Few would dispute, although some regret, the fact that the single most influential
voice in twentieth–century Protestant thought as it bears on religion in the
public square is Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923). Only Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich
Bonhoeffer can compare in generating key concepts and intellectual loyalties
that have reproduced themselves for generations. Yet the reception of and resistance
to Troeltsch’s thought has left deep marks in the religious and social history
of the century now past.

To be sure, Troeltsch was largely ignored by statist–oriented “political theology”
as it derived on the right from Carl Schmitt and on the left from Ernst Bloch,
although Troeltsch energetically jumped into the struggle to establish a republic
in Weimar after World War I. Further, it was his friends and heirs (including,
in many ways, Niebuhr) who stood against the rising tide of radical ideologies
after his death, and who later most energetically mobilized the Protestant churches
outside of Germany against the Nazis and later the Communists. Indeed, as Ronald
Stone of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary has shown in a new book that contains
the translations of broadcasts to the German people during World War II by Troeltsch’s
student Paul Tillich, the Protestant resistance movements against the Nazis
were likely inspired as much by Troeltschian motifs as by the more widely celebrated
Barmen Declaration, written by Karl Barth, and the writings of the martyr Bonhoeffer.

Troeltsch was also ignored, or treated as a “neoliberal,” by the advocates
of Liberation Theology as it played out in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s,
the belated fruit of the Catholic revisionist Maurice  Blondel and the Marxist
revisionist Antonio Gramsci. Indeed, when the World Council of Churches began
to modulate its earlier Barthian accents to become a center of liberation advocacy,
Troeltsch’s influence further declined in those Protestant circles.

Yet it was the students of Troeltsch, then already a full generation removed
from him, who often worked ecumenically at local levels in the West, who advocated
the embrace of the UN Declaration of Human Rights by the Protestant churches,
and who marched with Martin Luther King for civil rights in America. In doing
so, they often parted ways with other Protestants who were nationalistic or
racist—as well as with those who were so alienated from Western culture in general
and American culture in particular that they uncritically echoed every liberation
voice that protested against them.

More recently, Troeltsch has come under fire from neo–sectarian pietists such
as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, and treated with harsh contempt by
those who have appointed themselves the guardians of “radical orthodoxy,” such
as John Milbank. But it is not at all clear that they understand Troeltsch.
Besides, they tend to accuse anyone who seeks to address public issues theologically
of selling out to “the principalities and powers.” They note, for instance,
that Troeltsch sometimes advocated the necessity of a “compromise” between the
gospel and the world. But they fail to note that he clearly defined the “compromise”
he intended as finding that synthetic possibility in a particular historical
moment that was “co–promising” between basic theological insights and the social
realities at hand.

The nonsectarian traditions of twentieth–century Protestantism, however—the
parts that have not become cadres of liberation or advocates of pious communitarianism,
and are thus likely to continue their public influence into the next century—have
been shaped directly or indirectly by Troeltsch and his followers more than
is acknowledged. He was cited often by the founders of the American Social Gospel
and Christian Labor movements early in the century as they generated what later
became the New Deal. He was utilized heavily by H. Richard Niebuhr at mid–century
in studies of religion, the Church, and American life. He was made mandatory
reading by several generations of leading Protestant teachers of Christian ethics—James
Luther Adams, Walter Muelder, Paul Ramsey, Roger Shinn, Edward Long, James Gustafson,
and Gibson Winter (and their many students) in the post–World War II period.
He has been cited by intellectual historians and social theorists from Leo Strauss
to David Martin and Peter Berger. And he has been taken up in divergent ways
by such Catholic thinkers as David Tracy, Dennis McCann, Michael Novak, and,
until his untimely death, Theodore Steeman. All, in one way or another, struggle
with the issues of how to accept the historical nature of Christianity without
succumbing to relativism, how to affirm the transcendent claims of Christianity
without recourse to supernaturalist metaphysics, and how to more fully actualize
the commitment of Christianity to universal justice without imposing the values
of one culture.

As a professor of theology at the University of Heidelberg, Troeltsch lived
with his family in the other half of a duplex where his “religiously unmusical”
(as his wife said of him), morally rigorous, and sociologically brilliant colleague,
Max Weber, wrote his five volumes on the sociology of religion. They were friends
also with the famous Jewish historian of law Georg Jellinek, who wrote a definitive
work on the theological foundations of modern human rights law, and the conservative
Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper, who developed the theory of “sphere” pluralism
that has increasingly been in conversation with Roman Catholic theories of “subsidiarity.”
They all had sympathy for aspects of natural law theory and discussed appreciatively
the reinvigoration of the social encyclical tradition by Leo XIII.

