ABSTRACT
The powerful influence of the secularisation thesis in the academic study of religion and modernity has left its mark on the study of Christianity in the nineteenth century. Transcendent Christianity views the created order – human creatures included – as utterly different from the God who made them. For transcendent Christianity in the nineteenth century then, the drama of salvation was just that. Christian liberals generally interpreted the doctrine of the incarnation to mean both that there was something of the human in God, and something of the divine in human beings. The picture which emerges is of a spectrum of different and often antagonistic interpretations of Christianity ranging from the conservative at one end, through the liberal, to alternative spiritualities at the other extreme. Literature proved to be one of the key sites for the reinterpretation of Christianity in the nineteenth century.
