LAUSR

son? Chapter 4 turns to Bonhoeffer and Hegel on Christ’s presence in word and sacrament. Robinson provides helpful background in the form of Barth and Bonhoeffer’s friend Franz Hildebrandt who had used Hegelian language for explicating Luther’s ist. For Robinson, Bonhoeffer’s theology displays both these influences. With Hildebrandt (and Hegel), Bonhoeffer develops the logic of Christ’s ‘real presence’ in the bread and wine. With Barth (and against Hegel), he gives more emphasis to preaching in its ‘disruptive’ significance. The final two chapters draw out some of the political implications of Bonhoeffer’s ‘correctives’ of Hegel, mostly drawing on Discipleship and Ethics. In Chapter 5, Robinson contests ways in which scholars have straightforwardly juxtaposed Bonhoeffer’s ‘revolutionary spirit’ with Hegel as ‘Prussian state apologist’. He claims that Bonhoeffer’s context required a greater emphasis (than Hegel) on the church as a distinct ‘confessional space’ vis-à-vis the state. Correlatively, he demonstrates that Hegel himself had often brought a ‘critical rational principle’ to bear ‘on state action’. Chapter 6 extends and deepens this argument with reference to race, again contesting overly simplistic oppositions between the two. Here Robinson also briefly presents W. E. B. Du Bois as a lesser known ‘critical line of Hegel reception’, which also directly influenced Bonhoeffer. As mentioned above, Christ and Revelatory Community is an important accomplishment. It is filled with rich observations and insights into Bonhoeffer and Hegel (most of which cannot, of course, be conveyed in a short review). As also suggested, Robinson’s chapters follow a particular pattern; and he thus tends to frame and organise Bonhoeffer’s reception of Hegel as an ‘internal corrective’, ‘repair’ or ‘subversion’. My only real question is whether these insights and this material might have been organised otherwise. Would it be possible to read and interpret Bonhoeffer’s many ‘divergences’ as indicative of a more thoroughgoing break, even if he remains willing to draw upon Hegel in discrete ways? The rich detail of Robinson’s book and complexity of its structure would seem to allow such a question.