Eschatological Presentism in Protestant German Theology of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

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This chapter’s exploration of preaching in Protestant Germany considers concepts of redemption through the period of the First World War, locating these within Christian intellectual culture over a wider frame. While the sense of a present charged with redemptive potential is a long held feature of Christian temporality (if sometimes poorly understood), it was in the conceptual framework of historical time as developed in 18th and 19th century thought that Protestant pastoral theology found a new way of articulating this sense of the divine present. In the mid- to late-19th century, pastors of the pietist tradition felt the nearness of the Second Coming and foresaw its signs in many of the political upheavals of their day. Ultimately the time of God and the time of man were increasingly seen as separate, but this meant that by the turn of the 20th century, the sense of an imminent end to the world was receding: many saw the Last Day as a distant event. The First World War, however, shook up the concerns of the faithful with the passing of time. The search for redemption was firmly relocated in a call to repentance in the present, through which God would successfully intervene. Karl Barth in particular moved away from the idea that human progress could intertwine itself with God’s redemption. Redemption came in a present moment of decision. In so far as God represented ‘the real’, to the community of believers in Protestant Germany, the present became more and more important, as the claim of the modernist vision of progress to redeem the world seemed less and less persuasive.