A. E. Biedermann and the liturgy debate in mid-nineteenth century Zurich: A test case of the role of a Christian theologian

My dissertation lies at the interstices of historical theology and the history of religions. In the mid-nineteenth century a liberal government took control of the Canton (State) of Zurich. Their platform of reform included politics, economics, education, and religion. I argue that an altered sense of history's dynamics lies beneath all these changes. The power to act as a historically significant agent comes to be seen as located broadly across the wider community. Such a change requires, for example, a representative democracy rather than an aristocratic oligarchy.;The government's religious reform consisted of calling the Young-Hegelian A. E. Biedermann to the University, and of asking the Synod to adopt a new liturgy. Biedermann argues, over-against his orthodox colleagues, that the significance of Jesus is not that humans are saved on his behalf, but that Jesus makes possible the knowledge that all humans (as finite spirits) are united with God (absolute spirit) in essentially the same way that he is. Jesus acted in history in a way open to all human agents.;Recent work in ritual theory argues that ritual constructs an environment that comes to be taken for granted as 'the way things are' by the participants. This suggests that the government was savvy to introduce a new liturgy. I focus on baptism, the rite of initiation into the civic as well as religious life in Zurich. I lay out the 'grammar' of this ritual in detail, and classify the various sentences uttered in the course of baptism using recent work in speech act theory. Once again the issue at stake is the view of history's dynamics. Embedded within the baptism ceremony is a view of the kind of action it is possible for Jesus, as a historical actor, to take in instituting the ceremony. The view of Jesus' role implicit in the revised ceremony of baptism is compatible with the view of Jesus found in Biedermann's christology.