Theologies of History: Hebrew Prophets and German Protestants
This is the first in a two part series on the Hebrew prophets and history in German thought.
Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law by Rembrandt
What did the ancient Hebrews ever do for us? The answer was clear to Wilhelm Caspari. Writing in 1914 for a book series aimed at the general public, the German professor listed the contributions of great nations to world history. The Greeks gave us philosophers and sculptors, the Romans generals and lawyers, the English colonial rulers, the Americans economic organizers, and the Germans musicians. But the Hebrews provided us with prophets, unparalleled before or since. What, exactly, do we owe those prophets, though? According to Caspari, they left no school, unlike Pythagoras, and unlike Socrates, they interrogated no assumptions. Yet, like Pericles or Demosthenes, they sought to inculcate a particular mindset in their people. That mindset was ethical monotheism. And they gave it to all humanity.
Caspari was not the only one, of course, to link prophecy to monotheism. Another Old Testament scholar, the Dutch Abraham Kuenen, firmly tied the two already in the 1870s. (In fact, the term “ethical monotheism” had circulated even earlier that century but did so in theories on the ur-religion of humanity and on the universalism of Zoroaster). Two World Wars later, in 1947, an American author named William A. Irwin still insisted in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man that ethical monotheism was Israel’s great achievement. Nor were such Protestant writers the only ones to do so. For liberal Jewish thinkers, the identification of Hebrew prophets as ethical monotheists suggested shared pasts and common values. German Jews hailed monotheism as the distinctively Jewish contribution to Western culture. The stress on ethical monotheism and its place among the prophets came most memorably from the great Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. He consistently extolled Judaism in general as the source of rational religion and prophecy, in particular as the teacher of universal ethical laws. In doing so, Cohen placed the Hebrew prophets alongside the Greek Plato as the two great nourishing streams of modern culture: Hebraic ideals of moral doctrine and Hellenic scientific knowledge.
Yet this association, and celebration, marked a drastic shift for representations of Jewish antiquity. The Old Testament had long been disparaged by Christians for its morality (or lack thereof) compared to that of the New. In the Enlightenment, prophets then became suspect, with their improbable future predictions and messianic expectations. Then, with the rise of comparative philology in the mid-nineteenth century came the suggestion that monotheism, the worship of one God, was typical of all Semites—not special to the Hebrews. Between 1880 and 1920, as historical criticism was drastically rewriting the biblical past, interpreters were able to let go of the credibility of accounts in the Old Testament only to tighten their grip on the legacy of Hebrew antiquity. Kuenen and others recast ethical monotheism not as an original, pristine building at risk of falling to ruins—i.e., instituted by Moses and refurbished by the prophets—but a tower raised only over time, in large part thanks to prophecy. The bond between Hebrew prophecy and ethical monotheism became fixed. Irwin found it “so apparent that mention of it is almost trite.”
But German writers circa 1900 valued Hebrew prophets for a different reason too, one long overlooked: their historical thinking. The praise appeared in an array of genres, from specialist works, pamphlets, and literary reviews to popular histories, public talks, theological monthlies, and pedagogical literature. And it came mostly from liberal Protestants, who dominated the cultural and intellectual institutions at the time. These figures, who were willing to relinquish some traditional doctrines to reconcile the claims of faith and science, included philologians and theologians, pastors and professors. There were many cords that tied prophets to historical thought. For Rudolf Kittel, Isaiah made “the first attempt at a philosophy of history in great style.” This prophet, he explained, had connected “the law of a moral world” order to human history, adding, “world history is the world’s tribunal.” With this aphorism, he evoked famed idealist philosophers: Schiller, its creator, and Hegel, its propagator. For other writers, the prophets had seen the hidden hand of God at work in the world. In his book Israel’s Prophets, Bernhard Duhm, a foremost scholar of prophecy, celebrated their sense of “an intention, a plan” behind seemingly tumultuous events on earth: “the history made by God.”
