This book offers the first in-depth treatment in English language of Habermas’s long-awaited work on religion, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, published in 2019. Charting the contingent origins and turning points of occidental thinking through to the current "postmetaphysical" stage, the two volumes provide striking insights into the intellectual streams and conflicts in which core components of modern self-understanding have been forged. The encounter of Greek metaphysics with biblical monotheism has led to a theology of history as salvation, expanding in bold arcs from Adam’s Fall to Christ and the Last Judgement. The reconstruction of key turns in the relationship between faith and knowledge ends, however, with locating the uniqueness of religion in "ritual" and defining reason as inherently secular.

The book exposes the sources and trajectories, analysed by Habermas with great erudition, to different assessments in biblical studies, theology, and philosophy of subjectivity. Apart from Paul and Augustine, key lines of continuity are identified in the Gospels, early patristic theology, Duns Scotus and Schleiermacher that retain the internal connection of faith to autonomous freedom.

• Contents 8
• Preface 16
• Abbreviations 18
• Introduction 20
• 1 Recent Philosophical Debates on the Hermeneutics of Past Events and Their Relevance for Biblical Research 24
• 2 Reconstructing the Position of Paul in Early Christianity 46
• 3 Tracing the Origins of the Doctrine of Christ 73
• 4 Assessing the Pauline Strand: Exegetical, Methodological and Theological Disputes and Conclusions 96
• 5 The Patristic Era as Setting the Course for Relating Religion to Reason 119
• 6 The Origins of Modernity in the Late Middle Ages 143
• 7 “Faith” and “Knowledge” after the Copernican Turn in Kant’s Critiques of Reason 176
• 8 Post-Kantian Theories of Language – Pacemakers for the Paradigm Change from Subject Philosophy to Linguistic Interaction 209
• 9 Reappraising the Counterparts: Secular Reason as the Default Position, Religion as “Other”? 251
• Bibliography 282
• Person Index 297