Kaiser, Christ, and Canaan: The Religion of Israel in Protestant Germany, 1871–1918. By Paul Michael Kurtz

Abstract

Whoever seeks to place Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) in the German Kaiserzeit may want to look at the magisterial volume on the Christian religion in a multi-volume work Die Kultur der Gegenwart. Ihre Entwicklung und Ziele, edited by Paul Hinneberg. The volume in question, published in 1906, comes under the title Die christliche Religion. Mit Einschluss der israelitisch-jüdischen Religion, and comprises two parts: ‘I. Geschichte der christlichen Religion’, and ‘II. Systematische christliche Theologie’. Part I starts with an introduction, ‘Die israelitisch-jüdische Religion’, by Wellhausen (pp. 1–40); Part II, with an introduction, ‘Wesen der Religion und der Religionswissenschaft’, by Ernst Troeltsch (pp. 461–91). More than a quarter of a century after his study of the historical sequence of the several collections of ritual laws in the Torah (published in 1878), Wellhausen is eager to emphasize that the religion of Israel in antiquity belongs in the category of religions which have, in fact, undergone a development in historical time. His Kaiserzeit audience would have been interested in an outline of such a religious development in ancient Israel as well as in an explanation of how Christianity in turn developed from its early foundation in ancient Judaism. One may assume that such an orientation has characterized religious, and more particularly biblical, studies ever since the end of a purely allegorical and typological reading of the Hebrew Bible, but it is not amiss to claim that German scholarship in the Kaiserzeit had a strong interest in constructing historical knowledge about the past, including the remote past. Whether there was anything ‘German’ about this may be discussed, especially since in the case of Wellhausen the ‘Dutch’ scholar Abraham Kuenen (1828–91) or the ‘Scottish’ scholar William Robertson Smith (1846–94), for example, were among colleagues with whom Wellhausen exchanged a considerable number of letters. The correspondence has become fully available in an edition of 2013, and Kurtz refers extensively, though not consistently, to this material.