of Schleiermacher's dogmatics. According to Matthew Becker, whose study of Hofmann's life and theology is the only comprehensive overview and analysis of this theologian's ideas in the English language, "Hofmann's Trinitarian view of God is grounded in the divine love, which is the cause of God's free decision to self-differentiate God’s self in history and give God’s self (divine kenosis or 'divine self-emptying') in history in order to realize in the human Jesus a new humanity. The focal point of Hofmann's conception of 'salvation history' (Heilsgeschichte) is his understanding of Trinitarian kenosis, that the eternal God has become historical by 'emptying' God's self into Jesus in order to reconcile the whole world to God. According to Hofmann, world history can only be understood properly within the historical self-giving of the triune God who is love. Salvation history, therefore, is not separate from history but ultimately embraces and fulfills all history within itself. Thus salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) is not a part of world-history, but rather world-history is a part of salvation history". Hofmann's Trinitarian theology of history is properly eschatological: History is given its unity and meaning by viewing it from its end—not from its beginning—though its end appears in the midst of history and is discernible only in faith. Hofmann believed, in light of his baptismal regeneration and by faith, that God has already revealed the end or goal of history (its unity) in the event of Jesus, who is "the center of all history". In Jesus the eternal God has become temporal to give the eternal Self in love in order to restore and unite the temporal to God. Hofmann's historical perspective was tempered by his concern to take seriously the inescapable pre-understanding that every interpreter of the Bible brings to the biblical text and to reckon with the hermeneutical implications that a particular religious perspective creates for biblical interpretation. Hofmann acknowledged that the interpreter’s personal participation in his knowledge and understanding, in both its discovery and its validation, is an indispensable part of interpretation itself. According to Becker, Hofmann's hermeneutical reflections thus form an important development between the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and later thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Ricoeur, who have also analyzed the historicity of language and the historicality of the biblical interpreter. Works Hofmann wrote: De bellis ab Antiocho Epiphane adversus Ptolemaeos, Ph.D. diss., (1835) Die siebzig Jahre des Jeremias