Schenkel, DANIEL, a learned and aggressive German theologian, born in Switzerland, at Dägerlen in Zurich, December 21, 1813. He studied at Basel and Göttingen, and had been successively privat-docent at Basel and pastor at Schaffhausen, when in 1849 he became professor of Theology at Basel. In 1851, through the influence of Ullmann and Umbreit, he was called to Heidelberg, where he died, May 19, 1885, shortly after retiring from his chair. Here also he had been both university preacher and Kirchenrath. In his youth almost orthodox and a vigorous antagonist of Swiss radicalism, he became a prominent leader of the famous Protestantverein, a champion of ecclesiastical liberalism and of the rights of the laity. From 1860 to 1872 he edited in its interest the Allgemeine Kirchliche Zeitschrift, and with a yet wider propagandist aim he associated with himself a group of its liberal theologians in the preparation of a great Bibel-Lexikon (5 vols. 1869-75). His most important scientific work was Das Wesen des Protestantismus aus den Quellen des Reformationszeitalters beleuchtet (3 vols. 1846-51), in which he explains Protestantism as a task to be progressively realised rather than a system of doctrine or of church government. Its aim is more than to give a comprehensive scheme of dogma to the church and a key for the interpretation of divine revelation to the individual Christian conscience—it is to create a community of believers whose fellowship rests on the re-establishment of humanity through Jesus Christ. Further, in Der Unionsberuf des evangelischen Protestantismus (1855) he pointed out the substantial identity that underlay the differences between the Lutheran and the Reformed Confessions. His Christliche Dogmatik (2 vols. 1858-59) follows Schleiermacher in making conscience the spring of religion, the intellectual and the moral elements involved being but different aspects of its essence. In his famous book, Das Charakterbild Jesu (1864), he essayed a task for which his powers were inadequate. He attempts to construct the human character of Jesus in relation to his consciousness of the Messianic idea, and entirely eliminates the supernatural, the only miracles admitted—those of healing—being reduced to mere psychological cures. His Jesus is merely a sublimated modern radical reformer, and one over-addicted to rhetoric besides.
Other books of this voluminous writer were Die Kirchliche Frage und ihre Prot. Lösung (1862); Die Grundchren d. Christenthums aus dem Bewusstsein d. Glaubens (1877); a Life of Schleiermacher (1868); Christentum und Kirche (1867); and Das Christusbild der Apostel u. der Nachapostolischen Zeit (1879).