Through various realignments beginning in the Revolutionary era and continuing across the nineteenth century, Christianity not only endured as a vital intellectual tradition but also contributed importantly to a wide variety of significant conversations, movements, and social transformations across the diverse spheres of intellectual, cultural, and social history. The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought proposes new readings of the diverse sites and variegated role of the Christian intellectual tradition across what has come to be called 'the long nineteenth century'. It represents the first comprehensive examination of a picture emerging from the twin recognition of Christianity's abiding intellectual influence and its radical transformation and diversification under the influence of the forces of modernity.
Part one investigates changing paradigms that determine the evolving approaches to religious matters during the nineteenth century, providing readers with a sense of the fundamental changes at the time. Section two considers human nature and the nature of religion. It explores a range of categories rising to prominence in the course of the nineteenth century, and influencing the way religion in general, and Christianity in particular, were conceived. Part three focuses on the intellectual, cultural, and social developments of the time, while part four looks at Christianity and the arts-a major area in which Christian ideas, stories, and images were used, adapted, and challenged during the nineteenth century. Christianity was radically pluralized in the nineteenth century, and the fifth section is dedicated to 'Christianity and Christianities'. The chapters sketch the major churches and confessions during the period. The final part considers doctrinal themes registering the wealth and scope through broad narrative and individual example. This authoritative reference work offers an indispensable overview of a period whose forceful ideas continue to be present in contemporary theology.
Joel D. S. Rasmussen is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University and a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He is the author of Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard's Poetics of Faith, Hope, and Love (T&T Clark, 2005); and co-editor of William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2014) and of Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks (Princeton University Press, 2007-).
Judith Wolfe studied literature and philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and first literature and then philosophical theology at Oxford. She has taught in Berlin and Oxford, and is now Senior Lecturer in Theology & the Arts at the University of St Andrews. Her publications include
Heidegger's Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger's Early Work (Oxford University Press, 2013) and
Heidegger and Theology (T&T Clark, 2014). Dr Wolfe has edited a number of volumes on C. S. Lewis, and published articles on other themes in eschatology and nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy and literature.
Johannes Zachhuber studied theology in Rostock, Berlin, and Oxford where he earned his DPhil in 1997. Following a time as Assistant and Junior Professor in Berlin, he has taught at the University of Oxford since 2005. He is the Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology and a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He is the author of
Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford University Press, 2013) and
Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa (Brill, 1999), as well as numerous articles principally in the areas of late ancient Christianity and nineteenth-century theology.
