ABSTRACT
Max Weber, the unbelieving scion of a family descended on the one side from those protestant refugees from the Habsburg lands who had so often generated religious revival, and in another branch from that ancient Huguenot community in Frankfurt, whose congregation outside the walls was a permanent memorial to the pugnacious determination of the Frankfurt town council to maintain the Lutheran character of a place full of Calvinists and Jews, derived from his pedigree a degree of detachment, even alienation, from his milieu, which is doubtless one of the qualifications of a sociologist. Family circumstances, political events and intellectual interests were, however, to bring him into close contact with a group of Lutheran theologians, all of whom had strong reasons for wishing to remain within their Landeskirchen, and so made the intellectual running in these establishments, that they are now almost the only theologians in the period of intellectual interest. To this group, the neoRitschlians, Weber came to be important, partly because of his analysis of German society and partly because he was powerfully engaged with intellectual issues cognate with those that they had inherited from Ritschl. The intellectual significance of this group in no way disguises the fact that they were a minority, even a persecuted minority, in the great Landeskirchen of their day, and heavily dependent on state protection in academic appointments, protection that did not extend to providing a career for one distinguished Old Testament scholar among them, Hermann Gunkel. 1 One of the unspoken reasons for Troeltsch's transfer from theology to philosophy when he moved from Heidelberg to Berlin in 1915 may very well have been that no one wanted another row with the Evangelisch Oberkirchenrat like that which had been staged when Harnack had been brought in from Marburg in 1890. 2 Confessional Lutheranism remained as strong as ever in the Saxon church; to the fury of Ritschl, it came to provide a shelter for all the tendencies of anti-Prussian separatism in Hanover and the middle states; 3 the power of the Positive Union, meticulously consolidated at the court of Wilhelm I, remained unbroken in the Old Prussian Union at the time of his grandson's abdication. 4
Political antipathy was not the only barrier between Weber and the conservatives who were in possession in the German churches. All of these groups still resisted in the name of dogma the historical outlook for which Weber stood and, even on the level of social understanding, moved in another world. Rudolf Todt had tried to derive social policy from the Bible; Stoecker was not merely an anti-semite, but thought that political agitation provided a way to sublimate the divisions in the national life by focusing on enthusiasm for God, Church and Emperor; while the whole protestant-social enterprise was an affront to the demand for a value-free social science for which Weber had
come to stand. Indeed, the third edition of Martin von Nathusius's book, Die Mitarbeit der Kirche an der Losung der sozialen Frage [The Contribution of the Church to a Solution of the Social Question] (1st edn, Leipzig, 1893-4; 3rd edn, 1904), which gave Troeltsch a push towards the studies that led to his Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, sought to derive from Christianity the principles of a natural social order, of a Christian sociology with the virtual status of revelation. And, if Weber made no contact with the various styles of conservatism dominant in the Landeskirchen, the interest he aroused among theologians was equally clearly terminated by the demise of the Ritschlian party. It was Karl Barth, a pupil of Wilhelm Herrmann, and one of the successors of that friend of Weber's youth, Paul Gohre, as assistant to Martin Rade on Die christliche Welt, who most notably turned from his neoRitschlian origins to new ways; although Barth vituperated wildly against Naumann, Troeltsch and Harnack, he left hardly a reference to Weber in the whole of his gigantic corpus. The deaths of Naumann, Weber and Troeltsch in rapid succession concluded a chapter, and that conclusion was underlined by the rise of the dialectical theology.
