Present Religious Conditions in Germany

Abstract

In considering the present religious conditions and prospects in Germany, the main problem appears to be this: Can the church, which up to the eighteenth century had been the chief promoter and embodiment of culture, remain and be preserved over against a culture which has now become independent, or is this independent modern culture destined to sweep the church away? And if the latter be the case, what then will become of religion? This problem of the prospects of religion and church in the modern world has nowhere more significance than in Germany; for there, as nowhere else, an immensely rich and highly developed intellectual culture stands absolutely independent over against a strong and living church. Neither in France nor in England nor in America is the issue so burning as in Germany. In France secular culture faces no strong church filled with profound spiritual forces, but an outgrown institution governed by Roman spiritual tyranny; and therefore it has triumphed over the church. In England and America secular culture has not developed in opposition to the church, but is in the main friendly to it. In Germany, however, national culture since the eighteenth century has stood outside of the church and in a certain opposition to it; Goethe, who in his own person embodies our national culture, took a cool und unsympathetic attitude towards the church, and so have in a greater or less degree the other creators of our modern thought,—Kant and Schiller, the Darwinists and Karl Marx, the Naturalists and Nietzsche, the Liberals of 1848 and Bismarck. On the other hand the church made very great progress in the nineteenth century. German theologians—Schleiermacher, Strauss, Baur, Ritschl, Harnack—utilized for the church the best spiritual results of modern culture, and gave to German theology undisputed leadership in the Protestant world; piety in the church was profoundly deepened and enriched by Schleiermacher, Claus Harms, Löhe, Wichern, von Bodelschwing, Stöcker; while the external power of the church increased greatly in consequence of the restoration movement, the political leadership of the pious Hohenzollerns, and the establishment of a new and more democratic ecclesiastical constitution with synods and presbyteries.