This Munich dissertation describes the character of the Protestant theological faculties in Germany as they adapted to modernity without changing their traditional role of producing some of the local leadership throughout the various provinces in the form of a highly educated parish clergy. Maintaining the truth-claims of Protestant Christianity in an intellectual milieu that was more secularised than society generally assumed an academic ideal and independence, but the professors' cultural identity was expressed in ecclesial roles. The close relationship to provincial churches was maintained as academic professionalisation and specialisation developed. The work takes a narrow time-frame, the period of political reaction following 1848, up to the Second Reich, and restricts itself to four somewhat different faculties: Jena, small and liberal, Berlin large, Tübingen diverse, and Erlangen neo-confessional. The comparative dimension on this narrow front confirms fairly uniform institutional patterns across a diversity of theological standpoints. Limiting itself to four faculties and avoiding wider comparisons with even Catholic theological faculties, much less other disciplines or countries, allows some biographical reference to all eighty-six theologians active in these four, and an impressive depth of published and unpublished source material. Two long chapters on institutional factors and the ‘actors’ are followed by three shorter ones on their mentality and fields of action, their theological positions or parties, and their academic style. Autobiography, letters, university speeches and archives, and the church press, yield a detailed socio-historical picture which offers some corrections and supplements to the standard church and theology histories. The importance of social context to theology has long been recognised but rarely has the social profile of the theologians, their backgrounds and careers, pay and piety, their obligation to publish and their politics, been so minutely explored. The result is a resource which deserves a long life and a stimulus to reflection on the roles of universities in their wider culture.