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"Our universities … are our churches."
—Hegel
In Germany "we saw the giants, the sons of Anak," an American scholar tellingly reported in the 1830s, "and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." Such awestruck regard brought over nine thousand American students and scholars to German universities between 1815 and 1914. In Berlin, Göttingen, Tübingen, and other far-off locales Americans learned the latest German scholarly skills in a variety of fields. The ideas and impressions they brought home forever changed the landscape of American higher education. As George Marsden has recently affirmed, the German system possessed "overwhelming symbolic importance" for the modernization of American universities in the 19th century.
But by no means was the influence of Germany limited to the United States. In his much-discussed The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard singled out the German university system, particularly after the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, as the "motor" behind "contemporary knowledge." "[M]any countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," Lyotard wrote, "adopted this university's organization as a model for the foundation or reform of their own system of higher education." Scholarly consensus largely bears out Lyotard's assertion.
Sweeping claims always invite curiosity. How and when did the redoubtable "German university" arise? Why has it proven so consequential in shaping academic norms—including, importantly, norms for the study of theology and religion? And how today should thinking Christians begin to size up its pervasive and persistent legacy? It is not at all obvious, we must remember, that an institution born in the Middle Ages and modeled after the cloister should find itself today a dynamic global phenomenon aggressively pursuing critical, progressive, and often secular forms of inquiry.
Although the roots of German universities reach back to the 14th century, perhaps the most important event giving rise to the distinctly modern German university happened near the city of Jena, Saxony on the 10th of October 1806. This pivotal event was neither the publication of an important scholarly treatise nor a new educational decree by the state, but a military conflict in which the once-mighty Prussian army suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Napoleon's France. On October 27th the upstart general himself marched with his troops triumphantly through Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, a privilege traditionally reserved for the Prussian monarchs alone. At first intent on liquidating Prussia as a political entity, Napoleon relented and, in 1807 at the Peace of Tilsit signed with the Russian czar, allowed a Prussian state to continue, albeit one greatly reduced in size and saddled with wartime reparations. Prussian historians would later call these Germany's darkest days, the great national humiliation.
During this time, however, potent new historical forces arose. The philosopher J. G. Fichte gave his famous "Addresses to the German Nation," a milestone in the development of pan-German nationalism and nationhood. The defeat of 1806 also led to what historians call the Prussian Reform Era, a decade of profound social and political changes, during which liberal statesmen, under Napoleon's watchful eye, sought to adapt Prussia (often selectively) to the principles of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. A significant component of these reforms focused on revamping higher education, and in this area they gave birth to something remarkable and of world-historical importance: the founding in 1810 of the University of Berlin, which quickly became Prussia's and—after political unification in 1871—Germany's flagship university, and among the leading models for all modern research universities.
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