Theology's status in European universities has varied considerably over time––from “queen of the sciences” in medieval universities to calls for its expulsion from modern universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany tells part of this story by charting the rise and fall of “theological encyclopedia” in Protestant academic theology in Germany. Theological encyclopedia was a uniquely modern project of understanding how the different disciplines that constitute academic theology cohere together and relate to the larger body of academic knowledge outside of the theology faculty. In the form of pedagogical literature and introductory university courses, theological encyclopedia was an area where theologians sought to clarify both their position in the modern university and the scientific nature (Wissenschaftlichkeit) of their discipline. Purvis describes theological encyclopedia as “the place where theological reflection and the requirements of the institutional setting in which that reflection occurs––here the German university––meet” (3). Not only was it the locus for such disciplinary self-reflection, but it also became an important means of socializing new theologians into the academic norms and practices of their field.

The book's early chapters chart the origins and development of the encyclopedia model, in its more general scientific and distinctly theological forms. After considering predecessors of the genre in earlier theological compendia and pre-modern reference works, Purvis examines the emergence of theological encyclopedia in the second half of the eighteenth century. State-sponsored reforms at the universities of Göttingen and Halle that sought to rationalize and modernize university curricula fostered the recognizably new project of theological encyclopedia. The middle chapters of the book explore Prussian theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher's pioneering work in relation to the question of theology's status as Wissenschaft. Purvis places Schleiermacher's short but influential Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, a paradigmatic work in the genre of theological encyclopedia, within its institutional context and amid Schleiermacher's other writings and work. Purvis argues that Schleiermacher's Brief Outline was epoch-making for legitimating modern theology as a collection of academic disciplines (mainly historical ones) which are properly rooted in the philosophical rather than theological faculty, and are unified only through the theologian's practical end of leading the church.

The latter chapters explore the later development of encyclopedia as it diverged in two directions after Schleiermacher: a speculative trajectory influenced by Hegel, and a second trajectory (exemplified by Karl Hagenbach) that remained true to Schleiermacher's vision of theology in a mediating position between church and university. As Purvis describes in the book's conclusion, theological encyclopedia faltered with the rise of radical disciplinary specialization at the end of the century and the concomitant loss in the university of an idealist vision of the organic unity of knowledge. Taken as a whole, what emerges is a story of Protestant theology's transformation in the context of the German university––from “a sapiential understanding of ‘God and divine things’” into a body of academic knowledge known through a variety of fragmented disciplines with methods that applied equally to theological and non-theological subjects (228).

Purvis's book is an intellectual history of theology that nevertheless remains attuned to institutional contexts. It situates major theologians and texts in the encyclopedia genre within the shifting German university contexts, elucidated through considerable archival research on the main theologians in his study. As an institutionally attentive intellectual history, it is a welcome companion to works that explore similar questions from more institutional angles, such as Thomas Albert Howard's Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Johannes Wischmeyer's Theologiae Facultas (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), as well as to works that approach these questions more traditionally through close readings of key theological texts, such as Johannes Zachhuber's recent Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2013).

By tackling a large problem––the status of Protestant theology as Wissenschaft in the modern German university––through the more limited genre of theological encyclopedia, Purvis is able to show the evolution of this problem over time while still situating the main actors in their various institutional and intellectual contexts. The book would benefit from even greater contextualization with regard to ecclesial contexts. As Schleiermacher recognized, Protestant theologians in Germany had ties to both the university and the church, and often gained (or failed to gain) their academic appointments at the hands of state ministers who also oversaw the affairs of the Protestant churches. And while Purvis is excellent at showing the entanglement between philosophy and theology in nineteenth-century theological debates, greater attention to the natural sciences in German universities might further illuminate the intellectual contexts in which these theologians grappled with questions of unity and method in their field. Romantic biology in the first half of the century, with its suggestive models of organic unity drawn from nature, and the rising prestige of physics and chemistry as exemplars of academic Wissenschaften later in the century, both likely shaped theologians’ self-understandings as Wissenschaftler. These minor quibbles aside, Purvis convincingly depicts theological encyclopedia as the locus of the tensions that German Protestant theologians experienced as they felt themselves pulled between university and church over the course of the nineteenth century.