The Raft of History: Hebrew Prophets as German Philosophers
This is the second in a two part series on the Hebrew prophets and history in German thought.
The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault
What Hermann Gunkel hinted in 1914, he broadcast the following year. With his piece in the Deutsche Rundschau, the Protestant biblical scholar had called the Hebrew conception of God “the basis of all higher, moral, spiritual religion, echoing in every idealistic worldview up until today.” In 1915, introducing a new translation and commentary, he then credited Hebrew prophecy with “the powerful idea that history is a unity, a great divine-human activity,” what he called “an inalienable achievement of its spirit.”
Gunkel was only the latest to suggest a continuity between the ancient Hebrew past and the modern German present. In the decades around 1900, German Protestants presented a correspondence between their views of history and those by the Hebrew prophets. That correspondence featured in two basic claims: God was the guiding force behind all events on earth, and those events testified to his activity and plans. Divine revelation was therefore bound up with history itself. Not only did variations on these themes surface in their textual and historical work on ancient Israel, but they also featured prominently in their own descriptions of the world.
Gunkel was also the most outspoken. Speaking at the fifth International Congress of Free Christianity and Religious Progress, a major interfaith conference on matters of religion and society that took place in Berlin in 1910, he affirmed that history was a unity of past, present, and future, a unity both cohesive and progressive. “Everything has come into being by a continuing process—operated upon and still operating,” he proclaimed. “Nothing is isolated, everything is connected with everything else.” Yet this Old Testament scholar argued for more than a unified history. He argued for a purposeful one. In his chapter for a popular book from 1905, entitled Contributions for the Progress of the Christian Religion, he declared that history was knowable, meaningful, and divinely directed. In his own words, “The concept of historical development leads to the idea of revelation. Where the profane view sees nothing other than the human, it is precisely there that belief beholds the great work of God in humanity.” To study history was to study God.
Frieze of Prophets by John Singer Sargent at the Boston Public Library
This stream of historical thought—affirmed by Protestants and attributed to the prophets—flowed in what has been called “the German conception of history.” In line with the philosophical movement of German Idealism, these interpreters did not conceive of “history” as some random chaos but a source for truth. History was full of rational meaning, where all diversity and individuality converged within a grander unity. The whole of human history ultimately pointed toward an Absolute behind it, which was working through the past into the present and toward the future. In agreement with the German Historical School, which emphasized the particularity of human culture, they also believed in “history” as a real, objective process taking place, not a construct of the mind. In their specialized work on ancient Israel, they focused on the individual over the universal, asserted the autonomy and distinctiveness of every culture and each epoch, and preferred induction to deduction. Small wonder, then, that Gunkel credited the understanding of unity, meaning, and purpose in human history to the specifically German historical spirit. For him, the very word “history” represented “an entire worldview that our great idealist thinkers and poets have won for us.”
Yet German biblical scholars did more than suggest a mere congruence between their ideas and those of the Hebrew prophets. They used this formulation of God working in the world to confront a series of cultural, philosophical, and scientific challenges at the turn of the twentieth century. One was supernaturalism, with its claims of God directly involving himself in human affairs and perhaps even breaking the laws of nature through miracles. Liberal theology readily admitted that some orthodox Christian belief was simply unbelievable—talking snakes, floating axe heads, suns stood still—and assigned incredible statements or descriptions in the Bible to the contingencies of a primitive people living in antiquity. Gunkel judged “crass supernaturalism” to be incompatible with the basic principles of current historical thinking.
A different challenge came from the opposite direction, in claims of a world without a God. In two lectures, in 1892 and 1896, Bernhard Duhm addressed the problem of materialism, which banned the divine from nature and history. He conceded the apparent difficulties in reconciling religious and scientific understandings of the world, referring to the “mechanistic worldview” and the “materialist consequences” of the exact sciences. The University of Basel professor first distinguished the realm of geology, cosmology, and biology from the realm of religion. He then invoked prophetic teachings and presented two kinds of worlds: a material and sensory one, and a higher and unseen one. Together they formed a coherent whole.
Still another difficulty arose alongside supernaturalism and materialism, namely comparatism. Comparative studies increasingly threatened the uniqueness of the Hebrew literature and the people of Israel. Thrilling new discoveries from across the Middle East brought with them unsettling questions about who got there first, who did it best, and where God was in it all. Especially with Assyriology and the decipherment of Akkadian, earlier accounts of creation, flood, and law raised suspicions that the Hebrews may not have been so different after all, just another ancient people—and maybe even plagiarizers. At the request of the Royal Sachsen Ministry of Culture and Public Education in 1910, Rudolf Kittel published his talk to schoolteachers on how to handle Old Testament studies in religion class, which went through multiple editions and was translated into English. He promoted the prophet Isaiah, who had seen God beyond the whole history of the human spirit and had revealed himself not only to the chosen but also to the seekers. The divine had worked through Hammurabi, Kittel claimed, just as he had through Moses and the prophets. God, it seemed, was everywhere.
The Twelve Minor Prophets Mary Evans Picture Library
German Old Testament interpreters ultimately presented a prophetic conception of history that represented their own, one that saw heavenly dealings in worldly doings. For liberal Protestants between 1880 and 1920, the Bible itself was no longer revelation as a text, nor had God directly appeared to Israel on Mount Sinai as an event. But in directing history itself, the divine had become, and continued to be, manifest on earth. With this genealogy of ideas, they created a continuity between Hebrew prophecy and, with direct appeals to idealism and historicism, specifically German Protestantism. So it was that they assembled a view of history—equated with God himself—as a raft to navigate the rising challenges of their modern world. But as the twentieth century wore on, as its tides, and its horrors, rose higher, that raft would look less and less secure, not stable enough to keep them afloat.
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.