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." "Thomas Albert Howard seeks to reframe debate about modern theology and nineteenth-century university development. Historians of modern German higher education rarely consider the fate of theological study, focusing more often on the rise of humanistic and natural scientific fields. Theologians and scholars of religion, by contrast, have long been attentive to the significance of nineteenth-century German Protestant theology. But if theology is regularly slighted by historians, theologians often neglect to provide sufficiently contextualized accounts of the social, intellectual, and institutional conditions in which modern academic theology in Germany took shape. We are often left, therefore, not only with modern histories of the university short on theology, but stories of modern theology short on university history. The view that the two profoundly hang together is the guiding insight of this study."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.