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Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion. By VAN A. HARVEY. Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought l. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ix + 319 pp.
This book and its author recall the mid-nineteenth century in Germany, when two sensational books were published by radical disciples of Hegel: The Life of Jesus Crictically Examined by David Friedrich Strauss (1835) and The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach (1841) . Together they signaled the collapse of Hegel's school of philosophy, with far-reaching consequences for the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. Both raised issues that, according to Karl Barth, were to provide "the deeply disturbing background to the history of theology in all the ensuing decades" (Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl [New York, 1959], p. 382). It is certainly of interest to note that Van Harvey has addressed both of these issues in two outstanding publications that are the bookends, so to say, of a distinguished career. In The Historian and the Believer (New York, 1966) he offered...