As they read the text of the Hebrew Bible, German Protestants constructed a prophetic conception of history. It had two basic claims: God guided happenings on earth and could be seen in their unfolding. Rather than interfere, the divine inhered in human events. According to Max Haller’s popular pamphlet, written for the “the German Christian present,” Isaiah’s successor had looked beyond the narrow history of Israel to the entire unfolding of past and present as testimony to divine truths. The course of history was, on this reading, itself the revelation of God. As Otto Procksch put it in his book The Conception of History and Historical Transmission among the Pre-exilic Prophets, “the world is full of God’s ordering; meaning and purpose are everywhere.” For these readers of the Bible, the prophets were no longer predicters of the future—messianic or otherwise—but interpreters of God in past and present.
Isaiah by Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier
Writers then used this prophetic conception of history to judge the prophets themselves. Amos thus earned accolades for preaching divine judgment and the consequences of human conduct for the life of nations, while Isaiah pulled in praise for proclaiming a universal God whose dominion extended beyond the Hebrew people. However, other prophets were castigated for their views of history. Rudolf Smend disapproved of Ezekiel, whom he called “the spiritual father of Judaism,” which was not meant as a compliment. Smend believed that Ezekiel had drawn an unfair portrait of Israel’s past, based on “a priori assumptions” and without any sense for “objective historical truth.” Later prophets fared little better. Habakkuk was damned by Duhm for failing to connect past and present, for having “no historical sense at all.” Daniel he then condemned for depicting a God who stands with the Jews alone and regardless of circumstance, which only went to show that “no genuine prophecy stands before us.” The idea of God sticking with a chosen people regardless of what they do was no doubt an unsavory one to Christians who considered themselves the inheritors of Hebrew prophecy.
These representations of historical thought contributed to negative views of Judaism. Protestants used them not only to evaluate the prophets themselves but also to distinguish between earlier, original Israel and later, degenerate Judaism. On one level, they portrayed postexilic Jews (those active under the Persians, Greeks, and Romans) as having abandoned the here and now and projected themselves, instead, into an ideal future yet to come. According to Duhm, Jewish thought deviated from the old prophetic drive of world history. They let go of the past as it had been to grasp hold of a future as they wished it would be. Duhm thus drew a contrast between “the fantastical fog of scribal eschatology” and good “historical sense.”
On another level, German Old Testament scholars depicted the accounts of the past produced by ancient Jews as fanciful, deceitful, even disgraceful. The Prophets of Israel, a successful series of lectures by Carl Heinrich Cornill, claimed that just as Arabs had erased pre-Islamic history and German Christians had destroyed old pagan literature, so too had Jews misunderstood, disavowed, and deleted their own history. This idea of corruption in literature—that postexilic Jews had distorted the true pre-exilic past of Israel—powered much historical criticism on biblical texts. Even more, writers regarded “Jewish” historical writing as uninspired and formulaic. Hans Schmidt published The Writing of History in the Old Testament, wherein he decried “the lack of perspective of the late Jewish view of history.” He listed the features he judged most foul: “priestly-forensic style, proclivity for series of names and genealogy, recklessness with sources, unworldliness and churchly delight.”
However, “Jewish” historical thought, in this telling, was more than un-prophetic. It was also foreign. Christian theologians writing on antiquity had long divided Israel and Judaism—chronologically, politically, religiously, literarily. But that wedge was driven even further in claims about historiography. For Schmidt, this deficient view of history had come from Babylonians with their astrology, a view marked by “fatalism and determinism that knows no authentic life, no well-planned activity by God, no history with a great purpose, one to which everything appears pre-ordained.” Such arguments of foreign influence only furthered Christian claims of Jews having lost their connection to the reality and authenticity of pre-exilic Israel.
Crispin van den Broeck, Ezekiel and The Dry Bones
In 1914, the year Caspari’s book appeared, Hermann Gunkel published an article in the Deutsche Rundschau, a highly influential literary and political monthly. The famed Old Testament professor affirmed that “world history” had made Israel into one of the cultural foundations for “Christian-European nations.” The other pillar, of course, was ancient Greece. “What we are,” he wrote, “we have become by virtue of the connection of these two worlds.” Gunkel then proclaimed it the duty for those of modern historical mind “to understand the Reason that reveals itself in all of history and that laid both these boulders as the foundation.” For liberal Protestants in Germany, the Hebrew prophets had given to humanity that path of understanding.
Paul Michael Kurtz is a research fellow of the Flemish Research Council at Ghent University. His work focuses on the history of the humanities in modern Europe.