ABSTRACT
On 4 October 1914, exactly two months after Britain’s entry into the First World War, the so-called ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’,1 carrying the signatures of ninety-three intellectuals, was published in the main German dailies. According to Karl Barth, this date was a ‘black day’ for theology. Among the signatories were seven Catholic and five Protestant theologians, including the liberals Adolf von Harnack2 and his own Marburg teacher Wilhelm Herrmann, the moderate Adolf Deissmann, and the conservatives Reinhold Seeberg and Adolf von Schlatter. ‘For me’, Barth went on, ‘nineteenth-century theology no longer held any future’.3 Barth, of course, had his own purposes in distinguishing himself from his predecessors and downplaying any theological similarities with what went before – his rhetorical devices are undoubtedly impressive. And, not surprisingly, histories of twentieth-century theology have often seen 1914 as the great turning point.4
