Karl Friedrich August Kahnis

From a poor background, Kahnis was educated at the gymnasium of his native town Greiz, and after acting as private tutor for several years began the study of theology at Halle. He was at first an ardent Hegelian, but he passed to orthodox Lutheranism. The transition may be dated from the publication of his Dr. Ruge und Hegel: Ein Beitrag zur Würdigung Hegelscher Tendenzen (Quedlinburg, 1838).

At the invitation of Hengstenberg, Kahnis went in 1840 to Berlin, where he studied under August Neander, Marheineke, Twesten, and others. To August Tholuck's Litterarischer Anzeiger für christliche Theologie he contributed a criticism of David Strauss, which appeared in expanded form under the title Die moderne Wissenschaft des Dr. Strauss und der Glaube unserer Kirche (Berlin, 1842). In 1842 he became privat-docent and then spent two years in close relationship with Neander, Henrik Steffens, and the circle of romanticists who gathered about Ludwig von Gerlach.

In 1844 he was called to Breslau as professor extraordinary to represent the orthodox party in a rationalistic faculty, but in his inaugural speech De Spiritus Sancti persona he departed from the accepted doctrine of Trinitarianism, ranking the Son as subordinate to the Father, and assigning the last place to the Holy Spirit, which he described as the impersonal principle of life, binding together the other two. Hampered by the lack of harmony between himself and his colleagues, he devoted himself to investigation in theology, the first results being his Lehre vom heiligen Geiste (Halle, 1847).

After the revolution of 1848, in which Kahnis supported the king and the established order, he came to believe that the safest defense against irreligion was in rigid orthodoxy, and gradually drifted into an attitude of opposition to the Union (the consolidation of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia effected by a royal decree in 1817).^[1] Convinced that the Lutheran confession possessed neither a logical nor a legal basis under the Union, he joined the old Lutheran party in November 1848, a step making his academic activity at Breslau still more difficult. In 1850, therefore, he accepted a call to Leipzig, where he succeeded Gottlieb Christoph Adolf von Harless in the chair of dogmatics, to which he later united that of church history. In the following year the University of Erlangen gave him the degree of D.D., and he acknowledged this honor by his Lehre vom Abendmahle (Leipzig, 1851), a formulation of the type of Lutheranism taught at Erlangen. He would have accepted a call to Erlangen in 1856 had not the authorities promised to fill the first vacancy in the faculty by a theologian in agreement with his own views. In the same year, Christoph Ernst Luthardt was called from Marburg, and he and Kahnis, together with Franz Delitzsch, who came to Leipsic from Erlangen in 1867, constituted a triumvirate in theology.

In addition to his academic duties, Kahnis from 1851 to 1857 was a member of the board of missions, from 1853 to 1857 edited the Sächsische Kirchen- und Schulblatt, and from 1866 to 1875 was one of the editors of Niedner's Zeitschrift für historische Theologie. At Leipzig in 1854 he published Der innere Gang des deutschen Protestantismus seit Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts,^[2] expanded in the second edition (1860) to include the period from the Reformation.

The same years witnessed a literary controversy with Karl Immanuel Nitzsch over the question of the Union and confessional latitudinarianism, a controversy in which Kahnis sought to demonstrate the lack of doctrinal unity prevailing among the supporters of the movement.