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An Exchange Between Scotland and Germany in 1879: Ebrard of Erlangen and Matheson of Inellan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
In 1988 the Reformed Church in Bavaria commemorated the life and work of August Ebrard (1818–1888), the first Professor Ordinarius of Reformed Theology in the University of Erlangen. Ebrard is today almost completely forgotten; Karl Barth is reported to have opined that his theology was ‘deader than dead’. Yet he was a remarkable man, successively Professor in Erlangen, Konsistorialrat in Speyer, independent author and lecturer, finally minister of the French Reformed congregation in Erlangen (as his father had been long before). He contributed considerably to the maintenance and strengthening of the Reformed witness in Germany in the nineteenth century, took up the cudgels to defend the faith against D. F. Strauss on the one hand and Haeckel's Darwinism on the other, and published voluminous theological works, from biblical exegesis through church history to dogmatics, apologetics and practical theology, including liturgies, hymnology and sacramentalia. His interests were wider still; he was a kind of nineteenth century ‘renaissance man’, his studies extending inter alia to geology, mineralogy, musical theory and linguistics; learned, cultivated, busily writing up to the day of his death. Alongside his specifically theological works stand historical novels (written under the pen-name Gottfried Flammberg), poems, travel reports, an autobiography of Herculean proportions and such special gems as a System of Musical Acoustics and a Handbook of Middle Gaelic. Ground enough there alone for a Scot occupying Ebrard's chair a century after his death to look more closely at the man and his writings! Ebrard's papers are preserved in the Erlangen City Archives.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1989
References
1 Haas, K.E., Der Lehrstuhl für reformierte Theologie zu Erlangen, Erlangen 1987, 58.Google Scholar
2 The most generally accessible summary account of Ebrard's life and writings is Müller, E.F.K., ‘Ebrard’ in RE3 vol. 5 (1898), 130–137Google Scholar; cf. also: Jacobs, Paul, Wille und Wandlung — Die Grundlinien der Theologie Johann Heinrich August Ebrards, Zurich 1955Google Scholar (reviewed by Dietrich Ritschl in SJT 11 (1958), 102–3); Haas, op. cit., 47–66.
3 I am grateful to my former teacher and colleague, David Wright, New College, Edinburgh, for kindly tracking down the published version of Ebrard's reply and supplying a photocopy of it.
4 See e.g. Kantzenbach, F.W., Die Erlanger Theologie, Munich 1960.Google Scholar
5 Cf. Bonkhoff, B.H., Geschichte der veremiglen prot.-ev.-christl. Kirche der Pfalz 1818–1861, Munich 1986.Google Scholar
6 On Rust's career see Haas, op. cit., 20–27; Bonkhoff, op. cit., 69–96. That Rust was (albeit only briefly) Professor Ordinarius within the faculty was in flagrant contradiction of the statutes guaranteeing its Lutheran character. But Rust had powerful friends in Munich!
7 Ebrard's time in Speyer is described by Bonkhoff, op. cit., 121–142. One illustration of the rationalism of the hymn book Ebrard sought to replace may be offered here. Gerhardt's evening hymn, ‘Nun ruhen alle Wälder’, best known in English as beginning, ‘The duteous day now closeth’, included the line, ‘Es schläft die ganze Welt’, ‘All the world is sleeping’. Profoundly aware of the spherical shape of the earth and of the fact that, to quote an English hymn of more recent provenance, ‘The sun that bids us rest is waking/Our brethren neath the Western sky’, the Palatine ‘improvers’ had substituted ‘Es schläft die halbe Welt’, ‘Half the world is sleeping’!