These figures obviously did not agree on all things, but they did all recognize
that the deep structures of existence and the long traditions of religion shape
the present and the future more than most of modern scholarship has acknowledged.
They also knew that the repudiation of that reality, as fact and as value, had
been taken in radical and destructive directions by Marx and Nietzsche, the
godfathers of postmodernism. They were, at the same time, also critical of traditional
dogmatics, not only because it made unbelievable claims, but because it could
not, in their view, withstand the historicist assaults that they saw on the
intellectual horizon as the influence of Marx’s militant secularism and of Nietzsche’s
nihilist romanticism flourished.

Troeltsch saw the problems of their historicism early and acutely. It had something
to it, he saw, in that it recognized that much of our thought and life is deeply
embedded in historically constructed and changeable patterns. But that recognition
was not the whole truth, and he was convinced that historicism’s partial truth
could give us no moral guidance for life. Indeed, he held that certain “religious
a priori” were intrinsic to human nature and had to be acknowledged in social
theory. The critical issue was whether theology could acknowledge the depths
of historicity and social theory the depths of religious consciousness.

In the decade before the turn of the twentieth century Troeltsch produced a
number of articles that called for his contemporaries to face these matters
directly; and in the first ten years of the new century he struggled mightily
with this problem, writing The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History
of Religions and Political Ethics and Christianity, plus a number
of essays contrasting historical and dogmatic approaches to faith. (See Religion
in History, collected and translated by J. L. Adams and W. Bense.) Troeltsch’s
Der Historismus und seine Probleme (“Historicism and Its Problems”),
never published in English, appeared later and identified most of the issues
now known to us as postmodernism.

Troeltsch was convinced that the dogmatic theologians of his tradition were
ignoring the situation, and that those who tried to face every problem by simply
reclaiming “the spirit of love,” as advocated by several post–dogmatic reformers,
were not intellectually serious. Neither group appreciated that theology and
ethics, when they are alive, are always in dynamic conversation with the cultural,
philosophical, existential, and social contexts in which they are found, just
as every civilization, even an apparently secular one, needs an intellectually
plausible religious center or it will collapse for want of an inner moral architecture.

The question was whether, in the new situation, a new synthesis was possible
on Christian grounds, one analogous to that of Augustine with regard to biblical
religion and Neoplatonic philosophy, or Thomas with Augustine and Aristotle,
or Calvin with Luther and the legacy of Stoic thought. These great synthesizers
abandoned neither tradition and faith, as had the Enlightenment, nor the dynamic
contributions of philosophical and cultural insight, as did the dogmatists.

Troeltsch was not interested, therefore, only in a condemnation of his opponents.
It was the prospect of a new synthesis that drove him. Such a proposal came
into fuller view when he offered an address in 1906 to the Ninth Congress of
German Historians. In his highly influential lecture, Troeltsch put forward
the view that Protestantism was, in profound if little–recognized ways, the
womb of “modernity” and that “modernity” could not be understood either as a
purely scientific “coming of age” of reason, or as a full–scale secularistic
rejection of the Christian past.

Of course, many theologians feared modernity and many Enlightenment philosophers
relished the “defeat” of religion as so much myth and magic. Troeltsch disagreed
with both. Some things in the Enlightenment were novel, but that did not mean
that they were by definition incompatible with the faith. Indeed, many features
of modernity were nothing other than strikingly fresh developments of classic,
catholic motifs in conversation with a new cultural context that a reformed
Christianity might well be able to take in new directions. This view comported
well with the ways in which some church fathers had related the faith to the
Greco–Roman world. It also echoed previous efforts of some humanist Catholics
(such as Erasmus), some Phillipist Lutherans (following Melanchthon in manifesting
a renewed interest in Aristotle), and a number of free church reformers (such
as the Puritans who sought to establish a Christian commonwealth in the American
colonies using both Stoic republican and Reformed Christian motifs). Troeltsch
also adopted insights from Schleiermacher, who sought to establish theology
as a university discipline; from the post–Hegelian philosopher of history Dilthey;
and from the American philosopher and student of religious experience William
James. In time, Troeltsch expanded that lecture into a little book, translated
as Protestantism and Progress: The Significance of Protestantism for the
Rise of the Modern World (1912).

Troeltsch’s title identified the issue. Many Christians found their faith in
deep conflict with modernity. Could some kind of “catholic neo–reformed Christianity”
creatively link the rationality, empiricism, personalism, and historicism of
the modern world to the classical traditions of the faith? Could, as Troeltsch
sometimes put it, a Christian social philosophy and a Christian personalist
psychology be developed? If not, the brilliant terrors of Marx and Nietzsche
would likely shatter societies and souls. But if so, a fresh version of Christianity
could be the springboard of a future beyond modernity. It is this that allows
one to speak of Troeltsch as the father of a certain kind of postmodernism.

Of course, not everyone agreed that what he was seeking could or should be
sought. The Lutherans in his native Germany and the pietistic evangelicals in
America had little sympathy with the effort. They could not imagine a non–confessional
state shaped by a theological ethic, a tolerant pluralist culture rooted in
a Christian conviction about freedom of conscience and association, or a civil
society centered in a nonestablished church. (It was impossible for Troeltsch,
as for almost any Protestant of his time, to imagine the pre–Vatican II Catholic
Church as the source of renewal toward a new Christian synthesis.)

Troeltsch’s greatest work, in size and significance, The Social Teaching
of the Christian Churches and Sects (1911), has been a center piece of graduate
courses in Christian Ethics in Protestant circles since it was published. It
is an extended overview of his subject, organized, in the first instance, according
to a series of “departments of life”—obviously a revised understanding of the
“orders of creation” so deeply rooted in Lutheran thought. Thus, he takes up
questions of politics and power, economics, work and class, science, learning
and education, family and sexuality, and art and culture as these spheres had
been addressed by the Church. But although some biblical and doctrinal themes
are perennial, Troeltsch did not think that one constant perspective has prevailed
historically, a fact that leads to the second feature of the work’s organization.

Troeltsch holds that the New Testament has a series of fundamental elements
that give concrete substance to the “religious a priori” of human consciousness.
These are combined in various ways by the biblical authors as they were in later
developments of doctrine and morals. Theologians through the years also drew
from philosophical and ethical resources in the cultural environment of the
Church. Thus Troeltsch traced the formations and reformations of Christian ethics
as believers addressed the issues that the various “departments of life” posed
for them in ever new ways.

Troeltsch recognized the pluralism of answers that had been developed over
time, although he thought that certain great syntheses provided the most creative
and enduring responses. He charted these perspectives, drawing comparisons and
contrasts through five periods of development—the early Church, the medieval
synthesis, Lutheran Protestantism, the Calvinist Reformation, and the various
sectarian and spiritual impulses that developed first into the monastic movement
and later in the directions of “withdrawing sects,” “aggressive sects,” and
“spiritual movements.” His famous “church/sect” typology, now used by scholars
and journalists when speaking of religious movements and their impact on public
life, derived from this work.

Less widely noted is the fact that Troeltsch saw the twentieth century as a
time of vague, free–floating “spirituality,” of little importance for the great
issues. Modern churches lacked social significance because, contrary to what
had been the case in all the preceding ages, they lacked a high view of the
Church. Ecclesiology is, indeed, essential to Christian social philosophy, since
the Church is the place where persons are formed theologically and ethically
to live responsibly in the wider society.

In one sense, Troeltsch’s monumental work can be understood as a self–critical
search for a corrective to the German Lutheran tradition, with its tendency
to divide law and gospel too radically and to hand the exterior church over
to the state while confining the inner church to the heart. Troeltsch thought
that only two great syntheses have been generated in the long history of the
Christian heritage—the medieval synthesis of the Roman Catholic tradition, and
the “modern” tradition that derived from Calvin as modified by the sectarian
heritage and Enlightenment thought. Lutherans would, Troeltsch thought, sooner
or later have to bend back toward Rome or ally with their Reformed cousins.

He considered the withdrawing and aggressive sects in considerable detail,
seeing the root of one in the monastic impulses of the early and medieval Church,
and the root of the other in the episodic attempts to bring the Kingdom of God
by forced righteousness. The fruit of the first is the quietistic “peace churches,”
the fruit of the second is Christian Socialism. Troeltsch was attracted to the
sectarian desires for a “pure faith” and a “righteous society,” but he concluded
that only the great church–types of the Catholic and Reformed traditions could
sustain both the Church and the various spheres of the common life. He thought,
however, that these too had become wooden, and he did not see clearly how they
could be renewed, although that was his hope. Those who have followed Troeltsch
are those who have not despaired of the effort.

We do not know whether the future will bring an extended or renewed interest
in Troeltsch. We do know that in Germany new critical editions of his works
are appearing under the leadership of Trotz Rentdorff, Friedrich W. Graf, and
Klaus Tanner. Also, at Harvard Divinity School, Sarah Coakley has introduced
new reflections on Troeltsch’s Christology, while at Yale Thomas Ogletree is
seeking to update Troeltsch’s insights for our era, and graduate seminars are
regularly held on Troeltsch at Princeton. Indeed, Troeltsch continues to be
mined in many places for suggestions about how to handle the continuing dilemma
of facing up to pluralism and historicity without falling into the pits of relativism
or, in reaction to that temptation, retreating to premodern dogmatics. The problem,
as ever, is for the Church fully to engage the world without in the process
sacrificing its theological integrity.

Max L. Stackhouse is the Stephen Colwell Professor of Christian Ethics at Princeton
Theological Seminary.