We are living through a revival of interest in the study of Ferdinand Christian Baur. So, in 2013 Johannes Zachhuber published his Theology as science in nineteenth-century Germany: from F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch, and in 2014 Ferdinand Christian Baur und die Geschichte des frühen Christentums, appeared edited by David Lincicum and others. To add to this pair of important publications we now have Peter C. Hodgson and Robert F. Brown's translation of the second edition of Baur's Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte, with a full introduction by Hodgson himself. This most recent publication is of considerable significance as it is only the third translation into English of a whole work of Baur's (Hodgson himself produced partial translations of bits of Baur's work in 1968), the other two (of his famous volume on Paul, and on the first three centuries of Christian history) appearing in the 1870s.

Insofar as anyone has taken an interest in Baur in the past forty years, at least in the English-speaking world, it is Peter C. Hodgson. His important The formation of historical theology: a study of Ferdinand Christian Baur (New York 1966), which was reprinted in 2007, is a considerable work, which still merits close attention. Hodgson begins his substantial introduction to the book under review by referring to this volume and showing how he now holds Baur to be more of a Hegelian than he had previously thought, and discusses how Baur moved from an interest in Schleiermacher to one in Hegel. He argues that Baur misunderstood the latter (not least in aligning Hegel with Gnostic speculation), though this does not serve, in Hodgson's opinion, to diminish the influence of Hegel upon him. Such an influence is seen essentially in Baur's idea that ‘History exists because God as absolute spirit explicates himself historically: God lives historically, and history is God's triune life ad extra – a process moving through phases of original unity, differentiation, estrangement, and reconciliation.’ Such a view of history involves a need to penetrate to the objectivity of historical events and to search for inner unities and continuities. And yet such a quest for objectivity will always be compromised in some way by a certain subjectivity, a subjectivity which will reflect the age in which the author writes. This means that the history of dogma must itself always incorporate the age in which the author is writing.

Hodgson then produces a helpful summary of Baur's understanding of the different phases of church history: the ancient period running to 604, in which the formulation of Christian religious consciousness is seen in the central doctrines of the Church; the medieval period, seventh through to the fifteenth centuries, marked by a movement to hierarchy and scholasticism; and the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in which faith becomes the most significant factor and in which the battle royal between Catholicism and Protestantism is central. All this becomes clear in Baur's History of dogma, which, although described as a Lehrbuch in the original German title, is much more than a textbook; it demands rigorous engagement.

There is not space to go into the details of Baur's History. The work itself was based upon lectures that Baur gave every two years from 1826 to 1860, and appears in its second edition of 1858 here (Hodgson provides a helpful summary). However, a number of things strike the reader. First, its scope (a necessary feature given Baur's presuppositions but one that also reflects an era in which theologians were much less specialised than they are today). Secondly, its complex and subtle commitment both to a reading of history which takes seriously the view of its objective character, understood in terms of a discernible, spirit-filled process, and the difficulty of discerning that process except subjectively (‘Every age’, Baur notes, ‘has its own views and representations') – Baur's strong opposition to the view, exemplified in the rationalists, that history is a set of random events, that dogma is simply the aggregate of random opinions, strikingly shows his commitment to an objective approach, however difficult that may be. Thirdly, his intriguing periodisation of history. Fourthly, his brilliant discussion of the essence of Protestantism as a kind of subjective inwardness, which only gradually gives voice to the individual freedom which is its assumption; and fifthly his own comments on the era in which he lived, which itself could be seen to constitute the fourth period in his understanding of the history of dogma. While the period running from 1750 to 1815 was a time of revolution, the period between 1815 and 1830 was one of reaction, mediation and synthesis. The period from 1830 onwards, when Baur came of age, is seen as one in which efforts at synthesis seem to be dissolved and the world stands in the shadow of divergent forms of Hegelianism, between which Baur seeks to mediate.

The appearance of this translation is a reminder to us not only of the importance of the nineteenth century in the history of the historiography of ecclesiastical history but also of the complex and intriguing thought of one of its most significant theological historians. Baur emerges in this volume as a strikingly self-aware historian, conscious of the difficulty of his task but insistent upon the need for a history which brought sense to its disiecta membra. His Hegelianism cannot easily be termed of the right or the left, not least because of his insistence on an engaged, if complex, Christology; and it would be difficult, on the basis of what we read here, to think of Hegel's role as straightforwardly distorting. The translators are to be congratulated on a lucid and accessible translation, as is Peter Hodgson for his thoughtful and clear introductory essay. As Hodgson himself makes plain, Baur's history-writing remains highly problematic on a number of grounds (not least its entirely Christian-centred character), but there can be no successful account of nineteenth-century Christian theology without attributing a major role to this highly controverted individual; even if, as Hodgson contends, in the strict sense Baur had no legacy, construed in terms of disciples brandishing the torch of their master.