The Rebirth of Revelation: German Theology in an Age of Reason and History, 1750–1850

“Benes focuses on the period between 1750 and 1850 in the German lands, which boasted some of the most important intellectual minds of the period. They include Lessing, Mendelssohn, Kant, Herder, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. The most intriguing part of Benes’s book, however, is not the responses of these intellectual giants; rather, her approach is. She provides a much broader picture, including the religious struggles that haunted Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish intellectual communities at the time.” Ulrich Groetsch, University of North Alabama, Central European History

"Tuska Benes’s deeply learned and incisively argued study shows us how a host of nineteenth-century German thinkers – Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish – made elaborate, ingenious attempts to reconcile reason and revelation. That by 1905 it was widely acknowledged that this quest had failed, Benes argues, marks a sharper break in the history of ideas than did the Enlightenment. Benes’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in relations between reason and faith in modern Europe."

Suzanne Marchand, Boyd Professor of History, Louisiana State University

"Tuska Benes has written a remarkable book about one of the most momentous periods in German intellectual history. Her grasp of a wide variety of authors – some famous, others almost unknown – is stunning and has allowed her to create a narrative that is both complex and innovative. This book is highly recommended to all those interested in the history of theological and religious thought in modernity."

Johannes Zachhuber, Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology, University of Oxford

"In this groundbreaking study, Tuska Benes gives us a brilliant analysis of what modernity did to our belief in divine revelation. Reborn and redefined by the theologians of the nineteenth century, revelation became the key to thinking in new ways about Scripture, history, society, and what it means to be a human being. Written with amazing clarity and vivacious enthusiasm for ideas, this is not only a superb work of scholarship but also fabulously fun to read!"

Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College, and author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany

"In the face of Enlightenment scepticism, defenders of revelation had to either double down on orthodoxy or reinvent revelation in accordance with the demands of the age. Benes’s important new book tracks a host of German thinkers across many different disciplines and often profoundly different vantage points who chose the latter. Lucidly written, deeply researched, and synthetic in its grasp, The Rebirth of Revelation will be invaluable to anyone interested in the place of religion in the intellectual history of modern Europe."

Warren Breckman, Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania