior and we have to await no other.”
Christ is like us through an “identity of human nature,” except that in him was “the constant potency of His God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.”
Sin is anything such as our sensuous nature that prompts us to forget about or hinders us from experiencing God-consciousness.
Christ’s role as redeemer is intimately associated with his perfect knowledge of God-consciousness.
By grace he saves us.
We have our “communion” with him as “the fully God-conscious man Jesus Christ.”
We are to partake in the life of Christ’s church and have faith the way Christ did.
In time, Schleiermacher thought that his emphasis on religious consciousness meshed with the pietistic background he had earlier rejected. His appeal to both his orthodox and nonbelieving contemporaries to reconsider religion as experiencing a “consciousness” of God was a helpful reminder.
For the orthodox, it could help them remember that faith is more than assent to right doctrine.
For unbelieving contemporaries, it could lead them to consider grounds for belief that exist other than those of rational argumentation.
At the same time, Schleiermacher’s teachings launched a trajectory for liberal theology that departed from the beliefs of orthodox Christian churches. For all his “Christocentrism,” Schleiermacher did not teach that Christ is perfect God and perfect man as the Christian creeds affirm. Moreover, Schleiermacher redefined the Fall, the nature of sin (lack of God-consciousness), and the nature of Christ’s redemption (communication of God-consciousness to believers). He discounted Christ’s miracles as recorded in Scripture and dismissed any historical investigation of the resurrection as fruitless and thus of “no importance.” He appeared to deny the personal nature of God.
Some contemporary critics were convinced that Schleiermacher’s teaching regarding “God-consciousness” and “religious” experience was tinctured with pantheistic elements. Nonetheless, it gained a remarkable following among clerics in Germany.
After 1815, Schleiermacher and Hegel, gifted and creative thinkers both, competed with each other to dominate German intellectual life. Their deep antipathy for each other was well known.
B. German Biblical Critics and Liberal Theology#
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who was philosophically an Absolute Idealist (a proponent of a monistic view joining being and thought), disdained Schleiermacher’s emphasis on religious experience. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel proposed a grand dialectical scheme to explain all of history through the working out of “reason.”
According to Hegel, the world Spirit or Absolute Idea passes through stages in history — that is, a thesis stage, an antithesis stage, and a synthesis stage that in turn becomes a new thesis stage. Hegel believed he could make rational sense of history’s evolution. Moreover, he thought the end of this historical process would take place when Spirit/reality reached its final state of freedom or self-realization.
The impact of Hegel’s writings was enormous.
Karl Marx was greatly influenced by Hegel’s dialectical approach to understanding history
A number of radical biblical critics believed his thesis/antithesis/synthesis approach afforded an especially helpful framework for understanding the New Testament
For his part, Schleiermacher did not uphold traditional views of the Bible’s authority. At the same time, he proposed that a truthful theology must comport with the “evangelical confessions, and, in the absence of such, partly by the New Testament writings and partly by the connection of a doctrine with other recognized doctrines.” By contrast, he had little appreciation for the value of the Old Testament in constructing Christian theology.
Many biblical scholars did not appreciate Schleiermacher’s supposed substitution of religious consciousness for Scripture as the authoritative source for doing theology. They preferred the approach of biblical criticism that Semler had advocated, calling for “free inquiry” to search out a canon within a canon (the Word of God from the Bible) by the use of historical criticism.
Likewise, Johann Gottfried Eichorn (1752–1827) — who admired Semler, calling him the “greatest theologian of the century” —distinguished between “higher criticism” and “textual criticism.” Eichorn declared that some accounts in Scripture have mythical origins. He thought the texts of Scripture should be studied without referencing any doctrine of biblical inspiration.
The scholars who followed this program of biblical criticism believed that their reliance on reason would permit them to identify more accurately the actual teachings of Christ unencumbered from “myths.” In this sense they were “rationalists.”
In Contributions to the Introduction to the Old Testament (1806–7), Wilhelm M. L. De Wette called for the study of Scripture using the same historical critical methods that are used in the study of secular documents. With his emphasis on discrete authors contributing to the Pentateuch’s composition, De Wette is often credited with initiating new insights in Old Testament criticism that prepared the way for what later became known as the Graf-Wellhausen “documentary hypothesis.”
C. The Tübingen School: D. F. Strauss and F. C. Baur#
A number of those biblical critics who assumed that the Gospels include “myths” believed that the reader of Scripture cannot create a scholarly life of Christ simply by taking each story in the Gospels at face value. Instead, the critic should construct a life of Christ that discounts supposed myths about him found in the Gospels.
European scholars ranging from Schleiermacher to the French Catholic Ernest Renan (The Life of Jesus) attempted to write lives of the real Jesus. A cottage industry of “lives” written by liberals was jolted when Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), author of The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910), famously argued that many of these “lives” did not do justice to the first-century historical Jesus with his apocalyptic vision. Rather, they constructed a “half historical, half modern Jesus,” reflecting the authors’ own theological predilections and times.
In 1835–36 David Frederick Strauss (1808–74) of Tübingen University published early editions of The Life of Christ Critically Examined. Strauss’s own work devoted to the same topic was highly controversial. He assumed a Hegelian framework in piecing together who Christ was. Christ could not be perfect God in the flesh because he did not fully represent the movement in history of the Universal Idea to its final perfection or realization. What we often have in Scripture are myths that grew up about Christ — myths that are untrue and often block the reader from grasping the more beautiful real meaning of the text.
Orthodox Christians such as Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, an influential theologian from Berlin, reacted strongly against Strauss’s writings.
Strauss was forced out of his teaching position at Tübingen for making such radical proposals.
He also lost a possible teaching position at the University of Zürich in 1839 due to pressures from orthodox Protestants.
In 1846 the famous poet George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) translated Strauss’s life of Jesus into English. In his later works Strauss eventually concluded that Christ’s resurrection was “humbug.”
Strauss’s teacher, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), had opted for views rooted in those of Hegel as a set of presuppositions to inform his study of the New Testament. He proposed that:
Peter viewed the gospel as especially a message for the Jewish and Judaizing Christian community
Paul thought the gospel should be presented to the Gentiles in a format free from the dictates of the law.
Paul’s approach had a universalistic, Hellenistic, and Greek emphasis.
A clash ensued between Peter and Paul over their disagreement. By the middle of the second century, the early church arrived at a compromise (“early Catholicism”) between the Judaizing Christian community and Gentile Christianity. According to Baur, writings of the New Testament such as the Pastorals and John dated from the second century.
Whereas Baur attacked orthodox understandings of the New Testament, a number of other scholars launched criticisms of orthodox views of the Old Testament. In 1875 Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), a German Semitic specialist, published Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, an influential work.
Wellhausen denied that Moses wrote the Torah (Pentateuch).
Instead, he purported that a clever forger had dispersed four documents through it, what is called the JEDP Theory: the J Document (Jahvistic or Jehovistic), the E Document (Elohistic), the D Document (the book of Deuteronomy), and the P Document (the Priestly Code).
He also argued that the Jewish religion had evolved from a primitive idolatry (Yahweh viewed as a tribal deity) to a pristine monotheism (Yahweh viewed as a God demanding universal obedience).
Rudolf Kittel and other scholars believed they demonstrated the serious deficiencies of Wellhausen’s forger hypothesis.
D. Albrecht Ritschl and the Kingdom of God#
Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), a professor of New Testament and systematic theology at Bonn and Göttingen, famously pointed out the weaknesses of Baur’s approach to Scripture. Author of Justification and Reconciliation (1870–74) and The History of Pietism (1860–86) and, perhaps not insignificantly, Baur’s son-in-law, Ritschl starred among a constellation of prominent liberal theologians at northern German universities.
In The Origin of the Old Catholic Church (1856), Ritschl broke ranks with Baur. He contended that Baur had not only skewed his presentation by basing it on a philosophical presupposition, but also exaggerated the depth of the divisions in perspective between Peter and Paul. Ritschl indicated that Baur had engaged in an “incomplete use of the sources for the historical period” he was studying. In addition, Baur had pushed back the dating of some New Testament books too far, that is, to the second century. However, Ritschl did think a conflict existed between apostolic Christianity and Judaistic Christianity.
Ritschl’s corrections of Baur helped to steer some German theologians away from embracing a particular philosophy or metaphysic as a standard with which their research and doctrines necessarily had to conform. Paradoxically enough, Ritschl himself was a “neo-Kantian” who, in following Kant’s claim that we cannot have direct access to the noumena (the world of the spirit), concluded that we are thus excluded from a theoretical knowledge of God. Nonetheless, Ritschl believed that we can know God by the way he reveals his “saving influence” upon us.
Ritschl urged learning about the Christian faith through the study of Scripture in the context of the Christian community, the church. He recommended serious reflection on the historical accounts of Christ’s life. This does not mean, however, that a person’s faith should be solely identified with the results of this historical research. An individual makes “value judgments” about who Christ is.
According to Ritschl, there are two focal points to the Christian faith: redemption (divine grace at work) and the kingdom of God (the ethical work that Christians do). The Christian, reconciled to God by faith, is called to a life of perfection, including the pursuit of Christian ethical actions as a participant in the kingdom of God. This participation is especially accomplished by loving one’s neighbor as oneself. This kind of ethical living contributes to the spread of God’s kingdom. Ethics — particularly social ethics—are at the heart of the Christian message.
Among Ritschl’s partisans were the American Walter Rauschenbusch, Wilhelm Herrmann of the University of Marburg, and Professor Adolf von Harnack of the University of Berlin. Like Ritschl, a number of Protestant liberals appeared to embrace a philosophical framework of neo-Kantian thought.
E. Adolf von Harnack and What Is Christianity?#
Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) was one of Ritschl’s students and became professor of church history at the University of Berlin. Harnack valued Ritschl’s admonition that any history of Jesus Christ should not be based on a priori philosophical or metaphysical presuppositions but on careful historical research.
In Harnack’s day, interest in antiquities, Near Eastern geography, and archaeology remained high. Sir William Ramsay, the first professor of classical archaeology at Oxford University, after much research in Asia Minor published St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen (1895). This study provided valuable historical insights regarding Paul’s missionary journeys.
Harnack was born in Dorpat (now Tartu), Estonia. He benefitted academically from the learning of his father, Theodosius Harnack, an orthodox Lutheran church historian and professor of homiletics. The younger Harnack threw himself into the study of the historical origins of doctrine.
He developed a special interest in Marcion and wrote a doctoral dissertation, “Source Criticism and the History of Gnosticism.”
He became convinced that Gnosticism represented the “acute secularization or Hellenization of Christianity” and had impacted the contents of the New Testament writings.
From this premise he concluded that the Christian faith as presented in the New Testament is not identical with Christ’s own teachings.
To recover the true teachings of Jesus, according to Harnack, a scholar must engage in the historical critical study of the New Testament and separate out extraneous elements added by the apostle Paul, Gnostics, and others. The scholar must also assess the history of “dogma,” the beliefs within the Christian churches that emerged in the first four centuries and possessed authority.
Harnack came to the conviction that many of these dogmas do not necessarily reflect the teachings of Jesus. He argued that church dogma represents “the product of the Greek spirit rooted in the Gospels.” For Harnack, then, the study of history provided a privileged means to ferret out the “essence” of the Christian faith.
After teaching stints (beginning in 1874) at the University of Leipzig, the University of Giessen, and the University of Marburg, Harnack was nominated in 1888 for an appointment as a professor at the University of Berlin. The Supreme Council of the Evangelical Church of Prussia contested his nomination. Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of Prussia, intervened and helped assure his appointment.
In 1892 Harnack became embroiled in further controversy. He had offended the theological sensitivities of certain Lutherans such as Professor Adolf Schlatter by suggesting that the Apostles’ Creed should not be used in the liturgies of the state church.
Harnack’s massive works, including The History of Dogma (1886–89) and The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (1902), won for him great renown. He served as the historian of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and as the director of the Royal Library of Berlin (1906). A prodigious worker, he produced a bibliography of 1,611 assorted titles. In 1914 many contemporary Germans viewed Harnack as one of their nation’s premier intellectuals. He also acted as a confidant for Kaiser Wilhelm II and various chancellors.
In 1900 Harnack’s university lectures for the year 1899–1900 were published under the title What Is Christianity? (15 editions). Harnack intended that this book might elicit the interest of German students who thought “the Christian religion had outlived itself” or that contemporary German Protestantism was “a miserable spectacle.”
In What Is Christianity? Harnack provided in a popular format a synopsis of what he thought was an impartial presentation of the essence of Christianity.
He cautioned that in history “absolute judgments are impossible.”
Nonetheless, he thought that by employing the science of history he could discover the essence of the faith.
He indicated that “there can be no such things as ‘miracles.’”
He removed what he thought were the accretions the early church and Gnostics, later dogmaticians, and church institutions had added to the faith over the years.
Harnack proposed that Christ was a human being just as we are and was not God in the flesh as orthodox Christians proposed. Christ’s very life was his message. The description of Christ as the Son of God simply refers to Christ’s “consciousness” of God the Father. The gospel focuses on the Father and not on the Son. How Christ gained this special knowledge was “his secret,” and psychology will never reveal the secret’s contents.
Therefore the message of the gospel, according to Harnack, is the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the infinite value of each individual soul. The Christian knows about the Father’s caring love. The Christian is to pursue a life of caring for others, and in so doing, the Christian participates in Christ’s kingdom.
Not all who read Harnack’s writings welcomed his perspectives on the nature of the Christian faith. His critics ranged from the Catholic modernist Alfred Loisy to his former student Karl Barth to his own father, Theodosius Harnack. By contrast, other Protestant liberal scholars, such as Otto Harnack, Adolf’s brother, praised his work as facilitating a true understanding of the Christian faith, stripped of miraculous and dogmatic accretions.
F. Louis Auguste Sabatier: The Christian Faith Adjusted to Modernity#
Protestant liberalism flourished elsewhere besides Prussia. Louis Auguste Sabatier (1839–1901), one of Protestant liberalism’s leading luminaries, taught in Haussmann’s renovated Paris, France. Sabatier, a prolific writer, helped establish the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris and served as the school’s dean. He also taught as a professor at the newly founded École des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne, where it was stipulated that religion was to be taught without confessional bias.
In his last book, Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit (published posthumously in 1901), Sabatier argued that “traditional theology” (whether Protestant or Catholic) was based on the “method of authority.” In his own day this method was rapidly being supplanted by the method of “modernity,” one based on autonomous reason and “the modern experimental method” that “puts us in immediate contact with reality.”
Sabatier proposed that a central question confronting theology is whether or not “it may achieve a place in the consecrated choir of modern science, or whether it will be shut out for want of any common interest with them.”
Moreover, Sabatier was straightforward in his criticism of orthodox Christianity, which he claimed was based on the vanquished “method of authority.” He proposed that the “orthodox doctrine of the divinity of Christ distorts the true character of the gospel of salvation not less than the rational doctrine, and is no less outside the authentic preaching of the Master.” He went so far as to postulate that the doctrine of the Trinity contains a “root of paganism.” He was critical of what he labeled the commonly accepted “Protestant” doctrines of biblical infallibility and justification by faith alone.
Sabatier claimed that the “Protestant” doctrine of biblical infallibility had been created by Protestant Scholastics of the seventeenth century. It had been challenged later, he said, by the likes of “Richard Simon, Jean Leclerc, Lessing, Semler, and the German theologians of the nineteenth century.” He postulated that the “final crisis” for the doctrine in the French Protestant world took place between the years 1848 and 1860, during which period Edmond Scherer of the Oratoire Theological School of Geneva resigned his position in 1849.
Much like Schleiermacher and Harnack, Sabatier did not view Christ as God in the flesh. Rather, he emphasized Christ’s humanity and experience of God-consciousness.
Sabatier was convinced that his views of the Christian faith reflected not only Christ’s own preaching but were commendable to modern contemporaries of the late nineteenth century. Only in the 1920s did Protestant liberalism lose its hold on the Protestant Faculty of Paris. In that decade, proponents of Barth’s theology gained considerable influence among the faculty.
V. CONCLUSION: THE WANING OF EUROPEAN PROTESTANT LIBERALISM#
Schleiermacher had professed a desire to shield Christian doctrine from external criticism (“uninvolved with science”). By contrast, many Protestant liberals later in the nineteenth century believed that adjustments of Christian theology to the canons of “modern” scholarship were needed if Christianity were to remain a viable and attractive faith for Europeans.
The renowned Protestant liberal Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922), a teacher of Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann at the University of Marburg, believed the Christian faith could not be anchored in historical research due to that method’s inability to provide assured results. Nor did Herrmann think it should be based on a belief in the infallibility of Scripture, a doctrine he attributed to Martin Luther.
