Physicalist soteriology is a scholarly category created by the nineteenth-century German liberal Protestants. Because they immediately connected physicalism with heterodoxy, subsequent scholars have – through methodologically untenable approaches – frequently rejected physicalism as a logic that has no historical existence. A review of scholarship on physicalist soteriology – within development of doctrine studies, studies of individual early Christian authors, and deification studies – reveals that physicalist soteriology has been subsumed into other scholarly projects and has rarely been the direct subject of scholarly study. The six major early Christian proponents of physicalist soteriology, namely Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor, are introduced.

This chapter is dedicated to the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), an era that saw the apex of German imperial expansionism. It was a period ripe with numerous intersecting visions of supersessionism, expansion, and domination. A major challenge for Baeck was Adolf Harnack’s turn-of-the-century popular lectures and subsequent book titled The Essence of Christianity. Harnack presented a pure and positive essence of Christianity against a legalistic and negative Jewish tradition. Baeck’s first major work, The Essence of Judaism (1905) responds to Harnack and subsequent challenges from the History of Religions School. Yet this type of response was shaped by the heydays of German imperialism, both abroad and in the attempts to colonize the former Polish territories. This is a formative phase for Baeck’s thought and many of his ideas, including the distinction between state power (Macht) and spiritual energy (Kraft), his views on Jewish missionizing, as well as his relation to Zionism. All these emerge in this period and continue to play a role in his thought throughout his life.

This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.