The Modern, Secular University

Hans Frei, on the University of Berlin (founded in 1809), from “The Case of Berlin, 1810” in Types of :

Its founding “sets an important paradigm for other universities,” because it “became the prototypical German university and the model for many others on both sides of the Atlantic… Negatively as well as positively, its influence was great; it was a national institution of transnational cultural significance, nowhere more so than in American higher education.”

“The university was owned and sponsored by the state… but it was organized around a coherent, rational ideal, encompassing all knowledge and neutral as to religion. That makes it interesting and important not only in the small but significant universe of higher education but in the history of theology. The philosophical faculty became, in effect, the cement and the most important faculty in the university… Schleiermacher, for instance, suggested that even if other, more directly professional faculties were to be included, their members ought to be legitimatized not only by their special skills but by competence in some aspect, department, or ‘Institute’… under the philosophical umbrella.”

“If indeed the intellectual idea of this university was totally wissenschaftlich and therefore secular, not only in the sense of being religion-neutral, but also of prohibiting any institutional or intellectual allegiance from inhibiting the free exercise of the critical faculty, then Christian theology was in principle, if not in fact, in the position of having to demonstrate that it was truly wissenschaftlich and had a right to citizenship in this university.”

A paradox:

“A Protestant Christian state, which insisted on maintaining both the traditional churches’ status and its own virtually complete control of them, including control over the training for their ordained ministry, handed the monopoly for that training to the very institution, the university, which was bound to be most uneasy, perhaps even deeply skeptical, about the compatibility of such training with its own ideal of Wissenschaftlichkeit and the intellectual freedom and institutional independence guaranteed by the same state that governed the Church.”

The Prussian state claimed a twofold prerogative in church matters: ius circa sacra and ius in sacra .

“The Church thus found itself in a double bind. Few people actually looked anywhere but the university for the training of parsons in the early nineteenth century, but the discomfort of the situation was clear to a good number. Ministerial training was under the complete control of the state authority, which delegated it to an educational institution whose basic intellectual and educational assumptions might well be completely at variance with those of the institution for the service of which the students were to be trained.”

“Is theology – and training in theology – a suitable project for a university whose ideal is the dissemination of Wissenschaft ? Or, to pose the question from the other side: Can a university dedicated to this ideal provide training appropriate to the exercise of ministry in the Christian Church?”

Immanuel Kant (a Lutheran pietist) anticipated this problem. In “The Quarrel of the Faculties” (1798), he attacks the traditional primacy accorded to the theology faculty.

• Theology, Law, Medicine (traditionally, the three higher faculties) • Philosophy

The former have usefulness as their aim, and ought to be ordered by the state. The latter has no aim but truth, and ought to be ordered by reason alone. Philosophy, unlike theology, must be “free, standing only under the jurisdiction of reason, not of government.”

This view is taken up and extended by Fichte (Adolf Harnack compared John the Baptist to Fichte):

If theology insists that direct, divine communication has taken place by way of special emissaries, and the result set forth in sacred books, “which by the way are written in a very obscure language,” then a school grounded in reason can have nothing to do with them. Theology must admit “that the will of God can be known without special and that these books are in no way a source of knowledge but only a vehicle of popular instruction, which, quite independently of what the authors actually said, which in turn – as they should have said – must therefore be known apart from and prior to their own explanation.”

One result of all this:

“If theology could not free itself of its particularistic commitments, at best it would have to be relegated to being a practical discipline to train ministers who were… understood to be agents of the state. The effort to show that theology could meet the demands of being a university discipline resulted in theologians focusing on methodological issues concerning the conditions that must be met if you were to do theology. Theology became one prolegomena after another that explained how theology should be done if you ever got around to doing theology.” (, The Work of Theology , p.108)