D A AT: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah 88 (2019), pp. 11-32 Alexandra Zirkle Biblical Hermeneutics: Between Wissenschaft and Religion Exegesis and the Shape of Nineteenth-Century German Teology The queen of the sciences found her sovereignty in universities across the German lands severely challenged by the end of the eighteenth century. Thinkers including Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher proposed that the theological faculty should be excised from the university’s medieval quadrivium of theology, law, medicine, and philosophy or subsumed within the “lower” philosophical faculty. 1 Critics argued that theological faculties remained myopically focused on confessional minutia, thereby dragging out the Wars of Religion, or were mired in intellectual torpor, unwilling or unable to engage new scholarship which posed vital challenges to the methods and canon of theological studies. When the Napoleonic wars wreaked havoc on Germany’s universities, the subsequent era of rebuilding forced the question of whether and in what form the faculty of theology merited a place in the restored and newly established universities. Early nineteenth-century theological faculties were commonly organized into four disciplines: exegetical theology, historical theology, practical theology, and dogmatic theology. 2 Schleiermacher’s brief theological encyclopedia, 3 the Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums 1 Tomas Albert Howard, Protestant Teology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Zachary Purvis, Teology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2 On the diverse ways that leading Protestant theological faculties were confgured, see Johannes Wischmeyer, Teologiae Facultas. Rahmenbedingungen, Akteure und Wissenschaftsorganisation protestantischer Universitätstheologie in Tubingen, Jena, Erlangen und Berlin 1850–1870 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008). 3 Unlike the genre of encyclopedia which catalogs aggregated information, the theological encyclopedia introduced students to how theology was (or should) be organized as an academic discipline. Teological encyclopedias detailed the scope and methods of theology’s sub-felds and often included bibliographies which sketched a theological student’s course of study. Tomas Albert Howard, “Te Rise and Fall of the ‘Teological Encyclopedia,’” Protestant Teology and the Making of the Modern German University, pp. 303-323 and Zachary Purvis, “Institutions and Reforms,” Teology and the University, pp. 38-65.