This weighty and informed analysis of Evangelical views of history started life as a doctoral dissertation accepted by the University of Tübingen in 2009. The fact that is has been included in the renowned series devoted to the history of Pietism testifies to its high quality and originality. The first section of Schnurr's study describes a range of historical works written mainly by German Evangelicals on secular and ecclesiastical history, missiology, biography, palaeontology and prophecy. The author suggests that this loose grouping of Christians made up something akin to a ‘discursive community’ (p. 190) which aimed to interpret history in the light of Scripture in order to inform and teach German Christians about the roots of their own history. Evangelical laymen and women were thus provided with a compass and roadmap as they worked to build the Kingdom of God in their own generation. These writings were devotional in character with a practical bent, well-suited as textbooks in schools, teacher training establishments, confirmation classes and missionary training institutes. Published sources – books and journal articles that appeared after 1815 but before the revolutions of 1848 – are the material with which Schnurr works; most sources are not well-known.

Most of the authors considered in this study are not academics or professional historians though the names of August Neander, August Tholuck and Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg will be known to many. These energetic individuals, all prolific writers, were bound by a particular theological tradition akin to what British readers will understand to be conservative Evangelicalism. Schnurr notes that not a few of his subjects of investigation came from the south-western region of Germany, Württemberg, where an attitude of denominational tolerance helped to forge personal links across confessional borders. Having said this, Lutheran confessionalists (Johann C. K. von Hofmann, Heinrich Guerike, Wilhelm Löhe, Andreas Rudelbach) are also dealt with as is the Halle University historian Heinrich Leo. In the second part of his study Schnurr provides a detailed analysis of a representative work of this community: the Allgemeine Weltgeschichte published in 1837 and written by the Swabian pastor Christian Gottlob Barth, one of the German co-founders of the Evangelical Alliance. Schnurr ably brings to light the premises and historiographical emphases that shaped the work of this key figure in the Evangelical movement. The third and final section of the book deals with the overarching themes and interpretative models used by Evangelicals as well as the use made of these historical works to provide an intensified sense of their own identity. Themes such as nationality and transnationality, interpretations of the Reformation and Pietism, Catholicism and the Enlightenment draw together strands of the analysis. Not surprisingly, there was not always a uniform understanding of an epoch's character. Nor were all German Evangelicals dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries. The Rostock theologian Julius Wiggers, for example, joined the political left in the Mecklenburg house of representatives. He seems, however, to have been one of the exceptions; most Evangelicals considered the Pauline instruction to obey and honour those in authority to be of fundamental spiritual and political importance. The French Revolution – and to a lesser extent the 1830 revolution – is highlighted as a source of moral and spiritual chaos in the modern world, though English deists also played their part.

The men considered by Schnurr were intellectual and, in part, spiritual leaders in their networks and were looked up to as people likely to be able to discern the growth of the Kingdom of God in history and the varied historical expressions of a divine plan for mankind. At root was an Evangelical teleology, which involved a rejection of the new secular optimism introduced and nourished by the French Revolution. For many Evangelicals the AntiChrist was coming to oversee whatever new secular order was being birthed in their day. Not unlike Evangelicals in other countries, Germans sometimes liked to think of their own nation or in Barth's case their own regional state as, in some sense, created for better things. Barth, of course, may have been writing tongue-in-cheek. As an adherent of a particular Württemberg school of eschatology (Johann Albrecht Bengel) he believed that Israel alone was God's chosen nation which, in the future, would turn to accept Jesus the Messiah. A particular understanding of prophecy, such as that contained in the book of Daniel, shaped the direction of thought. Some of these historians remained rather reserved when considering contemporary Jewry and Judaism and their support, moreover, for the political emancipation of the Jewish minority was not always whole-hearted. Yet those writers considered by Schnurr seem to have had, like generations of Pietists before them, a clear understanding of the Jews' importance which, incidentally, placed strict limits on their nationalist fervour. In this they differed from many of their contemporaries. Christ is seen to be the real key to unlocking the meaning of world history. One of the writers discussed, the church historian August Neander, was himself a converted Jew. The widely recognised significance of Great Britain for missionary work – from Boniface to Henry Martyn – put further constraints on nationalist outbursts within German neo-Pietism. The Free Churches received, in contrast, only minimal treatment from historians of the period – one of the continuities of German historiography. For various reasons exponents of revivalism were able to provide more objective critiques of the Christian Church than representatives of other theological streams of thought. And if indeed, as is suggested by Johann Daniel Braunschweig, the history of Israel is paralleled by the history of the Church, one wonders what this might mean for the future prospects of Christendom. To conclude, there is little to criticise in this thoughtful study. Schnurr has written an important book on aspects of a significant subculture in nineteenth-century Germany. His study of Evangelical reflections upon, and responses to, wider socio-cultural and political trends in the post-Napoleonic era is a very useful addition to the growing literature on conservative Protestantism.