259 - Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century Volume II, 1870-1914

Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century Volume II, 1870-1914

By Claude Welch

New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985. 315 Pp. $25.00.

The forces of nineteenth century thought live on in contemporary theology, whether in Edward Farley's concerns with the "essence of Christianity" (Ecclesial Reflection), in David Tracy's critique and retrieval of nineteenth century liberal theologies (Blessed Rage for Order), or even in recent feminist liberation theologies acknowledging, as they sometimes do, their debts to nineteenth century theology's turn to human experience (for example, Carter Heyward's The Redemption of God).

But if that century is to serve as more than a big bag from which we pick and choose at random, we need the kind of effort displayed in Claude Welch's survey of the century. Welch, who teaches historical theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, has now completed his two-volume study. The first volume appeared in 1973 and is also being reissued this year. The set now stands out in the literature as the richest and most comprehensive treatment of nineteenth century Protestant thought.

The two volumes are based on a three-part periodization. The initial volume focused on the first two periods of nineteenth century thought: one extending from 1799 to 1835 to include theologies of the eras of romanticism and revolution, a second period stretching from Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835) to Ritschl's Justification and Reconciliation (1870). According to Welch, the first period focused largely on the problem of the very possibility of theology, the second on the possibility of Christology.

This second volume focuses only on the third period (1870-1914), the time of extensive industrialization and national self-consciousness that occurred between the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and World War 1. Though Welch occasionally refers to these cultural and historical developments, his major concern is to delineate what Protestant thinkers were writing during this time.

The distinctive character of Protestant thought in this period is generally described by Welch as involving the problems of "Christ and culture." This general concern, however, divides into three categories: faith, history, and ethics. Elsewhere referred to by Welch as "dominant themes" of the period, these are all intertwined and held in balance in the work of Albrecht Ritschl. Subsequent thinkers might concentrate mainly on one or two of these themes, but Ritschl's thought is a kind of

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keynote address for the period, putting all three themes on a theological agenda and trying to shape them into a "convenient harmony."

By the time of Ernst Troeltsch's massive contributions at the end of the period, this convenient harmony seemed an all too sanguine hope. With the expository skills and sensitivity to original sources that he displays throughout both volumes, Welch shows how all three dominant themes are present in Troeltsch, but now in a way far different than in Ritschl. As he summarizes, for Troeltsch "faith in God, faith in Jesus Christ, and acceptance of the moral claim can be held together, but always as a venture fraught with inner tension, uncertainty, and temporality." With this kind of summary, Welch sets us on the doorstep of twentieth century theology with its familiar affirmations of religious and historical relativity and the struggles for justice and liberation.

The chapters on Ritschl and Troeltsch, which frame the book, are each well-crafted gems, orienting new students of nineteenth century thought and stimulating more well-studied readers. But the volume also offers a rich survey of major and minor Protestant figures who treat the themes of faith, history, and ethics as they develop in all their complex turns between Ritschl and Troeltsch.

Citing a transnational cast of thinkers, Welch orders the book by treating each of these dominant themes, looking first at faith, viewed "from within" as a "problem of certainty" (Holland, Spens, Sabatier, Ihmels, von Hugel, Underhill, Herrmann, William James) and "from. without" by the psychologists of religion (James, again, Starbuck, Coe, Leuba), by sociologists of religion (William Robertson Smith, Durkheim, Weber), and by the historians of religion and their theological interlocutors (Muller, Tylor, Frazer, Lang, Marret, Soderblom, Otto, Reville, Kähler, Augustus Strong, Harnack, Caird, Clarke, Fairburn, Seeberg, Pfleiderer).

When turning to his second theme, history, Welch crisply reviews the problem of historical consciousness for Christian faith in major figures such as Harnack, Loisy, Kähler, Herrmann, Baur, Schweitzer, and Weiss, and lesser known ones such as T. Haering, Mackintosh, Martineau, Forsyth, and Arthur Drews. Welch treats the theological debates about Darwin and evolution just after his discussion of the dominant theme of history.

The section of the volume on ethics takes up most directly the overall concern with Christianity and culture. Here Welch lays out four modes of theologians' accommodation to the pressures of the age: the "no compromise" positions (fundamentalist movements, F. Overbeck), radically new ventures (R.J. Campbell, G.A. Gordon, Shailer Matthews, D.C. Macintosh, Paul de Lagarde), "liberalisms" (Harnack, Herrmann, American Andover thinkers, Auguste Sabatier , C. Gore, J.R. Illingworth, and others), and "critical orthodoxy" (Kähler, Seeberg, Forsyth, Maurice). Welch concludes his discussion of ethics by delineating different varieties of "social gospels": the Band-Aid, at times dismaying,

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philanthropic approaches in Germany (Ritschl, Harnack, Herrmann, and then A. Stoeker, F. Naumann), the more concrete Christian social reform thinkers in Switzerland (Bitzius, H. Kutter, L. Ragaz), and the more radical gospels of social and economic reconstruction evident in the Christian socialist societies in Britain and in the American social gospel theologies (Rauschenbusch, R.T. Ely, W. Gladden).

