Over forty years Old Testament Professor in Berlin and editor of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, Ernst Hengstenberg (1802–69) was the politically powerful leader of the conservative reaction in mid nineteenth-century German theology. This substantial monograph presents him in as favourable light as possible while admitting the weakness of his biblicist theology which rejected Semler's distinction between Scripture and the word of God, a foundation-stone of liberal theology. Calling him a ‘conservative churchman’ does not mean that he merely clung to the old, but that he preserved it under changing conditions, and so transformed it. His roots in the Evangelical revival, and his turn to a more churchy Evangelicalism, summed up in his ‘God preserve our church from an orthodoxy without pietism, and a pietism without orthodoxy’, are explained. His friendships with Tholuck and Neander and their circles are sympathetically analysed and his case for a less subjective theology than Schleiermacher's and one which took the Old Testament more seriously is fairly presented. Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835) convinced him that there could be no compromise with liberal theology and the Bible encouraged him to think of faith as being willing to fight without compromise for true Christianity. As a ‘churchman’ he was a confessional Lutheran and refused when asked to associate with the English Evangelical Alliance, which was led by dissenters who had no great enthusiasm for the institutional Church. His book catalogue allows his huge personal library (sold to Chicago) to be discussed and the depth of his reading in Protestant orthodox dogmatics and popular edification as well as the biblical commentaries to be appreciated. In some ways an outsider in German theology, he was hugely prolific. Nine of his books in English translation have recently been reprinted by Wipf and Stock, including his Commentaries on the Gospel of St John (1961–3, 1842–3), and on the Psalms (3 vols), works on the Pentateuch, and his famous 1829 Christology of the Old Testament. Despite his influence in the united Church and Prussian State it was theology and the non-institutional dimensions of the Church that absorbed his energies. The Evangelische Kirchenzeitung did nothing to damp down Prussian militarism. That involved more, and more bitter, controversy than Deuschle tells us. In his desire to be fair to a much maligned figure he tells us less about his opponents than those who still hate and despise him would have wished. This book is narrowly focused, but its achievement may be signalled by its success in making an unsympathetic reader think that the conservative opposition to liberal theology may not have been entirely misguided.