Troeltsch’s assertion that “the eschatological bureau is usually closed” comes from the transcript of a lecture course in systematic theology at the University of Heidelberg in 1912 and offers an important example of how Troeltsch’s position can be twisted when readers do not take proper time to unpack it.[1] Hans Urs von Balthasar turned the statement into a byword in a 1957 essay on the state of eschatology in current theological work; while Balthasar’s reference to it was only a passing one, it has managed to exert an immense effect on the historiography of twentieth-century eschatology.[2] A good illustration of the extent to which this quote has become a contextless commonplace is Giorgio Agamben’s reference to it in The Kingdom and the Glory, when he writes of “the real meaning of the closure of the ‘eschatological bureau,’ about which Troeltsch spoke already in 1925.”[3] The problem, of course, is that Troeltsch had spoken these words over a decade earlier and had already been dead for two years by 1925, when his student Gertrud von le Fort brought the lectures to publication. But even those who take more time to read the statement in context do not tend to gain from it any more than a pithy dismissal of eschatology which would soon enough be proven naïve. Georges Florovsky goes so far as to psychologize two centuries of theology by claiming that “the arrogant phrase of Ernst Troeltsch . . . was distinctively characteristic of the whole liberal tradition, since the Age of the Enlightenment.”[4] Troeltsch, admittedly, does seem at first glance to be speaking as if eschatology were no longer a serious modern theological option. Yet such an interpretation clearly cannot be reconciled with the centrality he granted to eschatology in an encyclopedia article on the doctrine written around this time, or even with his discussion of eschatology later in the Heidelberg lectures themselves. It is necessary, then, to offer some sort of explanation for Troeltsch’s seeming rejection of eschatology early in his Glaubenslehre lectures despite a near simultaneous embrace of it elsewhere.
“Ein moderner Theologe sagt: Das eschatologische Bureau sei heutzutage zumeist geschlossen.” To whom is Troeltsch referring here? Is it simply “a modern theologian” in the sense of “any theologian who is with the times”? Or could he possibly be referring to “a recent theologian”? In fact we can be relatively certain that the latter is a more appropriate reading. One of the most widely quoted statements attributed to Troeltsch was, surprisingly, not his own words at all, although I have not yet encountered a commentator who mentions its true provenance.
Troeltsch’s “moderner Theologe” is Johann Peter Lange, a Reformed theologian in the mold of Schleiermacher, who taught at Bonn with Albrecht Ritschl in the 1850s and was the father of Friedrich Albert Lange, whose history of materialism was influential for Troeltsch’s early studies. The sentiment was originally expressed about Ritschl’s theology in particular: Lange said that “the eschatological bureau is closed, in the case of Ritschl,” according to the conservative Lutheran pastor Wilhelm Krüger, who quoted Lange in his own critique of Ritchlian theology published in 1887.[5] Krüger does not say when Lange uttered or wrote these words, and I have not been able to locate the comment in Lange’s oeuvre. In 1889 the comment was repeated during the August Conference of the Lutheran wing of the Prussian Union Church by a Pastor Gensichen.[6] Franz Hermann Reinhold Frank’s 1891 study of Ritschl’s theology quoted the line, and from there it appeared a number of times throughout the 1890s and into the first decade of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic, usually quoting either from Frank, from Krüger, or even via French translations of Frank,[7] but always retaining the original attribution to Lange.[8] The sentiment is akin to the American theologian James Denney’s comment around this time:, “Ritschl . . . has no eschatology at all.”[9] Troeltsch may not have expected his readers to know who the recent theologian was to whom he was referring, but he probably did expect them to surmise that a Ritschlian mode of theology, or at least a liberal one, generally speaking, was the impediment to reopening the bureau of eschatology. Such an assumption was in the air and widely quoted. The erasure of this fact by the outsized influence of Balthasar’s 1957 essay has created problems for interpreting Troeltsch ever since.
[excerpt from Evan Kuehn, Troeltsch’s Eschatological Absolute. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 19-21.]
[1] For a helpful explanation of this commonly misunderstood statement, see Gerhard Sauter, “Protestant Theology” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. J. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 253.
[2] See Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Eschatologie,” in Fragen der Theologie Heute, ed. Johannes Feiner et al. (Einsiederln: Benziger, 1957), 403–22.
[3] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 8. In his recent Mystery of Evil, Agamben uses this quote again without the error in chronology, but continues to apply it out of Troeltsch’s original context to a Catholic debate about the nature of the katechon. See Giorgio Agamben, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 13.
[4] Georges Florovsky, Creation and Redemption (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976), 246.
[5] All references to this comment trace back to Wilhelm Krüger’s polemical treatise Phantasie oder Geist? Ein Beitrag zur Characteristik der Ritschl’schen Theologie (Bremen: C. E. Müller, 1887), 36.
[6] [Martin?] Gensichen, “Das lutherische Bekenntniss in seiner Bedeutung für die Erbanung der Gemeinde—und die Ritschl’sche Theologie,” Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung 37 (1889): 671.
[7] Ernest Bertrand, Une Nouvelle Conception de la rédemption: La doctrine de la justification et de la réconciliation dans le système théologique de Ritschl (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1891), 185; H. Appia, “Trois Conceptions du Royaume de Dieu,” Revue de théologie et des questions religieuses 6 (1897): 53; J. A. Selbie, “Among the Periodicals,” Expository Times 8.7 (1897): 322.
[8] See Franz H. R. Frank, Zur Theologie A. Ritschls (Erlangen: Georg Bohm, 1891), 16; Martin Kahler, “Besteht das religiöse Erkennen in Werturteilen? Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des Ritschlianismus,” Der Beweis des Glauben 39 (1903): 322; C. W. Rishell, “The Ritschlian Theology,” Methodist Review 73 (1891): 195; William J. Mann, “Albrecht Ritschl and His Theology,” Lutheran Church Review 10.1 (1891): 21; G. R. W. Scott, “Signs of the Times in German Theological Faculties,” Our Day: A Record and Review of Current Reform 9 (1892): 161.
[9] James Denney, Studies in Theology: Lectures Delivered in Chicago Theological Seminary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1895), 228.