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God's Own Story? G erman Theology and Its Nineteenth‐Century Readers
Author(s) -
LedgerLomas Michael
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
reviews in religion and theology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1467-9418
pISSN - 1350-7303
DOI - 10.1111/rirt.12399
Subject(s) - german , subject matter , argument (complex analysis) , character (mathematics) , humanity , subject (documents) , philosophy , epistemology , absolute (philosophy) , theology , literature , law , political science , art , linguistics , biochemistry , chemistry , geometry , mathematics , library science , computer science , curriculum
This review essay discusses two recent monographs on nineteenth‐century G erman theology and its transnational reception. The books under review assess attempts by G erman theologians to present their discipline as a science, which required them to present its subject matter as at once purely historical and of absolute significance for humanity. The result was an attractive but inherently unstable discipline, which oscillated between idealist and critical objectives and historical and systematic modes of argument. Its reception in the U nited S tates demonstrates both its multifaceted character, which appealed to theologians from a range of traditions, and also the way in which engagement with Germany offered theologians a means of modernizing and sometimes challenging the doctrinal assumptions and scholarly methods of those traditions.