Some of the most exciting recent scholarship on the Kulturkampf has considered the “collateral damage” inflicted on German protestantism as a result of Bismarck's anti-Catholic policies. While the Kulturkampf was intended to secularize German Catholics, instead it buoyed Catholic solidarity and popularized political Catholicism. At the same time, the Kulturkampf legislation undermined German protestantism by secularizing institutions like marriage and the schools. Coupled with several decades of historical criticism of the Bible that questioned the empirical veracity of the Gospels, Wilhelmine-era German protestantism seemed almost certain to devolve into nothing more than a nationalist German civic religion.

But Mark R. Correll, Associate Professor of History at Spring Arbor University in Michigan, has uncovered a small group of conservative pastors that sought to find a middle way between state protestantism and liberal theology by engaging higher criticism and synthesizing its historical and critical methods with a German Christianity deeply-rooted in biblical faith. In Shepherds of the Empire Correll explores this conservative response to the “crisis” of historicism by examining the lives and work of the preachers Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909), Adolf Schlätter (1852–1938), Christoph Blumhart (1842–1919), and the theologian Martin Kähler (1835–1912).

The key belief of these four men was in a “Word of God” theology that recognized scripture rather than creeds, doctrines, or ecclesiastical canons as the ultimate arbiter of religious truth. Rather than appeal to confessionally-Lutheran positions, Stoecker et al. appealed to the authority of the Bible in their defense of protestantism against historicism. Correll calls this position “Bible-believing” and distinguishes it from neo-confessional or neo-orthodox positions that appealed to Reformation-era creeds for authority. Scripture would remain authoritative in spite of a crisis of historicism that challenged its objective truth so long as it remained a force in the lives of ordinary Christians. As such, witnessing one's faith did not consist in the mere affirmation of dogma, but instead in the acknowledgment of the Bible's centrality to the believer. This pragmatic understanding of the Word of God—it is true because it makes an impact in one's life—sidestepped empirical questions about the Bible's objective content and rendered the critiques of the higher critics moot.

Chapters 2 through 5 provide intellectual biographies of each of these figures. Correll notes that Stoecker, court preacher to Wilhelm II in Berlin, recognized that the fight against historicism and higher criticism would be won not in the academy, but in sermons delivered by parish pastors to their congregations. He saw academic theologians as a threat to German protestantism and the parish pastor as the last line of defense of biblical Christianity. More importantly, Stoecker served as a bridge between Bible-believing academic theologians and church clergy by disseminating this “Word of God” theology from the ecclesiastical hierarchy to local preachers. Martin Kähler was a systematic theologian from Halle whose critique of higher criticism and insistence on the importance of the Bible and authority of Scripture drew from Stoecker's thinking. Adolf Schlatter, first a rural preacher in Switzerland, and then an academic theologian at the Universities of Bern, Berlin, and finally Tübingen, sought to synthesize higher criticism and orthodoxy by recognizing theology as a practical, professional or vocational subject dedicated to guiding the Bible-believing Christian through life. Finally, Christoph Blumhart was a firebrand preacher whose understanding of biblical Christianity led him to dedicate himself to social justice and to service as a delegate in the Württemberg Federal Council.

Correll concedes that while these four preachers succeeded in helping to shelter congregations from the influence of higher criticism, they were less successful in disseminating their “Word of God” theologies in the local churches. He notes that local pastors tended to present admittedly complicated theological ideas in very simple terms, either because they lacked the sophistication to understand them, were unable to reconcile modern ideas to their Reformation-era creeds, or were simply accommodating a congregation that lacked that same sophistication. According to Correll, the eclipse of Word of God theology at the parish level and the ascendance of neo-orthodoxy came as a result of the First World War and the parish clergy's complicity in spreading German imperial propaganda in its sermons. These sermons espoused a theology of victory and assured listeners of an inevitable triumph and loudly proclaimed that God was on Germany's side. This caused a crisis in confidence among local congregations that had uncritically trusted their preachers until then.

Although Correll maintains that Shepherds of the Empire is “explicitly and unabashedly a ‘top-down’ history” (15), he provides readers with at least a glimpse of the history of the crisis of historicism at the local level. This “trickle-down” history of higher criticism at the parish level complements standard narratives of secularization and the neo-orthodox response to it in academic institutions and ecclesiastical synods. Shepherds of Empire also offers insight into how nineteenth-century theological debate operated in the spiritual lives of individual Christians. Indeed, far from being only an esoteric academic discipline, Correll has smartly demonstrated how theology might function as a lived experience in the lives of individual Christians, even if the four pastors that he reviews never discovered precisely how to bridge the gap between theology and faith and help to realize their views in the local churches.