CHAPTER SEVEN

THE 185 7 CONFERENCE IN BERLIN lt was not Karl Steinkopf, but Eduard Kuntze who played the most important role in establishing a branch of the Evangelical Alliance in . He had been a curate at the Savoy Church in London for three years. While in London he had also worked as the English correspondent for the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, which had been launched on 1 July 1827 by August Tholuck, Ludwig von Gerlach and Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg. 1 He met his wife in London and studied the work of Sunday schools in the English capital. Like evangelicals in England Kuntze was not content just preaching the gospel. T ogether the Kuntzes founded a hospital for the elderly who required permanent nursing care. Moreover, they established the Marthahqf, a training institute running on the Kaiserswerth model that Pastor Fliedner of Kaiserswerth visited on 16 November 1856, three days before its official opening. He spontaneously decided to send a deaconess to help Kuntze start the work in Berlin. 2 Kuntze helped to link up believers with one another. At the founding conference of the Evangelical Alliance Kuntze read out letters addressed to the gather• ing from groups of German evangelicals and pastoral conferences in Königsberg, Danzig, Tecklenburg, Lübeck and Berlin as well as a personal word of encouragement from Dr Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher, who had been mercilessly lampooned by Engels in the German press. 3 From the founding of the Alliance Kuntze had been involved in building bridges between denominations inside Germany as well as across national boundaries. The main reasons for the lack of progress made by Kuntze and the Baptist Gottfried Lebmann to set up a German Evangelical Alliance were partly to do with the persistent denaminational rivalries, partly

1 L. Witte, Tholuck, Zweiter Band, 65. 2 Gerhard Eosinski (ed), Zur Antwort bereit. Missionarisch-diakonische Arbeit der Evangelischen Landes- und Freikirchen in der DDR, Berlin 1978, 80. 3 Evangelical Alliance. Report qf the proceedings qf the confirence, held at Freemasons' Hall, London, .from August 19th to September 2nd inclusive, 1846, 71-2, Appendix C, vi-xiv, lxxxvii. On Kuntze's biography seeEvangelisches Pfarrerbuchfür die Mark Brandenburg seit der Reformation, bearbeitet von Otto Fischer, Zweiter Band, Erster Teil, Berlin 1941, 4 70. Kuntze translated works by Richard Baxter into German. 170 CHAPTER SEVEN with the growth of the alternative Kirchentag movement, but more importantly with the shock waves felt by theological conservatives unleashed by the 1848 revo1utions. Given the fact that evangelica1s associated or even identified theological rationalism with the areligious and antireligious aspects of the En1ightenment and the French Revolution4, it is not surprising that most of them saw the 1848 disturbances as the legitimate child ofthat stream of thought. Karl Reinthaler, who had always been a fervent adherent of mon• archy, wrote and published in that year patriotic songs and royalist tracts expressing sympathy and admiration for the Prussian royal family. In a tireless and idiosyncratic campaign he distributed these publications himself. The Martinsstift which he directed was cleared in 1848 to make way for the Erfurt Parliament oftheGerman Union and Reinthaler had to vacate his own lodgings. A second major blow took place a few years later when the educational establishments asso• ciated with the Stift, the Frei- und Erwerbsschule, were dissolved in a radical reform ofthe town's school system.5 Christian Barth also pub• lished patriotic-militaristic poems calling on Germany to 'wake up' and on German youth to 'remain united and as hard as steel and iron'. Yet Barth's own eschatological views prevented him from ex• pecting any positive changes in the German polity. In 1ine with tradi• tional interpretations of prophecy Barth saw the events of 1848 as an initia1 fulfilment of the evils talked about by Christ in the twenty• fourth chapter of Matthew. 'In my opinion', he wrote at the end of August 1848, 'we are now living in the midd1e of verse 7 in Matthew Chapter 24'. More worryingly for him than a separation of church and state was the belief that the 'man of sin' was soon to appear to 'unite all nations'. All true believers would have to face persecution. The time was near when the invisible church would be separated from the visible. As a direct result of this understanding of the signs of the time Barth said he did not expect much to come of the Wittenberg conference and, taking the advice of Wilhelm Hofacker, had had his name deleted from the list of prospective participants. 6 Barth's friend, August Tholuck, wrote and privately published ser• mons against the revolution in . He had started preaching against the 'ideas of 1789' after the February revolution in Paris. He recognised the just claims and indeed the 'divine intention' of the

4 Robert M. Bigler, 7he Politics qf German . 7he rise qf the Protestant Church elite in , 1815-1848, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1972, 48. 5 Neue Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 26 September 1863, 613. 6 Kar! Werner, Dr Barth, Volume 3, 189-90, 407-9.