Abstract

Recent historical studies of liberal theology in the Weimar era have called into question the popular thesis of liberal theology's sudden demise and disappearance coincident with the First World War and the publication of Karl Barth's Römerbrief. Historians of this period of theology are rediscovering a vibrant liberal theology active well into the 1920s and even into the 1930s. One of these liberal theologians, Georg Wobbermin, was particularly active in this period, and his work serves as an example of a constructive liberal theology pursued in the midst of dialectical theology's rise to prominence on the German-speaking theological scene. Wobbermin's debates with Barth on theological method, specifically on religious subjectivity, and on the heritage of Luther and Schleiermacher in early twentieth-century theology serve as a case study for testing the theses of the continuity and productivity of liberal theology beyond its supposed demise in 1918. Wobbermin's constructive work on the religio-psychological method and his conscious efforts to continue the Copernican revolutions of Luther, Kant, and Schleiermacher suggest a more complex picture of German-speaking Protestant theology in the Weimar era than most histories of this period have presented.