Book Reviews / CHRC .– () –
Robert Kolb (Ed.), Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, – [Brill’s Com- panions to the Christian Tradition ]. Brill, Leiden/Boston , x + pp. isbn . ; us.
As Robert Kolb points out in the introduction to this very valuable collection of essays, later Lutheranism is a relatively neglected field. This neglect may, he sug- gests, be a legacy of the Enlightenment view of the period after Luther’s death as an era of rigidity and intellectual poverty. The label ‘Lutheran orthodoxy,’ carefully sidestepped by the contributors to this volume, suggests a period of stasis between two much more interesting and significant eras. Moreover, while historians of the early Reformation have, for decades now, been much preoc- cupied with religious culture in its broadest sense—preaching, the reform of popular piety, art and music, domestic life, and social relations—scholarship on the later Reformation has continued to focus on university theology. The essays gathered together in this volume provide a valuable companion to the recent research by North American and European scholars that has started to redress this imbalance, and will also, it is hoped, act as a stimulus to those wishing to explore how church life developed after Luther’s death. The series of essays opens with an admirably clear and extremely useful sum- mary of Lutheran theological conflict in the lead-up to the Formula of Concord by Irene Dingel. Dingel demonstrates the significance of the controversies that rocked the Lutheran church after Luther’s death—over adiaphora, faith and works, the place of the law in Christian life, human free will, original sin, justification and the Lord’s Supper, and Christology—seeing them not as dis- ruptions, but as essential parts of the process by which the teaching of the Wittenberg theologians was systematized and synthesised. Kenneth Appold’s essay on academic life and teaching is equally clear and compelling. He argues that while territorial rulers did, as has been supposed, seek to use universities to further their aims of confessionalization, ‘behind the curtain’ of orthodoxy, in the realm of specialized theological discourse, a fertile world of the mind developed. The next set of essays move beyond the realm of theological dispute and intellectual life, exploring the ways in which the Lutheran message was com- municated to the populace and demonstrating the continued vitality of the project of evangelization. Mary Jane Haeming and Robert Kolb’s essay on ‘Preaching in Lutheran Pulpits in the Age of Confessionalization’ complements the intense work that has been done on preaching in the early Reformation. It explores the practicalities of preaching and the efforts Lutheran authori- ties made to improve the quality of that preaching. Lutheran preaching in the
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, DOI: 10.1163/187124110X542707 Book Reviews / CHRC .– () – period was, the authors conclude, not simply pedantic and polemical; it still offered above all consolation and the promise of God’s love. Gerhard Bode then writes about the enduring importance of Luther’s Small Catechism, demon- strating that it remained “the textual basis for all religious instruction in many Lutheran areas.” We should, he suggests, reconsider the value of pedagogical methods that emphasized rote learning: during the period under discussion instruction was sufficiently effective for preachers to assume that their hear- ers knew the Small Catechism, and to move onto more complicated explana- tions. Christopher Boyd Brown’s essay on hymns, liturgy, music, and prayer is brilliantly accessible and engaging, and demonstrates Lutherans’ continuing commitment to the use of music in proclaiming the gospel. This music must be understood, Brown argues, as more than “merely pedagogical”: the spiritual power of God’s word was manifest in the hymn texts. Brown also discusses the culture of prayer in later Lutheranism, and gives valuable insights into the importance of household devotion as a bulwark of Lutheran faith. The next two essays advance Brown’s forays into popular Lutheran piety. Robert Christman considers the interaction between the ideas of the reformers and the beliefs and behaviour of the laity, exploring the extent to which the clerical vision of a Godly society became reality. The notion of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ has caused scholars of the early Reformation much trouble, but here Christman argues that some pastors, at least, had considerable success in implementing their programmes of reform, and that during the second half of the sixteenth century some Reformation doctrines were “settling deeply into public consciousness.” Susan Boettcher’s remarkably wide-ranging essay looks beyond the reform of practice and belief, asking what impact Lutheranism had on early modern society. Lutheran theology, she concludes, did not bring about a general social transformation. Instead, change came about as a result of “complex negotiations between tradition, theology, and material circumstance in particular local contexts.” Social matters that were directly affected by the Reformation were confined to a few areas, primarily the clergy and gender relations. The final group of essays explore political life. Robert von Friedeburg con- siders the relationship between church and state in Lutheran lands. The later Lutheran Church can no longer be seen as a straightforward agency of the ‘state,’ unconditionally serving the prince. Von Friedeburg describes the com- plex interplay of religious, legal, and political concerns that shaped the polit- ical life of the Holy Roman Empire, and highlights the divergent paths of Lutheran political thought, from Pufendorf’s notion of churches as voluntary associations within the state to John Frederick Horn’s defence of absolutism