August Tholuck, Francis Greenwood Peabody, and the Trans-Atlantic Connections in the Social Gospel

Abstract This essay examines the influences of the mid-nineteenth century German theologian August Tholuck on the American Social Gospel, focusing on his connection with the Harvard theologian Francis Greenwood Peabody (1847–1936). Usually, the historiography of the Social Gospel locates it exclusively or almost exclusively in an American context, removing it from its trans-Atlantic dialogue in favor of a narrative of it as a wholly American fin-de-siècle phenomenon. Rather than emphasizing its relative newness or distance from European theology, however, members of the Social Gospel relied on German theology as an authority that could justify their theological and social interventions. Through a ‘case study’ of Peabody and his mentor the German August Tholuck, this essay highlights the theological side of a movement usually discussed mainly in light of its sociological components and highlights a much older tradition of German ‘mediating theology’ that was crucial for how Peabody contributed to a Christian ‘social ethics’ located within the Social Gospel.