Max Bernhard Weinstein was a man after my own heart. A nineteenth-into-twentieth century scientist (a
physicist who taught at the
University of Berlin), in his later years he became an examiner of
theology, turning (though never entirely) from writing books on physics to writing books on the
history and
development of
religion. He teased out connections between lines of theological thought spanning centuries. And, naturally, he wrote about
Pandeism -- in more depth than most authors who had come before. He was even criticized for this by contemporary reviewers. He often wrote in long unbroken sentences, stuffed full of clauses and lengthy descriptions, and within these passages he unapologetically
wordified, smashing together existing terms to forge a new one necessary for his purposes. He was happy inserting sudden bouts of ancient religious
poetry into his works. They often proved his points more finely than any
prose would have sufficed to.
Probably a greater claim to fame for him, historically, was his opposition to
Albert Einstein’s
General Theory of Relativity. It is easy today to look back on this as a folly,
history having since sanctified Einstein, but it is never folly to be meticulous in challenging new scientific
hypotheses. At the time Einstein worked out his
equations, some of their proposed
consequences were unproven, and seemed unprovable. And Weinstein was not the only doubter of Einstein’s conclusions -- simply perhaps the first and one of the more biting in his
criticisms. It wasn’t until a year after Weinstein’s death that Sirs
Frank Watson Dyson and
Arthur Eddington would confirm Einstein’s predictions of the effect of
gravitational light-bending during an
eclipse, and it was many years more than that before the technology even existed to measure whether, as Einstein proposed,
gravity would bend
starlight reaching Earth from the other end of the
galaxy.
Today, March 25, 2018, marks the 100th anniversary of Weinstein’s death. In commemoration thereof, an effort has been set underway to complete the first-ever
German-to-
English translation of his seminal theological work,
Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis'' ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature"), and so perhaps Weinstein’s
rehabilitation for the masses is in the offing.