Introduction to Volume 1

Abstract

Extract The first volume of the Oxford History of Modern Germany Theology (1781–1848) begins with a year most associated with a publication event and ends with a year most associated with a political event. This asymmetry captures the challenge of demarcating modern German theology into meaningful periods and signals a central aim of the Oxford History of Modern Germany Theology series, which strives to provide a comprehensive examination of landmark theological and philosophical currents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while also attending to the political, social, geographical, and cultural aspects that shaped them. As editors, we hope the best justification for our periodization is provided in the chapters that follow, but nonetheless a few words of justification precede these chapters. When Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, it initiated a series of events that transformed not only German intellectual life in general, but the course of German theology in particular. In the same decade, however, unrest in neighbouring France eventually led to a revolution that most clearly marks the end, or the beginning of the end, of the project of European Christendom and the union of throne and altar. The effects of these events were not all felt immediately but were nonetheless profound. Within two decades, Napoleon would conquer most of the Germanic lands, which led to the dissolution of the old Holy Roman Empire. Kant’s Copernican Revolution and France’s political revolution, separated by only eight years, were both the product of and the instigation for profound social, economic, and, most importantly for our purposes, religious and theological transformation. The fallout from these changes would continue to shape generations of social and intellectual debate and reached a definitive crescendo in the events of 1848, which represented Germany’s most serious, even if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to democratize and revolutionize its political life until after the Second World War.