be traced to conceptions of truth and freedom in German Idealism and to the biblical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Linked to this is the need to get beyond the ahistorical temper of scholasticism without ending up in the ditch of moral and epistemological relativism. These issues of the theological significance of history and culture were brewing from at least the late eighteenth century with the ascendancy of Romantic movements among intellectual elites across Western Europe and the United