Religion's role in the emergence of a modern historical consciousness is a fascinating and multifaceted topic. As recent works by Suzanne L. Marchand, Jonathan Sheehan, and George S. Williamson suggest, theology has been reborn as an important vector through which to view eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German intellectual life. The varied expressions that the new historical mindedness of this period assumed have likewise drawn substantial attention from, for example, Stephen Bann and John E. Toews. The focus of Leonard S. Smith's investigation into the relationship between Lutheranism and historicism is surprisingly narrow given this existing literature and the ambition of the question. The author applies a model-building methodology adapted from Max Weber to track the afterlife of two principles developed by Martin Luther as they influenced a chain of historical thinkers from G. W. Leibniz through Leopold von Ranke, Friedrich Meinecke, and Otto Hintze. Religion and the Rise of History is a self-described synthetic “essay” designed to place events with a “large and meaningful framework” (p. ix). Its intended audience is not specialists in the field, but rather history teachers, students, pastors, and priests. Weber, Smith notes, correlated the Calvinist ethic with the rise of modern capitalism. This text aims to connect the “Lutheran ethos” (p. 77) to “a distinctly modern type of Western historiography” (p. xii), while documenting the progressive rationalization and secularization of Luther's concepts among historians and theorists.

Luther's particular interpretation of the Lord's Supper produced, according to Smith, the two related principles that typify a “set of values that Lutherans share” (p. 59). Building on the doctrine of the real presence, Luther and Philip Melanchthon cultivated a “simul” and an “in-with-and-under” “way of viewing life” by which God's spirit animates the profane world (p. 74). The notion that all living things contained the hidden presence of God inspired the tradition of German idealism. Smith likewise suggests that the paradoxical richness of this perspective was conducive to an individualizing and historical way of thinking. In his view, the First Communion and the Small Catechism communicated these religious concepts to successive generations. Several of Smith's chapters explore how later German thinkers progressively rationalized “a specifically Lutheran civilization” and thereby contributed to the emergence of a modern historical consciousness (p. 111). Leibniz, for example, serves as the “chief forerunner for the rise of historicism” (p. 103) as well as its “main connecting link” (p. 258) with Martin Luther. According to Smith, his monads were soul-like substances through which God acted. Leibniz prepared Protestant theology for harmony with science; his “simul, dynamic and spiritual” view of the universe “haunted” Protestant scholars of the German Enlightenment (p. 258).

The most immediate incubator for the rise of historicism was the “Cultural Revolution” that Smith introduces as a useful new term for periodizing the formative decades in German thought from 1760 to 1810. Smith examines how Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Immanuel Kant contributed to a new historical consciousness, while emphasizing the specific relationship each scholar had to Luther. Thus, Hamann's conception of the relationship between spirit and word appears closely related to Luther's “in-with-and-under” theology of language; Kant's distinctions between phenomena and noumena approximated an “at-the-same-time” epistemology. Smith rightly notes how embedded these seminal figures were in Protestant theology and presents interesting material on the significance of Luther's personal legacy. His interpretation serves students well by including substantial citations from primary sources, but also relies quite heavily on existing secondary sources.

The central chapter of the book details how Leopold von Ranke transformed history from a calling to a scientific profession. Smith notes the Lutheran origins of the academic concept Beruf and situates Ranke squarely within a confessional tradition, analyzing in particular his “Luther Fragment” of 1817. In Smith's view, Ranke is the “most Lutheran” of all nineteenth-century historians (p. 202); his life and work demonstrate the “priestly nature of history as a calling” (p. 221). Thus, Ranke's strong religious convictions led him to seek the omnipresence of God in history. His historical methodology, which sought to present the general or the universal through the particular, appears as an extension of Luther's in-with-and-under way of viewing life. At the same time, Ranke exemplifies the ideal type that Smith creates for modern historiography, being professional and scientific and emphasizing individuality and development. Smith subsequently shows how Otto Hintze supplemented and demystified Ranke's terms and thereby “completely rationalized and secularized the Protestant religious traditions” that shaped German historicism (p. 250). Hintze similarly used paired opposing concepts to analyze particular subjects, contrasting, for example, the authoritative and associative principles of organization in his analysis of institutions, states, and societies.

Religion and the Rise of History surveys the European historical tradition from a unique perspective, covering familiar territory with a revealing lens. Students will gain a useful introduction to western historiography. The first chapter presents ideal types of classical Greek, Roman, and Christian historiography through St. Augustine, extending into the universal histories of the eighteenth century. The concluding chapter ends with the late nineteenth-century crisis of historicism and the bridges that Weber and Hintze built between the idealist and positivist traditions. Smith, as he himself states, approaches the undercurrent of Lutheranism within nineteenth-century historiography, with “sympathetic understanding” (p. 202). The narrow approach to religion provided by the legacy of Luther's doctrine of the real presence is effective for a textbook; while reductionist, an ideal-type methodology is likewise an appropriate mechanism for synthesis. Smith's goal of situating the rise of historicism within a theological tradition that extends deep into the early modern period will intrigue and challenge students and specialists alike.