If the precise subject matter has not received full treatment previously, a
number of connected, interdisciplinary concerns are, nonetheless, attracting
increasing attention.
17
Reflecting strong trends in recent scholarship, Jürgen
Osterhammel has proposed that religion‘occupy center stage in a global
history of the nineteenth century’.
18
German university theology certainly
represents a leading character to be cast in that story. The‘twin birth’of the
modern university and the modern faculty of theology occurred arguably with
the stirring foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810, which would go on
to become, as Nicholas Boyle put it, the‘global standard’of higher educa-
tion.
19
Despite gainsayers and overzealous secularization theorists, Jonathan
Sheehan has noted that‘religion has never been left behind, either personally
or institutionally. Instead it has been continually remade and given new forms
and meanings over time.’
20
As Thomas Nipperdey observed,‘modern thought
in Germany did not coexist or conflict with theology, but dwelled in the long
shadows cast by the problems it had set, by the“totality”it had laid claim to’.
21
Another concern relates to the sociology of knowledge. To modify
D. F. McKenzie’s phrase, the‘sociology of textbooks’cuts a wide interdiscip-
linary swathe.
22
The theological literature contributed to the social mechanism
by which ideas, mentalities, and prejudices entered the vocabulary of learned
society, what Charles Taylor has called the‘social imaginary’.
23
Introductory
courses and textbooks became vehicles for the socialization, as it were, of
generations of young theologians, who took their newfound expertise into
manifold arenas. Writings and oral lectures‘spoken like a book’in this family
‘offer models of correct comportment and practice’that‘not only inform
17
Cf. Howard,Protestant Theology, 303–23; and Farley,Theologia, 29 ff. On the early modern
Catholic side, see Leonhard Hell,Entstehung und Entfaltung der theologischen Enzyklopädie
(Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1999).
18
Jürgen Osterhammel,The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth
Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 873.
19
Nicholas Boyle,‘“Art,”Literature, Theology: Learning from Germany’, in Robert
E. Sullivan (ed.),Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions(Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2001), 89. Cf. Rüdiger vom Bruch and Heinz-Elmar Tenorth (eds.),Geschichte der
Universität Unter den Linden, i (Berlin: Akademie, 2012).
20
Jonathan Sheehan,‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review
Essay’,AHR108/4 (2003), 1072.
21
Thomas Nipperdey,Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nollan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 466; Nipperdey,Religion im Umbruch. Deutsch-
land 1870–1918(Munich: Beck, 1988), 7. Cf. George S. Williamson,‘A ReligiousSonderweg?
Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany’,CH75/1
(2006), 139–56.
22
D. F. McKenzie,Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999). On textbooks as objects of study, see Emidio Campi et al. (eds.),Scholarly Know-
ledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe(Geneva: Droz, 2008).
23
Charles Taylor,A Secular Age(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2007), 146, 171–6, 200–1; Taylor,Modern Social Imaginaries(Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF –FINAL, 23/5/2016, SPi
6 Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany