The German Awakening
Protestant Renewal After the Enlightenment, 1815–1848
ANDREW KLOES
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–093686–0 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To my grandparents
Arthur Kloes, Geraldine (Hynes) Kloes, Donald Lefeber Dance, and Marie (Bayko) Dance.
Acknowledgments
I would l I ke to express my gratitude to a number of individuals and institutions whose support has made it possible for me to write this book.
I owe my greatest debts to my doctoral supervisor at the University of Edinburgh, Stewart J. Brown. I cannot thank him enough for the guidance and support that he gave me as I wrote the PhD thesis upon which this book is based. I would also like to thank my secondary doctoral supervisors, Paul Nimmo and James Eglinton, for their thoughtful reading of my draft chapters and their helpful discussions, as well as Hartmut Lehmann and Thomas Ahnert for their helpful comments and suggestions during my oral examination. I am also grateful to my German teachers at Penn Hills High School in Pittsburgh, Robert Chaney and Kathleen Nardozzi; my professors at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania, James Bibza, J. Harvey Cole, Mark W. Graham, F. Stanley Keehlwetter, and Gary Scott Smith; and my professors at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, Gwenfair Adams, Scott Hafemann, Peter Kuzmič, Garth Rosell, and David. F. Wells, for their roles in my education. I would also like to thank Victoria Barnett for her mentoring during my time as a summer graduate student research assistant at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I would also like to thank the University of Edinburgh for the scholarships awarded me to undertake my doctoral research. Without that support, I could not have written this book. I would also like to thank the German Academic Exchanges Service and the European Union Erasmus exchange program for the grants that they gave me to conduct my research in Berlin and Tübingen. I want to express my deepest thanks to Heike Marquardt and Stephan Marquardt for their hospitality to me during my stay in Berlin. Without their kindness, I could not have done the research to write this book. I would also like to thank the Evangelisches
Acknowledgments
Stift in Tübingen for the accommodation that they provided me during the Wintersemester 2012–2013. I am thankful also to the Theologische Universiteit Kampen for a stimulating month at its summer international research seminar and to George Harinck for his response to my paper.
I wish to thank the following libraries that have admitted me as a visiting researcher, as well as those whose digitization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works has enabled me to access texts, which I otherwise could not have seen: the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf, Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, the National Library of Scotland, the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Stanford University Library, the Tübingen Universitätsbibliothek, the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn, the University of Michigan Library, and the University of Toronto Library.
I would also like to thank the following friends who have encouraged me during my graduate studies: Kengo Akiyama, Alan and Esmé Anderson, Kathryn and Charles Baldanza, Campbell Blackmore, Michael Bräutigam, Doreen Boyd, Tom Breimaier, Cory Brock, Chris Davidson, Matthew Davidson, William and Elizabeth Graham, Matthew and Emily Hahn, Jordan Hammill, Jim Hommes, Marinus de Jong, Matthew Koerber, Eugene Kwon, Derek and Catriona Lamont, Andy and Rachael Leuenberger, Jim and Pam Leuenberger, Josiah and Brittany Leuenberger, Eric Lewellen, Andy Longwe, Ryan Loya, Neal and Louise MacMillan, Laura Mair, Ewan McGillivray, Dave and Sue Muir, Tom and Sharlene Muir, Debbie and David O’Leary, Kathleen and Martin Rogerson, Colin Ross, Peter Sanlon, David and Sandy Snoke, Allan Shearer, Steven Stiles, Gray Sutanto, Ryan Tafilowski, and all my other friends at City Reformed, New College, and St. Columba’s.
Finally, I wish to express my most special thanks to my fiancée Eilish and the entire Barnes family, my parents, Kenneth and Donna, and my sister, Michele, for their love and encouragement over many years.
