Protestant Theology And the Making of the Modern German University

In shaping the modern academy and in setting the agenda of modern Christian theology, few institutions have been as influential as the German universities of the nineteenth century. This book examines the rise of the modern German university from the standpoint of the Protestant theological faculty, focusing especially on the University of Berlin (1810), Prussia’s flagship university in the nineteenth century. In contradistinction to historians of modern higher education who often overlook theology, and to theologians who are frequently inattentive to the social and institutional contexts of religious thought, Thomas Albert Howard argues that modern university development and the trajectory of modern Protestant theology in Germany should be understood as interrelated phenomena.

Thomas Albert Howard is Associate Professor of History at Gordon College, in Wenham, Massachusetts, and the founding director of the Jerusalem & Athens Forum, an undergraduate honors program. He completed his Ph.D. in European intellectual history at the University of Virginia. He is also the author of Religion and the Rise of Historicism (Cambridge University Press, 2000).