In early college days (1970s) I stumbled on a little book by Colin Brown called Philosophy and the Christian Faith. For the first time I began to see Western thought as a coherent whole and how the Christian faith related to the wider intellectual world. Gary Dorrien's Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit is a much longer and more technical book. But for those with the background and stamina to stay with it, it has similar potential for bringing clarity and comprehensiveness to one's understanding of (some modern forms of) Christian theology in modern times in the West.

There is a significant difference between Brown's book and Dorrien's. While the former took historic confessional Christianity as its lodestar for narrating the history of thought, Dorrien is an apologist for the “modern theology” of his book's subtitle. Brown helped situate historic Christianity vis-à-vis non-Christian thought currents; Dorrien argues that the Enlightenment rendered historic Christianity passé. It was and remains superseded by a religion (the liberal idealist tradition) for which not the God of Scripture but certain key philosophical thinkers are the supreme authority. Hence reference to Kant and Hegel in the title, with Schelling and Schleiermacher also looming large, for “modern theology operates in the shadow of” these four thinkers (p. 567). Dozens of other major figures factor in as well, as a quick survey of the book's ten chapters shows.

Chapter 1 (pp. 1-22) is relatively short and sets the stage: “Introduction: Kantian Concepts, Liberal Theology, and Post-Kantian Idealism.” It shows that Kant's idealist philosophy and reactions to it are the foundation of mainline Western Protestantism. Dorrien calls this “modern theology,” as if everybody affirms it, but he makes it clear that he is not talking about historic Catholic belief (p. 3), and he glosses “modern theology” with “what came to be called 'liberal' theology in Germany and 'modernist' theology in Great Britain” (p. 1). To explain further: until the eighteenth century, Christian theology reflected biblical and ecclesial authority. There had to be affirmation of “specific points of doctrine if one was to claim the Christian name” (p. 2). (Actually, this is still the case in most forms of Christianity around the world, but Dorrien writes as if doctrinal definition is a thing of the past because for him “modern theology,” which affects to reject such definition, reigns supreme above all other forms and expressions.) The historic conception of the Christian faith was swept away by “the later Enlightenment [i.e., after Hume], biblical criticism, the liberalizing of German universities, Kant, an upsurge of Romantic and Absolute idealism, and Schleiermacher's determination to liberalize Christian theology within the context of the Christian church and tradition” (p. 3). Chapter 1, then, lays the groundwork for Dorrien to tell the story of how every serious construal of modern theology “from Schleiermacher to Hegel, to Kierkegaard and David Friedrich Strauss, to Ritschland Troeltsch, to Rashdall and Temple, to Tillich and Barth got its bearings by figuring its relationship to Kantian and post-Kantian ideas” (p. 11).

Chapter 2 (“Subjectivity in Question: Immanuel Kant, Johann G. Fichte, and Critical Idealism,” pp. 23-83) is largely an exposition of Kant's views as they unfolded over the decades and then began to be developed by others. The chapter concludes dramatically with a hint at how Schleiermacher received Kant but took his thought in a different direction at a key point (p. 74).

Chapter 3 (“Making Sense of Religion: Friedrich Schleiermacher, John Locke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Liberal Theology,” pp. 84-158) tells the story of the outworking of Kant's idealism in Schleiermacher and Coleridge, who “had the Schleiermacher role in British theology” (p. 84). John Locke comes into the picture as the dominant British thinker whose legacy Coleridge had to confront and overcome. Not to be missed in this chapter is, for example, the catalog of criticisms of Schleiermacher by his contemporaries (p. 103). Nevertheless, Dorrien is in Schleiermacher's corner, deftly exonerates him, and in the end credits him with sounding “the keynotes of the first full-orbed liberal theology, which surpassed in influence all the liberal theologies that followed it, and which eventually was recognized as the quintessential liberal theology, long after Schleiermacher was gone” (p. 105). Coleridge proved to be “the Luther of Broad Church Anglicanism” (p. 145), which is to say, the conduit through which liberalism began its rise to dominance on the late Victorian British scene.

Chapter 4 (“Dialectics of Spirit: F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and Absolute Idealism,” pp. 159-242) is the longest of the book. Dorrien calls Hegel “the greatest philosopher of the modern experience” (p. 159), stresses the religious cast of his thought, and shows how Hegel was received (or not) or adapted by Schleiermacher and Schelling. Hegel offered “a panentheistic conception of the divine as the unification of nature and freedom, finite and infinite, and universal and particular” (p. 160). Dorrien avers that Hegel is at the root of almost all the great more recent philosophies (he mentions those of Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Bradley, Troeltsch, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Žižek) and schools (he mentions existentialism, psychoanalysis, absolute idealism, historicism, phenomenology, process, structuralism, and deconstructionism) of generations since his time. This chapter is key to explaining why Hegel belongs next to Kant in the book's title from Dorrien's point of view.

Chapter 5 (“Hegelian Spirit in Question: David Friedrich Strauss, Søren Kierkegaard, and Mediating Theology,” pp. 243-314) plots out ripples and reactions brought forth in response to Hegel. Strauss gets credit for paving the way for “theologies that let go of philosophy in the name of sacred history” (p. 260)-that is, theologies that speak of redemptive story without the rational justification that a philosophical system might provide. Kierkegaard in his anti-Hegelianism pays tribute to the advance and influence of outlooks Hegel set in motion. This chapter epitomizes a device Dorrien uses frequently to sustain his thesis: if a thinker (like Strauss) appropriates Hegel (or anyone else Dorrien affirms), then that is evidence for the authority of Hegel's ideas. If a thinker reacts against Hegel (cf. Kierkegaard), that is still evidence for Hegel's authority since he won out in the places Dorrien thinks ultimately matter, bolstered by the added status of having outdone the reactive thinker. I have never heard reference to “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose-historiography,” but the term could be out there. Otherwise, perhaps there is room for creation of the rubric.

In chapter 6 (“Neo-Kantian Historicism: Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Hermann, Ernst Troeltsch, and the Ritschlian School,” pp. 315-77), Dorrien shows that “Ritschlian theology was as idealistic as the Mediating and Hegelian traditions that it spurned” (p. 316; there's that device again: both Hegel and his detractors contribute to the legacy of his idealism). Since the main players in this chapter exerted great influence on twentieth-century German theological and biblical studies, this is one of the most important chapters for those engaged in those fields today. Ritschl rises to importance in eventually acrimonious debate with his father-in-law, F. C. Baur; Ritschlian liberalism becomes normative mainline Protestant thought in Germany and among many intellectuals in North America; and Troeltsch turns out to be the most important figure in the making of modern theology after Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher (p. 366).

Chapter 7 (“Idealistic Ordering: Lux Mundi, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Hastings Rashdall, Alfred E. Garvie, Alfred North Whitehead, William Temple, and British Idealism,” pp. 378-453) recounts some of the means by which idealist and liberal impulses from Germany made their way into Britain. The section “Liberal Evangelicalism: Alfred E. Garvey” (pp. 408-415) may be of special interest to Themelios readers; the whole chapter helps explain the many shifts from the confessional world of Westcott-Hort-Lightfoot to the post-World War II British scene where British doctrinal convictions had given way to the same impulses Dorrien documents in nineteenth-century Germany.

Chapter 8 (“The Barthian Revolt: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and the Legacy of Liberal Theology,” pp. 454-529) describes “the major event of twentieth-century theology,” which was the “postwar explosion” (meaning after World War I) of “the Barthian overthrow of the liberal establishment” (p. 454). Yet Tillich's theology turned out to be liberal, as was the theology of the “neo-orthodox” Rudolf Bultmann, and Barth himself by reacting so much to liberalism while being steeped in it educationally and professionally essentially replicated a truncated form of it. Yes, he was a revelational positivist (pp. 514), abhorrent to the liberal outlook. But as Dorrien shows in the next chapter, Barth “worked out a dialectical approach . . . that gave the upper hand to realism,” and “his dialecticism and open-ended pluralism played out in ways that prefigured postmodern criticism and fluidity” (p. 562). In many ways this chapter shows the liberal Dorrien saying, “Bye-bye, Barth!” (see also pp. 562-67) because he accepts little of what Barth in his reaction to liberalism sought to advance. But Dorrien also alleges close ties between Barth and idealists like Hegel, Hermann, and Kant (see, e.g., p. 499). In other words, where Barth affirms what Dorrien does, he was on the right track, even if only because he unwittingly implicated himself in idealism. Where he doesn't, he erred.

The irony of this anti-liberal-yet-still-idealist Barth is expanded to give the theme to the entire final chapter, “Idealistic Ironies: From Kant to Hegel to Tillich and Barth” (pp. 530-73). In a way this summarizes the book. But it also extends and seeks to clinch its key assertions. It is a rich and complex denouement of all that precedes. In a meandering and often oblique way, Dorrien commends the liberal legacy he has described in its current forms “where everything is relative because everything is related” (p. 567; does relationship necessitate relativity?). Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher remain the fathers of the “modern theology” that operates in their shadows.

This book is important because of its sweep and depth. Dorrien is a skilled storyteller with a nose for decisive detail. His accounts of most thinkers are rich in biographical features. It can be hard to remember or distinguish between the ideas of so many people holding such closely related ideas. But Dorrien's presentations of Kant, or John Locke, or Ritschl, in their respective upbringings and personality quirks and struggles, leave lasting impressions. For intellectual history in this general area, it is one of the more readable and memorable books I can recall.

The book could be improved editorially by more careful attention to German orthography. I found numerous typos without looking for them. And not just in German: on p. 483 we read that Barth called for theology based on “the World of God alone.” Surely that should be “Word.” I also wished for more careful or complete indexing. Too many names from works mentioned in endnotes do not appear in the index. Adolf Schlatter appears in the text (p. 455) but is not indexed. J. C. K. von Hofmann appears in the index, but the wrong page is given (should be p. 108; Hofmann's positive role in promoting Schleiermacher may be questioned). We can access Charlotte von Kirschbaum in the index if we look for her under “Von” (Adolf von Harnack, however, is found under “Harnack”). But if we are looking for Susanne Selinger's important work on von Kirschbaum and Barth, we will have to pick through the endnotes (see p. 522n100), for “Selinger” is absent from the index.

The book concludes speaking of irony but also embodies one: Dorrien's story substantially omits mention of the other simultaneous “story” that has unfolded alongside the one he tells. This alternate story is at least two-fold.

First, if the Enlightenment was as Dorrien affirms a revolution against historic Christian faith, there has also been a robust counter-revolution all along. In general Dorrien has little to say about this, affirming its existence only in the merest passing (e.g., when he speaks of the confessional convictions of the fathers of Ritchl [p. 316] or Harnack [p. 322] or Barth [pp. 454-455]). But Dorrien is writing history from the point of view of the victors (liberals, in his telling) at its best. And they still hold key aces in Western domains, so his narrative will resonate in influential quarters. Yet socially the mainline constituency has fallen from ca. 25% of the US population around 1950 to ca. 12% today. Numbers in pretty much all Western mainline denominations have been falling for decades. Today European liberal Protestantism in the “modern theology” mode Dorrien promotes is a feeble facsimile of its former self. Dorrien writes as if mainline theology were uniform, sacrosanct in its hegemony, and floating above social and ecclesial vicissitudes in enduring importance. Hardly. In Germany, in Britain, in North America-there have been many capable persons, significant institutions, and influential movements responding to the Enlightenment challenge by proposing alternative syntheses, whether doctrinal or intellectual or some combination of both. None is allowed telling voice against Dorrien's triumphant “modern theology.” That is fair enough; it is his book. But readers should be aware of the larger story they are not being told, which may turn out to be at least as significant for world history, the church, and Christian thought more broadly conceived as the narrow one Dorrien skillfully narrates. For in the same “modern” timeframe as liberal idealism, there have been other significant conceptualizations, articulations, and applications of Christian theology in academic, ecclesial, and missiological domains. They were evidently critical of or non-compliant toward Enlightenment dicta in ways Dorrien does not approve and so does not give much credence to. Yet in terms of the calendar, for what that is worth, they were and are “modern” too.

Second, internationally the church has exploded in numbers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during much of the latter period Dorrien describes. Again, his book is silent on this. He could answer that the book is about “the idealistic logic of modern theology,” not the exponential growth of “new faces” in Christianity as a result of “believing the Bible in the global South” (see Phillip Jenkins's 2006 book containing those words in its title). Still, what Dorrien treats as self-justifying, inexorable, and hegemonic could as readily be described as arbitrary, fortuitous, and at the current time fragmenting. The irony here is that his story upholds a view of God and the Bible that was post-Christian, indeed anti-Christian, from the start by historic standards. Dorrien's aim, in part, is to show how right that movement has been, and how wrong Barth (and those favoring him today?) was in thinking he could out-innovate the great prophets and apostles of the Enlightenment, their disciples, and the neo-churches they remade in their image and have dominated for generations. Meanwhile, another much larger church has arisen, charismatic or evangelical or both in character, Bible-centered in outlook, largely uninterested in and indeed skeptical of the god-of-some-German-philosophers during the era Dorrien describes.

Perhaps we might indulge here in a little postmodern playfulness. If we think of major Christian groupings worldwide today in Mount Carmel terms (see 1 Kgs 18), where some (or at least one) were prophets of Yahweh and many were not, one wonders who Kant and Hegel (Dorrien's greatest prophets) might correspond to. In Dorrien's telling, they led the way into “modern theology” and have truth, such as it is after modernism and under current postmodernisms, on their side. So the “modern theology” salvation-historical heritage (with many gaps) follows this sequence: Elijah-John the Baptist-Jesus . . . [major modulation for Enlightenment] … Kant and Hegel et al. The prophets of Baal, for “modern theology,” would be (the anti-liberal) Barth and his followers. Entirely off the grid it seems would be the world-wide charismatic and evangelical movements that have been sweeping across continents for decades.

An alternative assessment is one sketched most succinctly, perhaps, by Machen in Christianity and Liberalism. Or one might think of Kant scholar Heinz Cassirer's take on Kant in Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets. When Kant and Hegel and others consciously turned aside from classic Christian conceptions and doctrines as they felt constrained to do, they were not filling old forms with better ones but with alien ones. Naturally they were necessary ones in retrospect from the standpoint of reigning academic philosophies. But one can reasonably assert, from a Christian viewpoint, that Christ and Scripture as historically known and confessed furnish the norm for Christian faith-thought-life, not philosophers who have declared independence from the faith's foundational assertions to start with. Salvation history going back to Elijah does not find its fulfillment in Kant and Hegel.

Dorrien's book-which I cannot avoid calling brilliant-will hold the same enduring place in giving an historical justification for his “modern theology” that Barth's Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century holds in setting the table for Barth's dogmatics. Time will tell whether the future belongs to Dorrien's theology, Barth's (in historical or repristinated form), or some other. Also decisive may be whether a paperback edition appears, making this pricey volume more affordable for a wider range of readers.

---