Instead, for Herrmann, Christianity’s warrant should be found in the person and inner life of Jesus Christ spoken of in Scripture and in the life of Christ’s church. Influenced by Ritschl, Herrmann indicated that “communion with God” through Christ constitutes the heart of a person’s encounter with revelation.
Historians of religions had another quest. They sought to compare accounts of the Old and New Testaments with the histories of various ancient cultures. The Parliament of World Religions in Chicago (1893) gave a significant boost to the study of comparative religions.
A number of scholars went so far as to abandon completely the Christian faith. The skeptically oriented Franz Overbeck (1837–1905), a New Testament scholar at Basel and close friend of Nietzsche, dismissed Scripture as a revelation of God. Wilhelm Wrede (1859–1906), a student of Ritschl and Harnack, fostered a kind of biblical criticism that assumed nothing divine existed behind the writings of the New Testament.
Between 1890 and 1914, liberal Protestant theologians enjoyed considerable prominence and prestige at German universities but a diminished influence among the German public. Sometimes their own personal spirituality and devotion commended their theology to students.
Critics of Protestant liberalism included members of the laity who sometimes deemed its message inadequate to meet their practical, spiritual needs. Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810–77), associated with the Erlangen School of Theology, upheld baptismal regeneration, the Lutheran Confessions, and a “salvation-history” approach to Christian history. But Hofmann was no radical spiritual subjectivist, nor a Protestant liberal. Resolutely Christocentric and Trinitarian in focus, he observed, “Where things go right, Scripture and the Church must present us with precisely what we discover from ourselves.”
Conservative theologians such as Theodosius Harnack viewed Protestant liberalism’s program as ultimately a serious departure from Protestant orthodoxy. In 1895 Adolf Schlatter sided with those German Protestants who criticized liberal theologians in Berlin for their condemnation of confessional Christianity.
Professor Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), though a proponent of a neo-Kantian rationalism in higher criticism, argued that Harnack had miscalculated in thinking that the essence of the Christian faith could be established on the basis of impartial historical research in the biblical documents.
Machen concluded that the quest for the historical Jesus had ended in failure. In 1923 Machen published Christianity and Liberalism, in which he characterized Protestant liberalism not as a variant form of Christianity but as an entirely different religion stemming from naturalism.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 spelled the end of the “long” nineteenth-century old order of democratic, optimistic Christian Europe. The savagery of the fighting during the war appeared to falsify liberals’ claims about civilization’s inevitable progress and the inherent goodness of humankind.
In time, Karl Barth launched an incisive attack against Protestant liberalism. He faulted the “ethical” and theological failure of Protestant liberal theologians in Germany to stand up against German militarism on the eve of World War I.
In October 1914, ninety-six leading scholars, including Harnack and other liberal theologians, had signed a manifesto of German intellectuals backing the kaiser’s military plans. Earlier, Harnack had helped draft the kaiser’s speech declaring a state of war between Germany, France, and Russia.
Influenced by John Calvin and Søren Kierkegaard among others, Barth lamented the fact that Protestant liberalism with its focus on God’s immanence and on personal religious experience was resolutely anthropocentric. Its focus was quite alien to the view of God’s transcendence in biblical Christianity.
In 1919 the publication of Barth’s own Commentary on Romans (Römerbrief) offered to European professors, pastors, and students the makings of an alternative (“Theology of Crisis”) to Protestant liberalism. Barth did not completely turn his back on modernity. He accepted a chastened use of biblical criticism and believed that Scripture could contain “errors.” At the same time, he opposed “natural theology.” He refused to grant autonomous reason and the empirical method full sway in doing theology.
From Barth’s point of view, some Protestant liberals had tended to do just that and sometimes fell prey to distorting Christian revelation and denying its intrinsic authority. He objected to Protestant liberals’ attempts to understand the incarnation of Christ by relying essentially on the use of historical criticism. Barth did not think their attempts to adjust creedal Christianity (any of their denials notwithstanding) to the canons of modernity had necessarily well served the Christian churches.
On April 17, 1920, Harnack and Barth spoke at the same student conference in Switzerland and defended their respective positions. In correspondence with Barth (1923), Harnack, not at all welcoming of Barth’s criticisms, accused him of being the leader of “despisers of scientific theology.” In response to Harnack’s criticisms, Barth drew up a piece titled Fifteen Answers to Professor Adolf von Harnack. He did not take Harnack’s accusation lightly.