The German Genius

goal , a goal that was vaguely inherent in the nature of the entity undergoing change.
    Here then is the crucial point: change was accepted in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe, and Germany in particular, but it was expected to have a direction , though no one knew what that direction was or what it entailed. Moreover, the discovery of that direction now lay in activities outside the church.
    Once the principle of change had been accepted, the concept of history also changed (and so too did the understanding of politics, considered later). Until about the middle of the eighteenth century, the normal stance for German historians was similar to that of Sigmund Baumgarten, who argued that history’s main purpose was to confirm man’s impotence in the face of God’s will—in other words to show that history underlined the veracity of Christianity. 3 In 1726, the Halle-trained historian and jurist Johann David Köhler announced that “the best chronologists date the beginning of the world on the 26th of October in the year 1657 before the Flood and 3,947 years before Christ’s birth. To be sure,” he continued, “the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans, as well as the modern Chinese, make the world many thousands of years older, but Holy Scripture is more believable than all other books of heathen fables founded on the ancients’ search for fame.” 4
    By 1760, however, a definite shift was discernible. Instead of using history to confirm specific Christian episodes, these thinkers (known in Germany as Neologists) attempted to steer a path between orthodox, deist, and Pietist beliefs. The Neologists did not deny the importance of dogma, but nor did they accept that it was universally valid. For example, they felt able to surrender Christian chronology without rejecting the rest of Christianity, and this was an important milestone in the development of doubt. 5 The German Neologists argued that the Bible should be understood as a collection of books written at different times and in response to different circumstances. They took what we might regard as an anthropological approach: they accepted that God’s commands were transmitted in these books, but they also conceded that the transmission was carried out by human agents who were responding to specific circumstances. The importance of the books lay in the fact that they always expressed a moral law, but the message was dressed in what Johann Salomo Semler called a “local” or “provincial” dialect. On this reckoning, it would have been inappropriate “for God to have his message transmitted in Newtonian language at a time when that language would have been totally incomprehensible.” Similarly, it would be equally anachronistic for someone living in the eighteenth century to accept that the world was created in six days just because “this was the way a primitive nomadic people grasped and expressed God’s majesty.” 6
    Johann David Michaelis expanded this view. He argued that the way in which the ancient Israelites had transmitted their sacred knowledge was very different from that of eighteenth-century Europeans. Chronology, he insisted, was relatively unimportant to the Israelites of the Mosaic era. Instead, Moses provided his people with a selective genealogy, recording “only those events that had meaning in the memory of his people and revealed God’s message.” The rest was unimportant. 7 Moreover, given that the Bible was a collection of books compiled by single individuals, who lived at different times and places, it was only natural that contradictions would occur. With this bold move, the Neologists overturned the assault on Holy Scripture by asserting that the contradictions in the text actually confirmed its validity.
    This new view enabled imaginative scholars to suggest a fresh understanding of chronology. Johann Christoph Gatterer, for example, related the age of the people in the Bible to the Fall of man. Man’s life span during the biblical chronology, he observed, was divided into six levels, in the course of which life span declined from an average of 900–969 years (until the Flood), to 600 years, 450 years, 239 years (building the Tower of Babel), 120 years (the Mosaic era), to 70–80 years (since David’s time). Gatterer explained the change in life spans against the background of a hypothetical natural history. According to this, the earth—created perfect by God—took some time after Adam’s original