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Book Review: Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity

intellectual, cultural, social, and political matrix at the intersection of the Enlightenment and Romanticism in Berlin during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While stressing that neither movement is monolithic, Crouter depicts Schleiermacher as a towering intellectual figure and agent for religious and social reform who combined both strands in his thinking and writing. Whereas the Enlightenment stood for rationality and "the demand to produce strictly rational explanations of the human and scientific worlds," Romanticism pioneered "a mode of rationality that sought to acknowledge fully the dimensions of unknowability and contingency within human experience" (p. 8). According to Crouter, Schleiermacher cannot be adequately understood if either side of his dual legacy is minimized. The essays are divided into three parts under three rubrics: "Taking the Measure of Schleiermacher," "Signposts of a Public Theologian," and "Textual Readings and Milestones." Under the first rubric, we find essays that explore Schleiermacher's relations to Moses Mendelssohn, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, as well as one essay that weighs Dudley's insistence that Schleiermacher's ideas can only be grasped historically and biographically. Essays in the second part address Schleiermacher's stance in society, such as his proposal that Jews should be granted political and civic equality without having to convert to Christianity, his formative role in the creation of a new university in Berlin, and the criticism that Schleiermacher's theology is captive to bourgeois culture (a position that Crouter disputes). In the third part, Crouter offers us close studies of Schleiermacher's texts on religion, theological education, and theology, including one essay that asks larger hermeneutical questions about his influence in the last two centuries. There are very few interpreters of Schleiermacher who combine meticulous historical scholarship and careful exegesis of texts with a view toward raising really important questions about the relations of religion and theology to modernity. Crouter is one of those interpreters. He is blessed with a gift for clear, elegant prose. Anyone wishing to find a completely reliable guide to Schleiermacher's achievement cannot afford to pass by this book. Crouter deserves highest praise for setting the historical record straight as well as opening up new vistas of interpretation for students of modern theology.