Lutheran Quarterly Books

Leppin explores the four "solas" of Reformation theology--Christ, grace, faith, and scripture--as both anchored in the culture of late-medieval devotion and representing new, firmly demarcated formulae. Luther's four pillars became clarion calls in the fight against the medieval church. Leppin helps readers understand, however, that in the journey toward these new theological understandings, continuity and discontinuity were inextricably linked. Luther built upon the foundations of his late-medieval world, even as he articulated the sola Christus, sola gratia, sola fide, and sola scriptura foundations that would change Christianity forever. Along the way, these principles functioned as integrative, continuous ideas and exclusive, demarcating ones at the same time. Luther's world was a new and fundamentally different theological realm, but Sola: Christ, Grace, Faith, and Scripture Alone in Martin Luther's Theology also shows us the ways Luther and his thought were products of the personalities and intellectual origins from which they came.

The Protestant Reformation brought significant changes to the shape of Christian life. Worship, preaching, catechesis, and prayer all changed enormously; a renewed focus on engaging the Bible took the place of other devotional acts; and schools and charitable institutions were reshaped and expanded. The Wittenberg theologians helped instill these new practices and understandings by reforming Protestant preaching, pedagogy, ecclesiology, and piety. Reforming Faith tells the story of the Wittenberg reformers' joint work to establish and support the growing evangelical movement in the 1520s. Although this story is often told as Luther's movement, he worked in collaboration with his colleagues at the University of Wittenberg, and those colleagues made vital contributions to the movement. Aside from training new pastors, the university's largest enterprise was the publication of biblical and practical guidance by its faculty. The audiences were varied: political and community leaders who wanted to institute the Reformation in their jurisdictions, pastors who had become Protestants after being trained as priests, church leaders who wondered how to revise church practices, and laypeople with nagging questions that the new theology had raised for them. The Wittenberg faculty also participated in early community initiatives to help establish the Reformation, such as opening schools and performing parish visitations. Johnson sets the work of the Wittenberg reformers into the larger context of the Reformation, highlighting their cooperative work by bringing the many writings and initiatives of "the other Wittenberg reformers" to light.

Promissio is a methodologically rigorous study of all the pertinent Luther texts prior to 1520, thus enabling Bayer to trace Luther's reformational turn, culminating in his clear understanding of the gospel promise as God's gift, crystallized in the forgiveness of sins and enacted by the word of absolution. The author emphasizes that at the heart of Luther's understanding of the gospel is the insight that God justifies us freely through faith in the word of promise (promissio) and that this promise is not oriented primarily to the future but is a present gift to be received in faith. However, he shows that it is not the understanding of justification by faith that is at the center of Luther's breakthrough, but the insight that God's promise is an efficacious word that accomplishes what it says, and that justification can only be properly understood in the light of the promise. Bayer shows how Luther comes to see that the promise requires a reshaping of the sacrament of penance (confession and absolution), as well as Baptism and the Lord's Supper. Luther's new understanding of promise also leads him to radically rethink his understanding of Christology, the sermon, meditation, and prayer. When this book was first published in 1971 it was hailed by the Roman Catholic scholar Otto Hermann Pesch as a "classic of Luther research," and that claim still holds good today. No serious Luther scholar can afford to ignore it. It has also remained the foundation of all Oswald Bayer's subsequent work. The Lutheran Quarterly Books edition of Promissio now offers scholars and students this wisdom in English, thanks to Jeffrey Silcock's careful translation.

In this collection of essays newly published in English, Volker Leppin restores a holistic understanding of Martin Luther's development amid a late-medieval context strongly influenced by mysticism. Far from marking a clean break from earlier ideas, Luther's emerging theology drew upon deep wells of both personal mystical experience and the guidance of earlier mystics. Meister Eckhart's student, the fourteenth-century priest and theologian John Tauler, was an especially important source of inspiration for the young Luther, though he was also an avid student of figures such as Bernard of Clairvaux. Leppin's careful research overturns conceptions of late-medieval mysticism as inherently works-oriented, illuminating instead how Tauler and others influenced Luther's emerging views on indulgences, the Passion, the Eucharist, and theological tenets including the concepts of law and gospel, justification, and the priesthood of all believers. United with Christ continues to expand upon threads drawn in Leppin's 2024 Sola: Christ, Grace, Faith, and Scripture Alone in Martin Luther's Theology, helping us understand the emergence of the Reformation as an innovative series of developments from, rather than an absolute rupture with, late-medieval Christianity.

This overview of Luther's thought proceeds from the perspective of his use of the Latin preposition coram, "face-to-face with." Preeminent Luther scholar Robert Kolb proposes that under Luther's use of dominant ancient concepts of reality in his day, he placed the foundation of relationships. These relationships included the fundamental relationship of the Creator with every person and thing he made, along with all those relationships stemming from ordering his creation by his creative Word. With Luther's emphasis on the personal nature of the Creator, who continues to re-create by speaking in the absolution of sinners, he taught that believers experience life's realities in relationship (1) to the hidden God; (2) to sin, death, and Satan; (3) to the revealed God as Trinity and incarnate; (4) to the revealed God who becomes present in believers' lives through oral, written, and sacramental forms of his Word; (5) to their own self; (6) to the world both as God's creature and as perverted tempter; and (7) to individual human beings in the context of their callings. Chapters touching each of these relationships explore Luther's thinking and his practice of the faith based on his trust in the Creator, Savior, and Sanctifier and love in service to the neighbor. Individual chapters explore these topics within the context of contemporary treatments of various aspects of Luther's thought. A special focus of the study critically examines the ontological proposal of Tuomo Mannermaa and his students in Finland, offering as an alternative a better text-based assessment of what Luther's views can mean for the church today.

Gordon Jensen's careful analysis of the 1534 Luther Bible uncovers the central truth of Martin Luther's prodigious translation efforts: Luther's commitment to producing this physical object was founded in his desire that receiving the Gospel might become a lived experience. Contrary to popular perception, Luther's works were not the first, the freshest, or even the most user-friendly German biblical translations of the time. Rather, their power came in Luther's utter commitment to creatively sharing the Word "so that people would encounter Christ within the pages of scripture and through scripture, thus driving Christ into their hearts and lives." Jensen locates proof of Luther's commitment in his deliberate decision to highlight seven specific words and phrases in the text of his 1534 translation. Combined, these terms provide a concise summary of Luther's Reformation theology: the source, voice, content, and command of the gospel. Skillfully tracing the theological implications of Luther's editorial decisions, Jensen provides readers with a crystalline view into the very heart of Luther's theological message. The written Bible is important not for its literary qualities or its "inerrancy" -- an irrelevant premise for Luther, as Jensen explains. Rather, the Bible's essential value is as the conduit through which Christ is proclaimed. Luther's hope was that once someone encountered the Bible, they "would experience the gospel, and having experienced it, want to share this gospel so that others might experience Christ and the Word of life as well."

We tend to remember hymns one at a time. They color our lives, transmit our theology, and form our faith. We forget that the reason we can do so is because they have been made available throughout the centuries in hymnals. This edited collection explores the 500-year tradition of Lutheran hymnal production, illustrating how these books have influenced Lutheran faith and worship practice over time. Editor Robin A. Leaver has assembled a notable team of contributors from across the wider Lutheran church. Each chapter draws readers into the history and contributions of one or more landmark hymnals, ranging from the first books published during Luther's lifetime to volumes that have shaped the dimensions of the contemporary Lutheran church in the United States. Chapter authors include Leaver, Paul Grime, Markus Rathey, Joseph Hurl, Dianne M. McMullen, Jon D. Vieker, Paul Westermeyer, Mark A. Granquist, Daniel Zager, and Gracia Grindal.

The Augsburg Confession is the single most-important confession of faith among Lutherans today. However, it is often taught either from a historical perspective or from a dogmatic one. Yet the context out of which it arose was far more practical and lively: marked from the outset as confessions of faith in the face of fierce opposition and threats. The original princely signers, while clearly outlining the teaching of their churches, were also staking their lives on the witness to the gospel that had been emanating from Wittenberg since 1517, when Martin Luther first published his Ninety-Five Theses. By situating both the history and the theology of this document within the practice and life of faith, Timothy J. Wengert shows just how relevant the Confession's witness is for today's Lutheran parishes and their leaders by unlocking how its articles can shape and strengthen the church's witness today.

In this third of three volumes addressing Luther's outlaw God, Steven D. Paulson says that readers will embark on the deepest, hardest, and most glorious of all God's ways of hiding: God hiding a third time in the preached word or sacraments. The third time is the charm, not because humans finally awaken and "get" the essence of God. God's preached word is not an act of human understanding. It is a purely passive experience of receiving God wholly and completely in the absolving word that comes through the lowliest means of a sinful preacher. Not only does this word come through a creature to a creature, but through a sinner to a sinner. The difficulty with grasping all of this is that God works entirely outside his divine law--an outlaw God. Luther is the one who saw this more clearly than any other, because it happened to him just this way. The preacher got a preacher, and the sacraments that had once been organized by a legal scheme were set free to reveal and bestow God in the most hidden place of all. How much more hidden could God be than in water, bread, wine, and the mouth of a preacher? Paulson's grasp of historical, theological, and hermeneutical scholarship is on full display in this volume, but always in service of proclamation of the gospel. Readers and proclaimers: prepare to be provoked, enlightened, and inspired.

In an engaging and accessible style, Martin J. Lohrmann introduces readers to fascinating glimpses of faith, courage, and love in action within the global Lutheran community that now numbers over 70 million members in churches worldwide. He shows how Lutheranism is a much more diverse and global expression of the Christian tradition than most realize. This matches the expansive view of the church universal that the Reformers held when they presented the Augsburg Confession in 1530. As Philipp Melanchthon put it, the church "consists of people scattered throughout the entire world who agree on the gospel and have the same Christ, the same Holy Spirit, and the same sacraments, whether or not they have the same human traditions." Although Lutheranism first grew and spread in central and northern Europe, some of the most vibrant Lutheran communities are now in Africa and Asia. There are more Lutherans in Tanzania than in Sweden, and more Lutherans in Indonesia than in Norway. The single largest Lutheran church body in the world is the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, with over 8 million members and a focus on caring for the whole person. Outside of Europe, Namibia is the only country with a majority Lutheran population. Lutheran members of the global body of Christ have much to learn from and share with one another. The book largely follows the subjects listed in the Timeline of Global Lutheranism that Lohrmann created for Lutheran Quarterly Journal to commemorate the 500-year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.