God and Caesar

H. Richard Niebuhr's interpretation of Ernst Troeltsch

Troeltsch is one of the most respected and renowned figures in liberal Protestant thought. Yet as Harvard philosopher of religion Cornel West observes in his foreword, Constance Benson shatters certain crucial aspects of Troeltsch's image as a liberal religious thinker with God and Caesar.

Benson's reconstruction and reinterpretation

Benson reconstructs the historical context in which Troeltsch wrote his landmark The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches and reinterprets it in relation to that context. She shows that Troeltsch's Christianity legitimized class, religious, and gender inequality in response to the challenges of social democracy. Her controversial exploration of why most Troeltsch scholars have remained silent on this deserves serious consideration. Her discovery of Troeltsch's role in the politics and ideological debates of Imperial Germany require a painful reexamination of an entire chapter of Protestant history. Benson exposes Troeltsch's relationship to Paul de Lagarde, a notorious anti-Semite and architect of what later became Nazi ideology.

The need for a corrective

God and Caesar is a needed corrective. Troeltsch is an important figure for the Christian right in Germany and for many mainstream Protestants in the United States. Benson's courageous book is the most challenging critique of Troeltsch's politics we have—an unsettling perspective that forces us to revise the beloved Troeltsch so many of us had come to admire and cherish. It will be of interest to intellectual historians, theologians and students of religious history, and specialists in German social and political history.