Between Wittenberg and Geneva

Lutheran and Reformed Theology in Conversation

Kolb, Robert, Trueman, Carl R.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493411450
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

At the 500th anniversary of the Wittenberg Reformation, two highly regarded scholars compare and contrast the history and theological positions of the Reformed and Lutheran traditions. The authors tackle nine theological topics significant for the life of the church that remain a source of division between the two traditions. The book helps readers evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the Reformed and Lutheran approaches to presenting the biblical message and invites honest, irenic, and open dialogue within the Protestant family.

1
Scripture and Its Interpretation

Protestants are people of the book. Both Lutherans and Reformed place the reading and preaching of Scripture at the very heart of the public ministry of the church. The medieval church saw the Mass as the point where God made himself savingly present with his people, but the Reformers saw that role fulfilled above all in the public proclamation of the Word. For them, it was the pulpit, not the altar, that became key to church life. Indeed, there could be no sacrament without the proclamation of the Word. And when the Word was read and preached, it was not merely for the sake of conveying information. In the proclamation of the Word, God really confronted people with his presence. Whether this was for judgment or salvation depended on whether the Word was received in faith or rejected in unbelief.

Since the Word preached is central to both Lutherans and Reformed, then a number of other questions must be addressed. First, there is the issue of what exactly Scripture is. Preaching as an act must be shaped by what the Bible is understood to be. Second, there is the issue of interpretation. A sermon is not simply a recitation of the biblical text. The movement from text to sermon is governed by rules of textual interpretation. Both what those rules are understood to be and also how they are to be applied are crucial to the action of preachers as they proclaim the Word to their congregations.

Both Lutheran and Reformed traditions have produced many great and faithful theologians and preachers, all of whom are marked by their high view of the Bible as the written Word of God, by the care with which they expound and apply the text, and of course by their love for the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Holy Scripture in the Lutheran Tradition

Martin Luther encountered God’s presence, power, and promise in the words of Holy Scripture. At first against his own desires but in obedience to his monastic superiors’ direction, Luther took his assignment to prepare himself to teach Bible at the university level as a call from God and devoted himself to his studies with the energy and zeal of a young Augustinian friar who sought salvation in the performance of his vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. These studies contributed to the transformation of a man whose personality prepared him for taking what God has to say with utmost seriousness and for throwing himself totally into searching the Scriptures to find eternal life.1

Luther’s Encounter with Scripture

Increasingly, Luther recognized all his efforts to save himself from his sinfulness as insufficient. His personality easily sensed the lows and highs of life. This trait blended with his depiction of God as the almighty Lord and Creator of all that exists. His teachers, schooled in large part in the Ockhamist tradition delivered to them by Gabriel Biel, the foremost German theologian of the late fifteenth century, had bequeathed to him this image of the Author and Designer of all things, who had determined what the laws governing his universe were to be. Luther never abandoned this conviction, although he certainly refined it through his biblical study. His instructors also cultivated belief in the covenant or pact that this almighty God had created according to their schema of salvation. This covenant promised grace sufficient to perform the works that would prove the sinner’s righteousness before God to all who did “what was in them,” who performed their best “out of purely natural powers.” Luther stumbled over this impossible requirement. Slowly, as he gave his first formal university lectures on the Psalms (1513–15) and then on Romans (1515–16) and Galatians (1516), he found a path to a different depiction of both God and what it means to be human. He redefined what it means to be a Christian: one who places absolute trust in this almighty God who longs to renew his conversation with his rebellious human creatures. It was through Luther’s engagement with the biblical text that the structure bequeathed him by medieval scholastic thought, focused through Aristotelian lenses on human performance, began to crumble.

The Bible was anything but absent from the world of medieval Christians. Indeed, the church discouraged the few literate laypeople of the late Middle Ages from reading Scripture without ecclesiastical guidance. Nevertheless, liturgical Scripture readings, other portions of the liturgy, visual images in altars and other pious art, and other media conveyed portions of Scripture to the faithful. Two problems, however, plagued this absorption of Bible stories. First, they were incorporated into the individual’s worldview alongside and not always distinguished from the stories of the saints, handed down particularly in the Legenda aurea—literally, “golden things to be read”—of Jacob of Voragine, a thirteenth-century Dominican and archbishop of Genoa. Second, the biblical narratives or maxims were placed into a set of presuppositions forged in the era of the conversion of the pagan tribes to Christianity, which vitiated the message of the prophets and apostles. Insufficient personnel for delivering fundamental instruction in the faith resulted in a version of Christianity that used biblical language and narrative but presumed that divine power was available from many intermediaries capable of providing help for time and eternity. Christian saints assumed functions earlier performed by pagan gods and goddesses. Furthermore, the relationship between God and his human creatures was anchored in the performance of God-pleasing activities, particularly the performance of sacred or religious rituals—above all, the Mass. Its divine effects were mediated through a priestly hierarchy, made concrete for most Christians in the person of the local priest but with ultimate authority in the bishop of Rome, the pope. This framework for experiencing Scripture and constructing a worldview became increasingly unsatisfactory in the minds of many in the late Middle Ages. New forms of piety were invented, new reform movements launched. But all failed to develop, in Christopher Ocker’s words, “a literary method for handling the narrative construction of the Bible as a whole.”2 Precisely such a method Luther found in his redefinition of what it means to be Christian and in his distinguishing God’s plan for human action and performance from God’s gift of salvation through the pronouncement on believers of the forgiveness of sins and new life won by Christ.3

As he plunged into the Psalms and then Romans and Galatians for his first university lectures in the 1510s, Luther found that God takes the initiative in restoring the relationship lost when Adam and Eve doubted God’s Word in Eden. He comes to human beings, in the flesh, to bestow forgiveness, life, and salvation. God does this as a person. Luther’s apprehension of God was intensely personal; he was extremely sensitive to God’s personality as a loving Father whose wrath burns against all that disturbs and destroys life as he designed it for his human children. As this person with deep emotions, God is a God of conversation and community. He speaks, and when he speaks, things still happen—come into being anew—just as in the beginning (Gen. 1). God created human beings to be his conversation partners. He immediately sought renewal of the conversation in Genesis 3:9, when Adam and Eve stopped listening to him. Luther believed that God has never stopped talking and calling rebellious human creatures back to himself, so that he may speak a re-creating Word of absolution, of the restoration of righteousness in his sight, through words that arise from Scripture. These words of God are delivered in a variety of oral, written, and sacramental forms.

Scripture and Tradition

Indeed, Luther did not believe that Scripture is the only source from which God’s people hear his voice. Like Martin Chemnitz in his Examination of the Council of Trent (1565–73), Luther believed that the content of Scripture, not some magical use of its precise words, carries out God’s will. Chemnitz saw the Holy Spirit at work as the church handed down God’s Word in seven ways. This “tradition”—defined by Luther and Melanchthon as not only the content but also the act of sharing the message with the next generation4—began w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Scripture and Its Interpretation
• 2. Law and Gospel
• 3. The Person and Work of Christ
• 4. Election and the Bondage of the Will
• 5. Justification and Sanctification
• 6. Baptism
• 7. The Lord’s Supper
• 8. Worship
• Conclusion
• Scripture Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover