Ketzer oder Kirchenlehrer? Der Tuebinger Theologe Johannes von Kuhn (IB06-1887) in den kirchenpolitischen Auseinandersetzungen seiner Zeit. By Hubert Wolf. Veroeffentlichungen der Kommission fuer Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 58. (Mainz: Matthias Gruenewald Verlag. 1992. Pp. lvii, 395.) This weighty volume with 2026 footnotes has one major flaw recognized repeatedly by its author: he has had no access to the largest collection of primary sources. The archives of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Holy Office) remain inaccessible. The collections of the Vatican Archives are opened to 1922, but those of the Congregation are available only to those duly authorized by the Congregation itself--and that seldom includes scholars interested in publishing. Nonetheless, the volume is worth reading as a well-researched, well-put-together piece of the intellectual and political history of nineteenth-century European Roman Catholicism. Johannes von Kuhn was a professor on the theological faculty of Tuebingen, much respected in his own time, much neglected since the triumph of NeoScholasticism. He was involved in German politics after the Revolutions of 1848 as a member of the new Wuerttemberg Parliament until 1852. There he most often took the side of the monarch. Although Kuhn firmly believed In Roman authority when it came to church doctrine, he also believed strongly in the importance of a monarch in preserving and protecting Christian society. He was, like most Roman Catholics of his time, deeply skeptical of democracy, believing it to be more mob rule than effective governmental form. He thus walked a thin line in a political world still divided by Febronians and Ultramontanists. Kuhn was a complex man. He believed firmly in academic freedom and resisted any attempt to impose an oath of loyalty to the decrees of Treat. His review of David Friedrich Strauss's Leben Jesu was sympathetic to Strauss. Yet he joined vigorously in the condemnations of both Hermes and Guenther. He was not reticent in trying to silence those within the Church with whom he did not agree. Gracious and understanding to those outside the Roman tradition, he was most demanding of those who wished to remain within that tradition. Although at one point actually considered for appointment to the episcopacy, he was later accused of heterodoxy. Kuhn's theology, only briefly treated in Wolf's volume, caught the eye of the Neo-Thomists, who found it did not unsuccessfully walk the tightrope between fideism and rationalism. Again, the telling documents are not available, but Wolf makes a credible case that Kuhn was under investigation less because of his theological stance--which few but German professors of theology would read and understand--and more because he was caught in the politics of Rome which was anxious to repudiate any connection with the modern world. …