Among many contributions Søren Kierkegaard made to the clarification of what Christianity consists of, his critique of attempts made in his own age to adapt Christian faith to the dictates of modernity is surely among the most important, not least because such adaptations remain popular today. This conflict between modernity and Christianity, as Kierkegaard understood it, is the principal focus of Daphne Hampson's superbly written book.

Based on a lifetime of careful study, Hampson's book provides an exposition and critique of eight of Kierkegaard's most widely read works, often siding with modernity against Kierkegaard and against Christian faith. It is this opposition that renders Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique such a valuable resource. Hampson understands well the challenges to Christian faith posed by modernity, as does Kierkegaard, of course, while Kierkegaard presents in reverse the challenge posed by Christian faith to particular assumptions of modernity. Readers of Hampson's book are ably guided into the heart of this conflict and are encouraged to wrestle with the issues at stake.

Hampson describes, at the outset, the intellectual context within which Kierkegaard wrote. Apposite accounts are provided of Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, the three intellectual giants whose work seemed variously to provide in Kierkegaard's day the frameworks of thought to which Christianity must adapt itself in the modern world—if it is to be believed! Other key players are also introduced: G. E. Lessing, D. F. Strauss, and H. L. Martensen, this last being the professor of theology in Copenhagen and the principal advocate in Denmark of the Hegelianism that Kierkegaard considered to be a betrayal of Christian faith. Some knowledge of these figures is indispensable background to the reading of Kierkegaard. As noted by George Steiner, whom Hampson quotes, the reading of Kierkegaard should help us to discriminate between “the God of the philosophers” and the “living God” to whom Scripture bears witness (4). Crucial as well is the Lutheran theological background from which Kierkegaard draws and upon which Hampson sheds welcome light.

Although Hampson is a profoundly appreciative reader of Kierkegaard—her encouragement to grapple with his work found in the opening couple of pages of her book is as good as I have read anywhere—she finds, with respect to some crucial features of his thought, that she cannot go along with him. She contends, for example, that Kierkegaard's response to modernity “is undergirded by a whole epistemology which is quite foreign to how (one must surmise) most of us think today” (2). And further, “Kierkegaard seems to have almost no sense of what I call the fact that there is a causal nexus; that is to say that events are repeatable, that they are one of a type, that there are no interventions” (4). This assumption—let us not too hastily agree that it is a “fact”—creates a real gap, Hampson surmises, between Kierkegaard's ways of thinking and those of most modern Europeans and many North Americans (4), an authority, incidentally, that Kierkegaard would find singularly unimpressive. The implication, clearly drawn by Hampson, is that we cannot any longer believe the Christian claim that in the person of Jesus Christ “a particularity has occurred” (26), a particularity of whom it might be said, following Chalcedon, that he is in two natures fully divine and fully human. Yet, Kierkegaard himself persists with this claim. While Hampson sides with modernity in respect to this and other central claims of Christian faith, the converse possibility is clear: if Chalcedon's confession about Jesus is true, then some fundamental axioms of modernity must be false. This is indeed what Kierkegaard himself contended.

It is interesting to read Hampson's advocacy on behalf of modernity in the light of recent developments in science that challenge the adequacy of Newton's model of a causal nexus within which reality must be understood, or in light of the postmodern recognition that human reason, far from being a neutral arbiter of all truth claims, is profoundly shaped in its operations by a range of personal perspectives, commitments, and beliefs. Kierkegaard may appear, in this light, to be rather ahead of his time. Hampson's fine book provides the reader with an excellent opportunity not only to learn much about Kierkegaard, but also to engage seriously with the dispute.