Lutherforschung im 20. Jahrhundert: Rückblick, Bilanz, Ausblick by Rainer VinkeReview by: Paul R. HinlickyThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer, 2007), pp. 616-617Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20478475 .

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616 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXV111/2 (2007)

Lutherforschung im 20. Jahrhundert: Ruckblick, Bilanz, Ausblick. E d. R a i n e r Vinke. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2004. 290 pp. ?34.80. ISBN 3-8053-3424-9.

REVIEWED BY: Paul R. Hinlicky, Roanoke College

These papers were given at a conference in October 1999, right after the ceremonial signing of the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification. Yet the book is more useful than many of its type. It is not merely an inventory of various scholarly projects related to Luther but, reflecting the goals of the conference organizers, it seeks to lend direction to the ecumenical future of Luther research. Simo Peura states programmatically in the con cluding chapter that in Luther's theology it is possible to connect the forensic and effective aspects ofjustification with the unio cum Christo and the inhabitatio Christi respectively (258 59). Luther accordingly has not broken away from the catholic doctrinal inheritance. He has broken through to a fresh appreciation and appropriation of it. That is the implicit thesis in this volume. Luther's Reformation Durchbruch is not a breakaway but a breakthrough.

First there is a diagnosis of the "breakaway" thesis from both Catholic and Protestant sides. Martin Brecht, Jos Vercruysee, and Rolf Decot provide from varying confessional and disciplinary perspectives an acute analysis of the path taken in Catholic Luther research in the course of the past century. Particular accent falls upon the way the Lutherbild functioned as a surrogate for contemporary concerns. In his study Brecht points out, for example, how Henrich Denifle's polemical tract Luther in rationalistischer and christlicher Beleuchtung (Mainz, 1904) was directed against Adolph von Harnack's calling into question the Christological dogma-with Luther tendentiously explained as Harnack's precursor (9). By the same token, Brecht points to Grisar's Der deutsche Luther im Weltkrieg und in der Gegenwart (Augs burg, 1924) which protested the "anti-Catholic political, national and military instrumental ization of Luther" (15).

On the other side of the traditional divide, Martin Ohst investigates deep continuities in the line of Luther interpretation running from Ritschl through Holl to Hirsch and Vogelsang, showing how the methodology and agenda of the early twentieth-century Luther Renaissance go back to post-Kantian polemic against Lutheran orthodoxy, with Melanchthon as the font of all evils. For these researchers, the signature Reformation doctrine of justification does not reflect Melanchthon's artificially erected, essentially legalistic system, but rather the existential conflicts and doubts which any earnest person experiences. What matters is the simple picture of God as loving, which becomes the key to interpretation of any theological system. Antinomianism and Unitarianism respectively are thus made cardinal virtues of Luther's theological "breakthrough." Luther is thus refashioned as the exemplary precursor of modern mediation theology, who had broken away from the medieval-catholic form of Western Christianity; in rediscovering Luther's original thoughts, the hope of the Luther Renaissance was that the crisis-ridden present would find correction and salvation (47).

Should anyone object by calling attention to Luther's belief in Christ's expiatory suffer ing or in Christ's membership in the Holy Trinity, the historicist put-down was thus formu lated and ever since is at hand: "Das ist dann aber nicht Luther..." (50). Appointing themselves gatekeepers of Luther's legacy, liberal Protestant apologetics took license, in the ponderous name of scientific history, to make up a "breakaway" Luther that suited contem porary sensibilities. The contrast between an intriguing contribution by Eberhard Busch on Luther in dialectical theology and an instructive study by Albrecht Beutel on Ebeling's Luther further bring out this very tension rarely far below the surface in Luther studies.

The contribution by Thomas Kaufmann on the debate about Luther's "breakthrough"

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Book Reviews 617

stemming from Ernst Bizer's controversial study Fides ex auditu (Neukirchen Kreis Moers: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1958) provides illuminating background to the position today associated with Oswald Bayer: against the Holl school's tendency to regard the theology of the early Romans commentary as already "reformatory," the real "breakthrough" to the "genuinely" evangelical view must instead be located in the sacra ment of confession, where the penitent's existential need for certainty of faith is satisfied solely by God's word of promise (81-88). Bizer's turn to the unmediated power of the word of God to effect what it declares took the side of dialectical theology and judged that "all variants of culturally synthetic apologetics stand guilty of Liberalism" (90). This stance was no little source of the controversy surrounding his book.

Joachim Ringleben and Oswald Bayer provide historical and theological reflections respectively on Luther's word of God theology as nova lingua Spiriti. Ringleben develops the little-known motif in Luther of the Spirit as the hearer of the word of God (121, 126) and in this way brings new light on the contrast between Luther's Trinitarian dialectic (word and spirit) and Barth's dialectic of the two natures in Christ (133). Along the same lines, Oswald Bayer argues that the critique of substance metaphysics in Luther is not to be taken in a Kan tian way but, with the help of Hamman (145ff.), it should be seen as "word-ontology": God's word of promise to us "does not express the meaning of an already established subject, but is the movement in which the reality of both is established; it is not an ostensive, but rather an effective, copula ..." (146).

Scott Hendrix's contribution on American Luther research points to the confessionally diverse North American context and thus the need to explain in context the great man's sins and errors, not simply to lay claim to his legacy as the "German Savior." Hendrix rightly highlights Mark Edwards's important work in uncovering the roots of Luther's disturbing tendency to demonize opponents in an apocalyptic turn that his thinking took following his excommunication: "Luther took upon himself the role of the true apostles and prophets, according to which following the biblical model he could disparage his opponents as false prophets" (174). Hendrix rightly points to the great influence Heiko Oberman has had in locating Luther in the streams of medieval tradition in which he surely stood (181), although already earlier American scholarship John Dillenberger on the doctrine of God, Bengt Hoffmann on Luther's relation to mysticism) sought to put Luther's theology "in context" of medieval Catholicism. A footnote mentions in passing that Luther's Christology has had less interest for American researchers (182n73); but it is hardly clear that this is not also an example of the lamentable fact that "many American researchers still regard European research as exemplary" (188). If American Luther research is to "work out Luther's meaning for society and for Christianity in North America" (189), it will be in rediscovering Luther, not as author of the incoherent doctrine of forensic justification for the sake of preserving tribal Lutheranism, but as a witness of Jesus Christ, i.e., in interpreting his Durchbruch as a breakthrough to a fresh appreciation and appropriation of the Catholic legacy.

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