ABSTRACT
The early treatises of theology that flowed from the pen of Karl Earth during his pastorate in the Swiss village of Safenwil display a feeling of restlessness, a restlessness that arose from disillusionment with the cultural and social order. This disillusionment became wedded to dissatisfaction with the theology of his former teachers, the heritage of Protestant liberalism. Earth's work among the labor class in the small village of Safenwil fostered such discontentment with the status quo, but Earth's final divorce from theological liberalism itself came with the outbreak of the first World War. Many of Earth's former professors openly supported the German war effort through an explicit subscription to a manifesto supporting Wilhelm II and his war policy, an action Earth found to betray an underlying theological and ethical failure.1 Earth would later look back upon this event as marking his official break with the theology of his teachers.2 The most highly esteemed of these teachers, and one of the signatories of the manifesto, was Wilhelm Herrmann.