Abbreviations
AanKG Archiv für alte und neue Kirchengeschichte
ACDS Archives du christianisme au dix-neuvième siècle
ADB Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie
AHR The American Historical Review
AkAk Akademie Aktuell: Zeitschrift der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
AKZ Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung
ALZE Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung: Ergänzungsblätter
ARtLkS Allgemeines Repertorium für die theologische Litteratur und kirchliche Statistik
BBKL Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexicon
BMS Berlinische Monatsschrift
BPKG Blätter für Pfälzische Kirchengeschichte und religiöse Volkskunde
BWKG Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte
DVCS De Vereeniging: Christelijke Stemmen
DVS Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift
DZWL Deutsche Zeitschrift für christliche Wissenschaft und christliches Leben
EC Evangelical Christendom
EKZ Evangelische Kirchenzeitung
EM Evangelical Magazine
FBRH Fliegende Blätter aus dem Rauhen Hause zu Horn bei Hamburg
FP La France Protestante: ou vies des protestants franҫais qui se sont fait un nom dans l’histoire
FS Frankens Stiftungen
GSR German Studies Review
List of Abbreviations
HEFBKG Hospitium Ecclesiae: Forschungen zur bremischen Kirchengeschichte
HZ Historische Zeitschrift
JBBKG Jahrbuch für Berlin-Brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte
JBKG Jahrbuch für brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte
JGGPÖ Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich
JGNSKG Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte
JHKGV Jahrbuch der Hessischen Kirchengeschichtlichen Vereinigung
JMH The Journal of Modern History
JSKG Jahrbuch für Schlesische Kirchengeschichte
JVWKG Jahrbuch des Vereins für Westfälische Kirchengeschichte
KiO Kirche im Osten: Studien zur osteuropäischen Kirchengeschichte und Kirchenkunde
KKA Kirchen- und Ketzeralmanach
LAThW Litterarischer Anzeiger für christliche Theologie und Wissenschaft überhaupt
LThK Lutherische Theologie und Kirche
LZRL Litteraturzeitung für katholische Religionslehrer
MFCZ Der Menschenfreund. Eine christliche Zeitschrift
MM The Missionary Magazine
MNeGR Mittheilungen und Nachrichten für die evangelische Geistlichkeit Russlands
MnGeMBG Magazin für die neueste Geschichte der evangelischen Missions- und Bibelgesellschaften
MnGpMBG Magazin für die neueste Geschichte der protestantischen Missions- und Bibelgesellschaften
NBG Nachrichten aus der Brüder-Gemeine
NDB Neue Deutsche Biographie
NND Neuer Nekrolog der Deutschen
NNRG Neueste Nachrichten aus dem Reiche Gottes
NSH The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge
OJ Oldenburger Jahrbuch
PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
PMiZG Protestantische Monatsblätter für innere Zeitgeschichte
PuN Pietismus und Neuzeit
RDM Revue des deux mondes
RE Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche
RGG Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft
RP The Review of Politics
SLchWG Sammlungen für Liebhaber christlicher Wahrheit und Gottseligkeit
Sophronizon Sophronizon, oder unpartheyisch-freymüthige Beyträge zur neuren Geschichte, Gesetzgebung und Statistik der Staaten und Kirchen
SZG
SZRKG
Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Gemeinnützigkeit
Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte
ThG Theologie der Gegenwart
ThSK Theologische Studien und Kritiken
TRE Theologische Realenzyklopädie
TTVCH Transparant: De Tijdschrift van de Vereniging van de Christen-Historici
TZTh Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie
UF Unitas Fratrum
VJThK Vierteljahrschirft für Theologie und Kirche
VVDTG Vereinsblatt der verbündeten deutschen
ZBKG
ZfO
ZglThK
Traktat-Gesellschaften
Zeitschrift für bayerische Kirchengeschichte
Zeitschrift für Ostforschung
Zeitschrift für die gesammte lutherische Theologie und Kirche
ZRGG Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte
ZsT Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie
ZThG
Zeitschrift für Theologie und Gemeinde
ZVHG Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte
Introduction
In h I s autob I ography, Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, a prominent Reformed preacher and pastor, recounted how as a sixteen-year-old boy in 1812–13 he had witnessed the Grande Armée pass through his town of Anhalt (where his father was then serving as the general superintendent of the principality’s church) in both its advance into and retreat from Russia. Writing over fifty years after those events, Krummacher reflected on how the reversal of Napoleon’s military fortunes had contributed a marked change in German religious life.
The great time of the glorious salvation and uprising of the Fatherland bore the unmistakable marks of a sacred celebration. After having long forgotten Him, the people again honored “the old God.” The churches were again filled as they had not been for decades. Again they resounded with songs of praise and thanksgiving. Men whose lips had never before uttered a pious word were time and again heard to say, “The Lord has helped us” . . . Little crosses and crucifixes then became the most popular kind of woman’s necklace. Everywhere in Germany, a religious tone permeated the people’s favorite songs, such as Arndt’s “Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ,” and Körner’s “Vater, ich rufe Dich.” Even the bleak and arid rationalism—which had long cast down from almost every pulpit in the land its intellectually bereft, moralistic straw to sparsely attended congregations, and had thereby condemned their members to a deadly spiritual famine—even it felt the breath of the general pious spirit which hovered in the very air.1
TheGermanAwakening:ProtestantRenewalAftertheEnlightenment,1815–1848. Andrew Kloes, Oxford University Press (2019). © Andrew Kloes. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190936860.003.0001
Krummacher was far from being the only Protestant religious leader to believe that there had been a significant turning toward religion around 1815. In a speech that he delivered in London in 1851 to a meeting of the British Evangelical Alliance, August Tholuck, a professor of theology at the University of Halle and a member of the consistory of the Protestant State Church in Prussia, spoke about how the Wars of Liberation had stimulated popular interest in religion in Germany. Tholuck commented how it was “not from the universities, but from the battlegrounds of Waterloo and Leipzig” that the “divine spark was kindled which was to then spread throughout Germany. These were the schools in which our countrymen learned true divinity.”2 Similarly, in a lecture that he delivered at the University of Leipzig in 1865, the Lutheran church historian Karl Friedrich August Kahnis identified a number of developments, which he held forth as examples of a religious turn in German society.
It is an incontestable fact that since the War of Liberation, a lively faith in Jesus Christ has once again become a force in German society. This is testified to by facts that no one can argue against. I can only briefly mention here our missionary institutions, whose yearly revenues approach those of a small kingdom. I note as well the efforts of the Inner Mission, which through its constituent associations desires to bring saving love to the masses of poor men, women, and children who are estranged from God. This is how the living witness of Christ is today making its mark on the churches. We must further acknowledge the appearance of an extensive body of Christian literature, and most notably, the great reversal that has taken place in academic theology.3
More recently, Hartmut Lehmann has also observed how between 1815 and 1830, “pious German Protestants, who were mostly middle or lower middle class, labored unceasingly for what they called the building of God’s kingdom. Within a few years, they founded more organizations and established more institutions than in the whole history of German Protestantism from Luther to the end of the eighteenth century. Their activities far exceeded those of Pietists like Spener, Francke, and Zinzendorf whom they adored.”4
This book explores the nineteenth-century German Protestant “Awakening movement” in its cultural, intellectual, and social contexts. German religious historians use the terms Erweckung and
Erweckungsbewegung to describe a range of interrelated religious developments in modern German Protestantism. The difference between these two descriptive terms lies in the emphasis that they place on the religious developments. Erweckung connotes the personal, experiential aspect of “awakening,” that is, the Christian concept of spiritual conversion from sin and unbelief to faith and obedience to Jesus that is ultimately derived from such New Testament texts as Romans 13:11, Ephesians 5:14, 1 Thessalonians 5:6–8, and Revelation 3:2–4.5 Erweckungsbewegung highlights the religious “movement” that was constituted by individuals within churches and new extra-ecclesiastical organizations, whose goal it was to facilitate such religious conversions. The conversions that Awakened Protestants primarily desired to see were not from one ecclesiastical confession to another but rather from religious indifference or religious formalism to a heartfelt and active religious commitment to Christianity.
Kurt Aland has credited the Awakening with bringing “a new life to Christianity and the Church everywhere in Germany.” According to Aland, this new life came to “all social classes, beginning first with the nobility, then proceeding to the middle class, before reaching down to the simplest members of the congregation, spreading the same way that Pietism had in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.”6 In a 1963 study, Erich Beyreuther argued that a “worldwide, pan-Protestant Awakening” occurred during the early decades of the nineteenth century.7 According to Beyreuther, the Awakening in German-speaking Europe was the result of “a preparatory phase in the eighteenth-century, which was followed by an early awakening in the time of Napoleon, before its full development came after 1815.”8 Kenneth Scott Latourette also observed the significance of the Awakening to modern German religious culture. He noted how by 1914 a “prodigious burst of life in German Protestantism” in the nineteenth century had made Protestantism “stronger” everywhere in Europe than it had been in 1815.9
Early Conceptualizations of the Awakening as a Historical Era in Modern European Protestantism
Such developments were not unique to early nineteenth-century German Protestant religious life. Nor did they occur in isolation from Protestants in neighboring countries. Indeed, the notion of a shared religious
“awakening” in European Protestantism is found in the writings of several scholars in the 1840s. Their observations enable us to identify the Awakening movement in Germany as an expression of a wider religious movement that transcended national boundaries.
At the opening of his theological training college for ministers and missionaries in Geneva on October 3, 1844, the celebrated Reformation historian Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné gave an address entitled “Du caractere nécessaire au théologien et au chrétien en general, dans l’époque actuelle” (“The Character That Is Necessary for Theologians and for Christians, in General, at the Present Time”), in which he discussed the recent history of European Protestantism. He predicted that in the future, “these last twenty-five to thirty years will be known as the age of the awakening in the nineteenth century.”10 D’Aubigné, who had previously pastored Reformed congregations in Hamburg (1818–23) and in Brussels (1823–31), described with florid rhetoric how during this period “all those to whom the name of Jesus was precious” had come together and formed a number of “armies of the Lord.” He described how these Protestants displayed an “aggressive spirit and were full of action as they went forth in conquest. They advanced into countries that had been laid wasted by the infidelity of the eighteenth century.” D’Aubigné celebrated how these Protestants had victoriously “raised up the banner of the cross” in those places from which it had disappeared.11 With words of encouragement to the French-speaking Swiss Protestant theology students in his audience, d’Aubigné urged them to observe and draw inspiration from the evangelistic and missionary examples that Awakened German Protestants in the previous generation had provided.
Several twentieth-century Dutch church historians have analyzed the influence of the German Awakening movement in the early nineteenthcentury Dutch opwekking movement.12 Among those who reported an experience of religious awakening while listening to d’Aubigné’s preaching in Brussels was Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, a young Dutch aristocrat and secretary to the king, who also held two doctorates, in classics and in law, from the University of Leiden.13 Three years after d’Aubigné made his speech in Geneva, Groen published Ongeloof en Revolutie (Unbelief and Revolution) in 1847. As a basis for his discussion of the relationship between religion, philosophy, and politics, Groen offered a succinct summation of what he believed to be the central tenets of the Christian faith, those “truths that had always and everywhere been indelibly written on the hearts of all true believers.”14 According to Groen, these truths were “the infallibility
[onfeilbaarheid] of the Holy Scriptures, the divinity of the Savior, the personhood of the Holy Spirit, the entire corruption of our nature through sin, Christ’s death as satisfaction for our sins, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to sinners, humankind’s need to be born again and to become sanctified [noodzakelijkheid der wedergeboorte en der heiligmaking]. These truths all exist in the one that is most necessary: our peace with God through the blood of the cross, in our union with Christ by faith.”15 These truths, Groen insisted, were recognized by all the Protestant churches at the Reformation. He alleged that it had been the Enlightenment’s “denial of these truths” that had corrupted “Christian Europe” and “initiated the Revolution.”16 Groen lamented how during the eighteenth century Europe had been struck by a hail of “fiery darts from the evil one [Ephesians 6:16]” and had become like “the man in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 12:45 who was possessed by seven evil spirits.”17 Nevertheless, he expressed optimism, noting that “during the last thirty years, all of Christendom has witnessed a great reaffirmation of Christianity’s essential truths.”18 Groen prayed that this revival of the “religion of the gospel” would express itself in “a greater reformation of faith and morals in our day than that which has taken place anytime since the time of the Reformation.”19
A year after the publication of Unbelief and Revolution, Europe was swept by revolution. The “March days” in Berlin impressed the University of Bonn law professor August von Bethmann-Hollweg as an act of rebellion against God. In response, he issued in April 1848 a widely published circular letter, in which he called Protestants throughout Germany to come together for a national day of prayer and repentance. He insisted, in a reference to the Protestant religious revivals that had occurred during and after the Napoleonic Wars, that Protestants now needed to ask God’s forgiveness for what he called their “poor stewardship of the costly gift that Germany received after the time of her deep humiliation and great deliverance, that fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon our nation thirty years ago.”20
In September 1848 over five hundred religious leaders from the German churches and universities gathered in Wittenberg in response to Bethmann-Hollweg’s call. Speaking in the Castle Church, adjacent to the graves of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon and using the same lectern that Luther had taught from in his university classroom, BethmannHollweg led members from Lutheran, Reformed, Union, and Moravian Churches across Germany in a prayer of contrition and in a confession of their common faith in a number of doctrines. “We confess, that we,
everyone of us, are poor sinners, fallen away from You, our Almighty Creator, the eternal source of life, from You, who are righteous in all You do and holy in all your works, and that, according to your judgment, we are ruined, in damnation and death.” Bethmann-Hollweg continued that their only hope was in the mercy and faithfulness of God, who “does not want the sinner to die, but to repent and to live.” As such, he praised God for how “in your infallible word [untrüglichen Wort], we have heard and believed the good news” that Jesus, the eternal Son of God, had come down from heaven to reconcile humankind to God at the cost of his own life as a sacrifice for sins. Bethmann-Hollweg further thanked God for sending the Holy Spirit into the world to gather together and to preserve the church until Christ returns. He closed by asking God to give them all the strength to do his will in the world.21 These beliefs formed the doctrinal basis for the Evangelischer Kirchenbund, which was also known by the name of its meetings, the Kirchentag
The purpose of this organization was to promote Protestant solidarity, to spread its members’ particular theological views within the Protestant churches of Germany, and to form a united Protestant bloc in German society out of concerns related to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, communists, and socialists. This initial meeting of the Kirchentag also provided the young Hamburg clergyman, future Prussian inspector of prisons, and member of the consistory of the Protestant state church in Prussia (Evangelische Landeskirche in Preußen), Johann Hinrich Wichern, with a unique opportunity to disseminate to a large audience from all across Germany his plans to organize a national home mission board. Wichern announced that the remit of this innere Mission would be the coordination of the various religiously motivated social reform efforts then being undertaken by Protestant groups throughout Germany.22
Subsequent meetings of the Evangelischer Kirchenbund attracted an international audience. In 1853, d’Aubigné was invited to address the Kirchentag to be held that year in Berlin. He delighted in telling their members how, “When I arrived in this city in 1817, at the time of the celebration of the jubilee of the Reformation, the church had begun to awaken after a long sleep. Now, in 1853, after thirty-six years, I see its crowning achievement [i.e., the Evangelischer Kirchenbund].”23 Referencing the Apostle Paul’s instructions to the first members of the ancient church in Corinth that they were not to argue about whether as Christians they followed him, Apollos, or Peter, d’Aubigné admonished his “awakened” German auditors not to separate from each other based on whether they
were Lutherans, Calvinists, Moravians, or members of the United Church. He declared that God had awakened and reunited them “for the purposes of the Evangelischer Kirchenbund, for the work of the one, holy, and universal Church.”24
The Social-Historical Context of the Awakening Movement
Many early interpreters of the Awakening believed that the movement could be explained almost entirely by religious beliefs. In their portrayals, the Awakening was essentially a conflict over religious ideas. It was conceived of as a theological reaction against atheism, deism, and the “rationalistic” Christianity of the Enlightenment, which the defenders of orthodox Protestantism saw as misguided or even malevolent. Awakened Protestants rejected the Enlightenment’s optimistic confidence in human reason and cultural progress. Their criticisms of the Enlightenment closely resembled those that were made by contemporary Romantics, many of whom did not share their distinguishing religious beliefs.25
Any attempt to understand the Awakening movement must begin by considering the religious convictions of its proponents. Their beliefs profoundly shaped how they understood themselves. They motivated their various endeavors, from university scholarship in Berlin to social work in the slums of Hamburg to missionary work in many places far away from Germany. Yet, the Awakening movement cannot be interpreted solely in reference to theology and piety. Such an approach fails to recognize how the Awakening movement was a product of the same social changes that created modern German society. While Awakened Protestants affirmed doctrines that orthodox Protestants had confessed since the Reformation, the most innovative aspects of the Awakening resulted from the new political and economic conditions in the early nineteenth century. These gave members of the emerging German middle class new freedoms and new means to pursue religiously motivated goals.
Between 1906 and 1922, Ernst Troeltsch published several studies on the history of Protestantism and its particular relationship to modernity.26 His reflections help to place the Awakening movement into a long-term historical context. According to Troeltsch, the history of Protestantism could be divided into two epochs: “Old Protestantism” and “New Protestantism.”27 These two types of Protestantism were distinguished from each other not
only by different religious teachings. At a deeper level, they were cultural products of two different sets of assumptions about the basis of legitimacy within European Protestant societies.
In Troeltsch’s analysis, the Altprotestantismus that began with Luther and Calvin was continuous with the Western Catholicism of the late Middle Ages. Medieval Catholicism and Old Protestantism each offered a comprehensive vision of how “the state and society, education and scholarship, economics and law, should all be organized and structured according to the supernatural standards of revelation.”28 The salient characteristic of the magisterial reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the confidence that orthodox Christian beliefs constituted the only legitimate foundation for every sphere of life. Old Protestants assumed that it was appropriate for temporal authorities to endeavor to bring the lives of their people under the Lex Dei
Troeltsch observed how the goal of religious uniformity was gradually abandoned during the Enlightenment and societies became much freer. These goals had proven themselves to be unattainable with the proliferation of parties within Protestantism. They were further tainted by the ghastly number of deaths in the wars of religion. The critical biblical, philosophical, and theological inquiries that were carried out by scholars during the Enlightenment sapped much of the confidence in older systems of Protestant orthodoxy. Governments still provided for the establishment of state churches, but they intervened less and less in religious affairs. By the latter eighteenth century, Protestant societies increasingly tolerated the churches of religious dissenters. As Stuart Woolf has noted in his study of Napoleonic Europe, the bureaucratic administrators of the French Empire advanced social policies that promoted this kind of religious tolerance in almost every Protestant region of Germany.29
Troeltsch described the cultural conditions that the Enlightenment had initiated as “Neuprotestantismus.” New Protestants “endorsed the principles that only personal conviction and voluntary association were proper bases for forming religious communities.” They “agreed to emancipate secular life and ceased their direct and indirect attempts to use the means of the state to exercise a religious control over it.”30 For Troeltsch the era of the New Protestantism was one of tremendous religious diversity. It was comprised of “those who revived the old orthodoxy, those who wholly gave themselves over to ideas that had never been heard of before, and those who made every conceivable kind of compromise in between these
extremes.”31 This was the cultural milieu within which the Awakening movement emerged.32
The appearance of hundreds of Bible, missionary, and religious tract societies in cities, towns, and villages; the proliferation of dozens of new religious journals, periodicals, and publishing houses; and the establishment of new foundations for the care of orphans, the sick and physically handicapped, former prisoners, and others on the margins of society are all examples of how Awakened Protestants used new civic freedoms and financial resources to spread their religious beliefs. These developments in the Protestant religious sphere may be regarded as a manifestation of a general phenomenon of modernity: the diffusion of social agency downward so that more people had opportunities to participate in the public square according to their beliefs, ideologies, opinions, and values than any had had at any previous time in German history. The Awakening’s expression of Protestantism was one that aspired to be orthodox, even as it was intrinsically modern.
The Historiography of the Awakening Movement
Discussion of continental European Protestantism has generally not been well incorporated into the standard English-language histories of evangelicalism; however, there have been several important studies of international evangelical networks written in English. Prominent are two studies of the international history of Protestantism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by W. R. Ward: The Protestant Evangelical Awakening and Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789. Nicholas Railton has produced two highly informative studies of certain relationships between German and British evangelicals: No North Sea: The Anglo–German Evangelical Network in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century and Transnational Evangelicalism: The Case of Friedrich Bialloblotzky, 1799–1869. Similarly, Timothy C. F. Stunt and Kenneth Stewart have done the same for early nineteenth-century British and francophone Swiss Protestant relationships with their respective works From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–1835 and Restoring the Reformation: British Evangelicalism and the Francophone Réveil, 1816–1849. In 1883, the University of Geneva professor of church history Étienne Chastel included in the final volume of his five-volume Histoire du Christianisme a thirty-page section entitled “Réveil Chrétien
et Protestantisme Rétrograde” (“Christian Revival and Reactionary Protestantism”) as part of his larger discussion of Christianity in the modern world. Chastel claimed that during the early decades of the nineteenth century, “the souls” of Europeans “instinctively returned to religious inquiry.” In Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, Protestants once again proclaimed the doctrines of the Reformation in a reaction against both “the negative philosophy of the Enlightenment that had created a vacuum within the human soul” and “the horrific crimes of the Revolution.”33
Chastel argued that those Protestants who were then establishing new Bible and missionary societies and other “new evangelistic endeavors” were motivated by “the same spirit that had animated” prominent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestants, such as the German Pietists Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke, the early bishop of the Moravian Brethren August Spangenberg, the English Quaker William Penn, and the founder of the Methodists John Wesley.34 Furthermore, Chastel regarded the Kiel pastor Claus Harms, the Dutch poet and scholar Willem Bilderdijk, the Danish Lutheran bishop and literary scholar Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the preacher at the Prussian royal court Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, the University of Berlin theologian Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, and the Jewish convert to Protestantism and University of Berlin professor of law Friedrich Julius Stahl as eminent examples, within their respective national and linguistic contexts, of those who propounded Protestant “orthodoxy” and “religious revival” during the first half of the nineteenth century.35
In 1928 the University of Berlin church historian Walter Wendland contributed a new historiographical entry to the second edition of the German reference work for religious studies, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie and Religionswissenschaft. Whereas the first edition of the RGG had described the developments in European Protestantism’s early “nineteenth-century Pietism,” Wendland presented them here as the Erweckungsbewegung. 36 According to Wendland, “a new pietistic wave washed over all of Europe” as a reaction against “the rationalistic Christianity” of the Enlightenment. It introduced a revived expression of the Protestant Reformation into England, Scotland, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, and every region of German-speaking Europe. Among its distinguishing beliefs, Wendland identified a high regard for the Bible and an emphasis on salvation by grace alone.
Wendland perceived a commonality in the Protestant theology and spirituality promoted by several generations of European and North American Protestant religious leaders. Its religious leaders included Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and Charles Finney in America; John Wesley, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Chalmers in Britain; Henri-Louis Empaytaz, Adolphe Monod, and Alexandre Vinet in France and French-speaking Switzerland; Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Isaac da Costa, and Abraham Capadose in the Netherlands; Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig in Denmark; Hans Nielsen Hauge in Norway; and August Tholuck, Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, and Johann Heinrich Wichern in German-speaking Europe.37
The University of Erlangen church historian Erich Beyreuther followed Wendland in this analysis. In his 1963 study on the Awakening movement, Beyreuther noted religious revivals that had occurred in England, North America, Scotland, “in the Reformed Churches of Western Europe: Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands,” Germany, and Scandinavia as national instances of a larger modern Protestant Awakening. According to Beyreuther, in each of these national contexts, the Protestant beliefs of the Reformation were reaffirmed, alongside new evangelistic ministries and social reform initiatives.38
Likewise, in her 1970 work Het protestantse Réveil in Nederland en daarbuiten, 1815–1865 (The Protestant Revival in the Netherlands and in Foreign Countries), the University of Amsterdam archivist Marie Elisabeth Kluit interpreted the early nineteenth-century Dutch Protestant revival movement within the larger context of European religious awakenings. So too did the Scottish scholar Alice Wemyss in her 1977 study of the French Protestant revival movement, Histoire du Reveil: 1790–1849. 39 The University of Bielefeld professor Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the University of Basel professor Ulrich Gäbler made this same point about the connections and commonalities between European and Atlantic Protestant Awakenings in their respective 1987 and 1992 studies.40
The most thorough English-language discussion of the Awakening to date appeared in 1995 in Nicholas Hope’s masterful study German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700–1918. Hope portrayed those pastors who supported the Awakening as fulfilling a series of emotional and spiritual needs that the preceding generation of clergy had not met. According to Hope, Awakened ministers preached “the New Testament message of sinful man’s redemption through Christ’s saving grace and converted and reborn hearts,” which was very different from the Enlightenment
Christian message of “moral progress based on mankind’s natural moral predisposition.”41 Hope examined the Awakening in relation to developments in Protestant preaching, church polity, and religiously motivated social amelioration efforts. In contrast to how other observers had argued that the end of the Napoleonic Wars had precipitated the Awakening, Hope stressed longer-term, institutional and structural changes to German ecclesiastical life that began in the late eighteenth century:
A broad religious awakening in German lands . . . (c.1780–1850) is inconceivable without the gradual disruption of the communal parish order of dependent relationships in village, township, and home town dating back to medieval times by state legislation reforming the land and guilds in one modernizing state after the other. . . . The scale of this awakening—eighteenth-century popular piety pales in comparison—had, therefore much to do with a reaction against the successful application of enlightened principles in government, in consistories, in university law and theology faculties, and in vicarages.42
The Awakening movements were the subject of a collection of essays that was published in 2012 and edited by the Free University of Amsterdam professor of church history Fred van Lieburg, Opwekking van de natie: Het protestantse Réveil in Nederland (The Awakening of the Nation: Protestant Revival in the Netherlands). In his concluding essay, “Het international evangelicalisme in de vroege negentiende eeuw” (“International Evangelicalism in the Early Nineteenth Century”), Herman Paul, a professor of history at the University of Leiden, builds on the work of other Dutch and German scholars to argue that the Evangelical revival in the United Kingdom, the Dutch Opwekking, and German Erweckung were each national-linguistic types of the archetypical phenomenon of kersteningsoffensief; that is, they were efforts to “re-Christianize” European societies.43
This conceptualization of awakenings as “Christianization offensives” against secularization and de-Christianization in Protestant cultural contexts draws upon the work of University of Kiel emeritus professor Harmut Lehmann. He has argued that the religious and cultural history of Europe from the French Revolution to the end of the Second World War can be understood as a series of waves of secularization followed by waves of Christian religious revival: 1789–1815 (an era of secularization),
1815–48 (an era of religious revival), 1848–78 (secularization), 1878–1918 (revival), and 1918–1945 (secularization).44 This schematization redresses what Lehmann has argued elsewhere is a conceptual flaw in much of the most recent German scholarship on the Awakening.
As German church historians have transformed the notion of Erweckungsbewegung into a specific period of Protestant church history that is located in the early nineteenth century, they fail to see that Erweckung, spiritual rebirth, is a typological element of Christianity that can be found in many other centuries, most importantly as religious renewal within Protestant Christianity, as for example in Pietism and Methodism. Therefore if we use the term Erweckung, we should take a typological approach, not a chronological approach. Only if we take a typological approach are we able to contrast and compare the various expressions of Erweckung, of revival movements, and of religious awakenings. With certain variations the message in all of these movements was the same: To wake up the sleepers to stop them from sinning; to shake off spiritual numbness and religious indifference; to share a new religious life in a community of born-again Christians; and to go out and preach God’s word to those still asleep.45
The English-language historiography of evangelicalism would benefit from more engagement with the works of continental European scholars. It is this author’s hope that this study of the German Awakening may help to promote such engagement. Let us now continue our historiographical survey by turning to the German-language scholarship on the Awakening movement.
There is a sizable literature on regionally prominent figures, organizations, and institutions that illustrates how the Awakening movement appeared in particular localities throughout Germany.46 This is a reflection of how the Awakening did not have one special geographic center comparable to what Wittenberg, Halle, and Herrnhut were for early Lutheranism, Pietism, and Moravianism, respectively. Rather, the Awakening movement began independently in many different places, and it lacked the overall coordination of a centralized hierarchy. There were many regionally influential religious leaders among the clergy and laity, in the churches and universities, and among the nobility and middle class, who more or less simultaneously began to promote Awakened religiosity.
The University of Bochum professor of history Lucian Hölscher has provided a succinct summary of this literature in his fascinating 2005 study of the history of Protestant piety. Hölscher identifies some of the leading figures of the movement: in Berlin these were the Moravian Pastor Johannes Jänicke (1748–1827), Baron Hans Ernst von Kottwitz (1757–1843), and Professor August Neander (1789–1850, a distant relative of Moses Mendelssohn, who was known as David Mendel before his conversion to Christianity); in Pomerania, the Junker aristocrats Adolf von Thadden-Trieglaff (1796–1882, who would exert considerable religious influence upon Otto von Bismarck), Ernst von Senfft-Pilsach (1795–1882), and the brothers Otto (1801–49), Ernst Ludwig (1795–1877), and Leopold (1790–1861) von Gerlach; in Thuringia, Professor August Tholuck (1799–1877), who taught for over fifty years at the University of Halle; in Bavaria, the Lutheran Pastor Wilhelm Löhe (1808–72) and the Reformed pastor and professor Christian Krafft (1784–1845); in Württemberg, the founder of the separatist religious community at Korntal, Gottlieb Wilhelm Hoffmann (1771–1846), the Lutheran pastor Ludwig Hofacker (1798–1828), and the Lutheran pastor and missionary pioneer Christian Blumhardt (1779–1838); in Baden, the Lutheran pastor (and former Roman Catholic priest) Aloys Henhöfer (1789–1862); in Hesse, the gymnasium director August Vilmar (1800–68) and his brother, the Lutheran pastor Wilhelm Vilmar (1804–84); in Wuppertal, the Reformed pastors Gottfried Daniel Krummacher (1774–1837) and his nephew Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher (1796–1868); in Minden-Ravensberg the Lutheran pastor Johann Heinrich Volkening (1796–1877); in Bremen, the Reformed pastor Gottfried Menken (1768–1831); in Hannover, the author August von Arnswaldt (1798–1855) and the Lutheran pastors Philipp Spitta (1801–59) and Adolf Petri (1803–73); in Lüneburg, the Lutheran pastor Ludwig Harms (1808–65); and in Hamburg, the Lutheran pastor Johann Wilhelm Rautenberg (1791–1865) and the social reformer Johann Heinrich Wichern (1808–81).47 To be sure, Hölscher’s list is far from an exhaustive catalogue of all of the religious leaders of the Awakening movement, and, of course, he did not intend it to be such. But it conveys the breadth of the Awakening and the diverse backgrounds of its major figures.
The existing scholarship on the Awakening movement has been dominated by a regional focus to such an extent that there have only been three major attempts to interpret the Awakening movement as a German national phenomenon. The first of these was Ludwig Tiesmeyer’s, Die
