The 19th century saw tremendous changes in Europe, America, and the world. The relatively settled effects of the two great revolutions, the American- in some respects a continuation of the British Civil War- and the French, which installed godless nationalism for the first time in European history, had begun to be clear. And Napoleon, who undid much of the extremist character of the French Revolution, also abolished the Holy Roman Empire, which by that time had become largely symbolic, but whose loss was nevertheless felt acutely in the European mind- perhaps all the more so, precisely because it was more a symbol than a political power. The many and divergent opinions which went under the name “Enlightenment” had begun to develop into new and very distinct schools, and throughout the Germanies and England, a response to these began to arise; a response which had some the best aspects of the Enlightenment in its very makeup, and which would be called, in time, Romanticism. Print media became cheaper and more available, and transportation developed new range and power, and advanced financial systems had begun to integrate markets and commerce, all of these things bringing the Western nations into closer interdependence and similarity. Above all, what seems to us to be a fairly constant trait of Christian sages writing in the 19th c is the character of standing contra mundum: they are writing against the age. Thus, although we feel it best to stay away from facile timeline categories and abstract history-of-ideas categories in our arrangement of resourcement materials, for now, we will organize the presentation of the 19th c writers we consider simply by their century, that century with which most of them were so uneasy.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Frederick Denison Maurice
- Friedrich Julius Stahl
- Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig
- Soren Kierkegaard
- Franz Delitzsch
- William Augustus Muhlenberg
- Philip Schaff
- John Williamson Nevin
- William Shedd
- Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck
- Rudolph Sohm
- Charles and AA Hodge
- Abraham Kuyper
- Herman Bavinck
- Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield