This chapter is dedicated to the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), an era that saw the apex of German imperial expansionism. It was a period ripe with numerous intersecting visions of supersessionism, expansion, and domination. A major challenge for Baeck was Adolf Harnack’s turn-of-the-century popular lectures and subsequent book titled The Essence of Christianity. Harnack presented a pure and positive essence of Christianity against a legalistic and negative Jewish tradition. Baeck’s first major work, The Essence of Judaism (1905) responds to Harnack and subsequent challenges from the History of Religions School. Yet this type of response was shaped by the heydays of German imperialism, both abroad and in the attempts to colonize the former Polish territories. This is a formative phase for Baeck’s thought and many of his ideas, including the distinction between state power (Macht) and spiritual energy (Kraft), his views on Jewish missionizing, as well as his relation to Zionism. All these emerge in this period and continue to play a role in his thought throughout his life.

The Introduction to the work outlines the history of the study of Western Zhou royal ritual, describing its role in early Chinese and early imperial governance and noting how it came to dominate the historical memory of the Western Zhou period. It then explains the book’s commitment to describe Western Zhou royal ritual from a historically embedded perspective, relying on sources contemporary to the rituals themselves.It explains the advantages and pitfalls of working with bronze inscriptions – the bulk of these sources – and presents a methodological framework for understanding inscriptions through the modern frames of actor-network theory and ritual studies.

Psychological development is not something self-evidently natural but a partly human creation, emerging contingently from the midstream of human history. Modern developmental psychology is a continuing outgrowth of the religious outlook. Christian ways of thinking have become psychological ones, and they share a common underlying metaphysic; philosophers writing about time such as Heidegger and Ricoeur spring from this same tradition. The so-called predestination of souls from before birth (saved or damned) by divine determinism transitioned into pre-natal biological determinism of cognitive ability and disability. The theory of developmental stages – today (for example) the arrival of ‘logical reasoning’ or ‘empathy’ in the child – emerged from theories about the arrival of saving grace in the individual.

Chapter 6 offers summary reflections on the conclusions and contributions of the present work, including its findings for the study of the royal palms, the study of Syro-Palestinian inscriptions, Hebrew Bible theology, and the history of Israelite religion. In addition to proposing a new analytic for royal psalms (i.e. psalms of defeat), the book adds depth and specificity to previous scholarship on the theology of the royal psalms. It draws in sharper silhouette the animating commitment of royal psalms: Yhwh’s loyalty to his one individual client king. The book also calls attention to the non-narrative and lyric qualities of inscriptions, and it emphasizes the rhetorical centrality of their closing curse sections. For the study of Hebrew Bible theology, the present work holds up the important and distinctive theological offer of royal psalms. Historically, Levantine memorial inscriptions reflect an earlier engagement with Neo-Assyrian royal ideology and its monuments than scholars have argued heretofore, and a deeper indigenization.

This chapter investigates the disciplinary formation of Classical Philology as an especially privileged subject in the nineteenth-century university, and the degree to which it overlapped happily with theology. It looks at how the two fields, both committed to the study of antiquity, shared methodology, ideology and an approach to education. It investigates how particular scholars straddled both fields in a way that subsequent historiography and disciplinary silos have worked to conceal – and how specific books became the site for shared intellectual perspectives. The chapter explores this through the career of Benjamin Jowett, as an exemplary figure who straddles both fields. Finally, it considers how twentieth-century historiography and the self-representation of scholars in theology and philology have enacted an increasingly sharp divide between the two disciplines, and explores its reasons and consequences.