This is another important addition to the Oxford Handbook series that will be an essential companion for anyone seeking to understand theology's engagement with continental philosophy in the modern period. The editors have long laboured on theology's borderlands with modern philosophy and are thus naturally sensitive to the ambiguities inherent in the terms ‘European’, ‘theology’ and ‘modern’. These are cautiously explored in the introduction, where it is made clear that the handbook primarily seeks neither to trace the influence of modern European thought on theology nor to evince how the theological underlies the secular. Instead, taking dialogue as its theme, this book detects ‘those questions and issues to have been common to and formative of both theology and modern thought’, while seeking ‘to avoid reducing the subject matter to one-sidedly theological or secular philosophical views’ (p. 14). The ambiguities and aporia inherent in such a project are proudly presented as opportunities rather than dangers and, true to the aim of the editors, there is no easily discernible narrative or theological agenda beyond that of exploring the boundaries.

Rather, the thirty-one articles that make up the handbook are divided into six sections that cover an array of interests and methodological approaches: ‘Identity’; ‘The human condition’; ‘The age of revolution’; ‘The world’; ‘Ways of knowing’; and ‘Theology’. There are contributions from well-established voices such as Paul Fiddes (writing on ‘Suffering’), Stanley Hauerwas (on ‘War and peace’), David Brown (on ‘Sacramentality’), and Werner Jeanrond (on ‘Love’); and the editors also contribute three excellent essays on ‘The making of the modern metropolis’ (Ward), ‘Death’ (Pattison), and ‘The Bible’ (Adams). These are joined by a host of younger scholars who have been uncovering the theological impulses of modernity in recent years. For example, Luke Bretherton (recently appointed to Duke University) provides an essay on ‘Sovereignty’ that is masterly in its delineation of the theological pedigree of modern political theories, as well as the recent theological ‘counter-movement’ (of which he is part) to the notions of sovereignty presented by Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel. From a different angle, Judith Wolfe of Oxford University writes engagingly on the disturbing persistence of ‘Messianism’ in German thought, from the apocalyptic interpretations of Napoleon to the identification of the eschatological kingdom with the Third Reich, including the persistent need in Heidegger's thought, even after Nazism, for an openness ‘to a god who must come from without, or doom humankind by remaining absent’ (p. 320).

These two young scholars emerge from very different theological cradles: Luke Bretherton is a political theologian who has been associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement whereas Wolfe is a philosophical theologian and Heidegger specialist. Together, they exemplify how authors from different methodological backgrounds successfully complicate our understanding of ‘modernity’ in this book. From nihilism, technology and beauty, to time and history, sacrifice and freedom, the themes explored go some way towards discrediting ‘characterizations of modernity in which the atomized individual is acclaimed above the corporate, reason above passion, mind above body, the instrumental above the ornamental, the mechanical above the organic, and the secular above the sacred’ (p. 676). Setting these binaries aside, what is offered here is a multi-faceted approach that may at times leave intellectual historians steeped in those binaries disorientated as much as illuminated.

This disorientation is, however, intentionally and engagingly iconoclastic. It unsettles many of the established histories of religious thought since the French Revolution, shaped as they often have been by equating the political and intellectual, and the unchallenged acceptance of the secularisation theory. By complicating that narrative at every turn, the handbook reveals the theological to be so enmeshed in the secular that, as the orthodoxies of modernity crumble, religion's continued attraction for thinking about what it means to be a European human seems less strange.

This Oxford Handbook testifies to several generations of fruitful interdisciplinary reflection and will no doubt stimulate future engagements. It is generally more suggestive than definitive and, where some authors ponder theology's interrelationship with post-structuralism the language can, on occasion, be a little baroque. Readers of this Journal may also long for more historical context than is present. Given the natural limits of such an ambitious book, however, these are minor complaints. This is one of the most important handbooks in the ‘Religion’ series thus far, and will be an essential point of reference for many years to come.