The Reconstruction of Religion: Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

The Reconstruction of Religion explores the thoughts of three influential philosophers--G. E. Lessing, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche--looking in particular at their influential approaches to the relationship between religion and modernity. In a period of a little more than one hundred years, Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche each developed a different theory of religion. Rejecting the possibility of maintaining religious faith on the old foundation of church tradition, these thinkers formulated new ways of understanding religion in response to the challenges of modernity. Though the conclusions of each system are different, there remain important elements in common between them, such as the importance of "religious subjectivity" Jan-Olav Henriksen compares and contrasts the thought of Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, showing that each of these philosophers still has something important to contribute to understanding religion in our own postmodern era. For anyone interested in the position of religious belief in today's world, these reconstructions of religion are of great value. In addition to their place in the history of ideas, these three philosophical approaches anticipate some of the recent issues relating to religion in postmodernity. Henriksen's perceptive work moves beyond the level of historical analysis to insightful rereadings of Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche that help us better understand the place of religion in our pluralistic society.

Jan-Olav Henriksen is Dean of research and Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion at (MF) Norwegian School of Theology, Oslo, Norway.