Breath-taking, yes. If you are left wondering how the author can intelligibly hold discussions of all these figures (and more) in a single work, if you note the mix of thinkers both well-known and not so well known, and if you are intrigued by the possibility of a presentation that allows nineteenth century issues to live for reflection on issues in our time, then Welch's work will serve you well.

Not everyone will agree with the arrangement of thinkers in this book or ratify Welch's omission of developments in France, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, or of specific thinkers (Nietzsche, F. H. Bradley, Josiah Royce). Readers will doubtless find things to fault and rearrange in a work like this, but all acknowledge the significance of Welch's contribution and the masterful crafting it exhibits.

While criticisms of arrangement and selection need not be aired here, one major matter needs to be registered which calls forth both appreciation and a demurral. The matter concerns Welch's way of articulating the context of nineteenth century Protestant thought.

Appreciation is due Welch for his commitment to a transnational delineation of the major concerns of nineteenth century thought. As Welch himself argued in Volume 1, and now has developed over two volumes, the dominant themes of this century's thought do not respect only national boundaries however much they may be refracted by them. For this century, especially, we do well to avoid writing only still more histories of "German theology," "American theology," or "British theology." Limiting ourselves in these ways risks concealing the transnational developments of urbanization, industrialization, and capitalist modes of production occurring in the North Atlantic contexts of Europe and America within which nineteenth century thinkers labored. We are greatly served by Welch's portrait of a Protestant thought characterized by dominant themes extending throughout these regions of broad cultural (social, economic, political) changes.

With this appreciation must come a demurral. Though Welch frequently refers to these broad cultural and social movements, as when sketching the context of the Christian socialisms, he rarely articulates the connections between the transnational thought he portrays, on the one hand, and accompanying cultural/historical developments on the other. It is clear that Welch does regard the cultural/historical context as essential for understanding Protestant thought, but we receive few clues about how this thought is a response to its specific contexts. One would expect, for example, some explanation from Welch of why the "three categories" of Protestant thought (faith, history, ethics) are

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responses to their relevant cultural/ historical worlds. Why precisely do these categories of thought pervade American, British, and continental European reflection?

In fairness, it should be recognized that Welch's work intends to be primarily a study of thought. But without more extensive articulation of that thought's relation to culture and history, the impression is all too easily gained (however uncomfortable Welch himself may be with it) that thought develops with its own categories and impetus, largely apart from the stuff of culture and history. We need not press for a simple reduction of Protestant thought to cultural/ historical factors, but we can ask that greater attention be given to the connections of thought to developments in the North Atlantic regions Welch explores.

Accenting such connections would give us a better sense of these nineteenth century thinkers' locations and of the nature of their thought. As the volumes stand, it is difficult to see how this thought was made possible by European cultural growth resting on the systematic transmission of resources from what we today often term third world regions. Twentieth century theologians, acknowledging more and more the parochialisms of North Atlantic theologies, will especially want to locate this Protestant thought, spun out by a professional elite whose privilege and historical legacy rests on the labor and resources of those Eric Wolf terms "people without history" (Europe and the People Without History) who live outside North Atlantic regions in Oceania, Africa, Asia, and South America.

A twentieth century reader will also find it hard to overlook the fact that this is predominantly a history of men and of their thinking (Evelyn Underhill is the only woman whose reflections are summarized). Granted, as historian Gerda Lerner has shown in The Creation of Patriarchy, women have only recently become part of the professional classes that fashion the kind of thought Welch is interested in presenting. But Welch's silence about the fact that these theologians are almost all men, his silence about the cultural and historical obstacles to women's writing and thinking, together with his tendencies to couch some of his summaries of nineteenth century thought in male generic language-all this provides us few resources for generating critique of this nineteenth century theology as well as appreciative appropriation. Marilyn Chapin Massey's recent work, Feminine Soul: The Fate of an Ideal, is an example of a work that enters rigorously into the complexities of nineteenth century thought, but in relation to the equally complex cultural/historical subordination of women on which scholastic contributions often depended. Can that kind of perspective be justifiably omitted in a comprehensive discussion of nineteenth century Protestant thought? I do not think it can, at least if we are to think today on the shoulders of nineteenth century thinkers with something more than uncritical appropriation.

Welch has done us a great and, in many ways, incomparable service by breaking histories of thought out of their national categories to

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suggest their place within broader cultural /historical contexts. It is up to subsequent writers to do the analysis necessary to explore further the connections between this thought and those contexts. But for that work to move forward, Welch's stunning contribution should be read by both new students and more practiced scholars of nineteenth century thought.

MARK KLINE TAYLOR

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey