Description: As a historical inquiry and synthesis, this intellectual history is the first study to apply the ideal-type or model-building methodology of Otto Hintze (1861-1940) to Western historical thought or to what R. G. Collingwood called ""The Idea of History,"" for it contains succinct and useful models for seeing and teaching classical, Christian, and modern professional historiography. Religion and the Rise of History is also the first work to suggest that, in addition to his well-known paradoxical, simul, and/or ""at-the-same-time"" way of thinking and viewing life, Martin Luther...

This is the first intellectual history to study the ideal-type of model-building methodology of Otto Hintze (1861-1940) to Western historical thought and to suggest that Martin Luther also held to a way that was deeply incarnational, dynamic, and/or 'in-with-and-under'. This dual vision and 'a Lutheran ethos' strongly influenced Leibniz, Hamann, and Herder, and was therefore a matter of considerable significance for the rise of a distinctly modern form of historical consciousness in Protestant Germany. Smith's essay suggests a new time period for the formative age of modern German thought,...

Like Leonard Smith's larger study, Religion and the Rise of History, this essay, Martin Luther's Two Ways of Viewing Life, asserts that Luther's well-known --at-the-same-time, -- simul, or paradoxical way of viewing life does not capture Luther's thought as a whole, because it does not represent his deeply incarnational and dynamic, mystical and holistic, particularizing and historical way of viewing life based on the power of the Word and the Spirit of God either in his own life or in human history. Smith contends (1) that the best way to capture Luther's --second-- basic way of thinking and...