For those familiar with James C. Livingston's 1971 classic, Modern Christian Thought (New York: Macmillan), the book's 1997 revision was a welcome update. Whereas the original was subtitled “From the Enlightenment to Vatican II,” the 1997 work extended through the twentieth century and was divided into two volumes, one on the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century and one on the twentieth century. The topic of this review is the first volume, as recently reissued by Fortress Press in a second edition.

The book is well-organized and deals with a vast amount of conceptual and historical material. The stated goal is to focus on the “encounter between Christian ideas and modern philosophy, history and the natural sciences” (xiii). Livingston accomplishes this goal by weaving an incredibly readable narrative that shows how various movements within Christian thought developed in the Modern Period. Acknowledging that scholars disagree about the meaning of the term “modern,” Livingston rightly begins by delimiting his use of it: “the premise of this text is that modern Christian thought can best be understood as beginning with the formidable changes in our world-view that were occasioned by the intellectual ferment unleashed by the scientific, philosophical and historical challenges of the Enlightenment” (2). The 15 chapters of the book are a mapping of these three challenges—scientific, philosophical, and historical—in the family tree of modern Christian thought.

Livingston's method is to delimit the connections between various movements and their representative thinkers. This strategy allows the reader to see how ideas develop in relationship to each other. To do so, he provides summaries of key figures—some familiar, such as Kant, Hegel, or Blondel—and others less well-known. One of the strengths of the book is to introduce these lesser-known figures, such as Reimarus, John and Edward Caird, and Lamennais. The summaries are supplemented by extended quotations from primary sources that typically provide a representative view of the author. (Nevertheless, one may wonder why a key and complex figure such as Leibniz was excluded.)

The book's first three chapters help root the reader in the major themes of modernity. Livingston begins by delimiting the key topics of the Enlightenment that come to characterize the period and his book—autonomy, reason, nature, melioristic optimism, progress, and toleration. He then moves to an extended discussion of the development of the religion of reason (Locke, Voltaire, and Lessing) and its subsequent “breakdown” in the figures of Hume, Kant, and the Counter-Enlightenment.

The next six chapters cover two important branches of modernity's family tree: romanticism and speculative idealism. The chapters on the relationship of Christianity and romanticism (chapters 4, 6, 7, 8), in its Protestant, Catholic, and Anglo-Catholic forms, reveal Livingston's strengths in delimiting the nuances between related ideas. In discussing Catholic romanticism, he notes the differences in context between its French and German forms. The French Catholics, he observes, were responding to Voltaire's skepticism and developed a traditionalist stance, as “apologists for a lost tradition, for authority, and for the restoration of an organic, idealized feudalism: corporate, Catholic and hierarchical” (143). The German Catholics, on the other hand, were confronted with Protestant ideas and were fundamentally able to be “more progressive and open to the new transcendental philosophy and its turn to subjective consciousness” (186).

Chapters 5 and 9, on speculative idealism and its outgrowth into a critique of Christianity, stand out as a model of describing the interrelationship of Christianity, philosophy, and history. Livingston begins with an excellent overview of Hegel's contribution to modern thought, emphasizing his idea of history as the actualization of God/Spirit. He then traces Feuerbach's reaction to Hegel, summarizing presciently: “for Hegel the human subject is conceived as God in his self-alienation; for Feuerbach the exact opposite is the truth, i.e., God is the human subject in self-alienation” (222). The section concludes by highlighting Marx's rejection of Hegel's view of history in favor of a more materialist approach. This last chapter reveals another strength of Livingston's work: emphasizing the complex interaction between Christianity, philosophy, history, and politics, or between what some might term “secular” and “sacred.”

Livingston then moves to a discussion of the relationship of theology to other disciplines, including science and history (chapters 10, 11). He offers a detailed discussion of the Darwinian controversy, the development of biblical criticism, and the rise of Protestant liberalism (Ritschl, Herrman, Harnack and, in America, Rauschenbusch). He emphasizes the nuances of the latter in seeking out a relationship with other fields of study (in particular the life of Jesus question). He then shows, in chapters 12 and 13, the reactions to these developments in the form of “movements of recovery and conservation”: Ultramontanism and the restoration of Thomistic theology, in Germany “confessionalism,” and in the States the “Princeton theology.”

The book's two concluding chapters (14, 15) focus on figures and movements that offer transitions to the twentieth century: Catholic Modernism, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. These last two chapters point to the direction of Christian thought toward more localized, existential, and action-oriented thought.

Despite the book's 1997 revision, a major gap remains in Livingston's work: the inclusion of any voices besides white males of European heritage. Although he desires to discuss the relationship between Christian ideas and history, he ignores the contribution of two very important groups—women and African Americans. For example, he notes the contribution of George Eliot in translating works of theology but fails to mention that she (like the Cambridge Platonists) dealt with many theological ideas in her literature. Likewise, in America during the nineteenth century, women and African Americans were beginning to create their own theological works. These include Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Jarena Lee, and Sojourner Truth as well as the development of the Women's Bible and the abolitionist movement. A chapter on these movements, and their contribution to Christian thought, would have added to the richness of the material. The work's comprehensiveness is hindered by this rather large omission. Nevertheless, there are few books that cover the range of Livingston's. It is an important work and of incredible benefit to the classroom teacher.