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  • Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith
  • Susan C. Karant-Nunn
Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith. By Robert Kolb. [Christian Theology in Context.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. Pp. vi, 215. $99.00 clothbound; $35.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-199-20893-7.)

A well-known church historian specializing in early Lutheranism, Robert Kolb states at the outset that he has relied heavily on the writings of specialists in historical theology such as Bernhard Lohse and Martin Brecht in laying out the principal features of Martin Luther’s theology. Kolb has followed Luther scholarship closely. He consistently manifests his own detailed familiarity with Luther’s works, the man and his context, and all those intellectual predecessors, distant and proximate, with whose ideas the Wittenberg reformer interacted. Over the course of his career, Kolb has thought carefully about the nuances, shifts, and contradictions in Luther’s teachings. The signal quality and strength of this book, as a result, is its conveyance of development in the reformer’s thought. This would be a creditable achievement in a work of any length, much less in this brief compass, for most summaries leave an impression of firm, unevolving theological persuasion from about 1530 forward. [End Page 349]

The years from the 1510s to about 1525 were foundational, to be sure. Kolb explores the origin of justification by faith carefully, as well as the emergence of Luther’s other characteristic positions. But he then takes the development of these ideas on through the divine’s further utterances on them. Kolb applies his attention to the evolution in treatise and sermon of Luther’s thought on law and gospel (pp. 51–53), original sin (p. 34), the relation between ecclesiastical and secular (p. 77), the Eucharist (p. 84), baptism (pp. 85, 108), the will enslaved (p. 99, which Kolb calls by the unfamiliar phrase “bound choice”), predestination (p. 102), divine and human responsibility (pp. 105–06), penance and confession (p. 134), resistance to those in power (p. 194), and the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms (pp. 176–77). Kolb shows, for example, how early in Luther’s celebrity, he affirmed God’s establishment of his plan of salvation in Christ before the foundation of the world; God had determined everything that would occur. Although election as a topic recurred in his correspondence and at his dinner table, he gradually drew back from predestination, using by 1525 the term “only for God’s providential care of creation in general” (p. 102). For the last quarter century of his life, he “warned against speculation” (p. 102) on the matter. He simply refrained from pronouncing on the relation of evil to God’s plan and left plentiful rhetorical space for “the hidden God.”

At the core of Luther’s outlook is God’s reaching out to his human creatures through the Son and the Holy Spirit. God’s fatherly nature as “goodness, sweetness, and love” (p. 101), in Luther’s eyes, does jibe with my own conclusions concerning the emotional ideals of early Lutheranism, although not those most likely to be expressed in its institutional practice.

Kolb decisively refutes the “Finnish school,” represented by Tuomo Mannermaa, of interpreting justification by faith. He rejects the concept of humans’ becoming “divinized” in the process of justification. He agrees with Klaus Schwarzwäller that Mannermaa does not heed Luther’s insistent distinction between Creator and creature (pp. 127–29).

Many other Lutheran precepts appear here, but, as with his attitude toward the papacy (p. 161), they were not as subject to change over time. Kolb’s portrait of Luther comprehends the man’s personality and those with whom he interacted. The reformer who emerges is consistently dynamic just as he is human. His experience as a father affected his vision of the Heavenly Father. Kolb does gloss over Luther’s antisemitism by intellectualizing it. In fact, at the end of his life, as his letters to Katharina Lutheryn reveal, his feelings were visceral and acute, not merely mental and exegetical.

In the main, however, Kolb presents an amazingly differentiated analysis in a compact space. This study is highly recommended for students as well as for other interested laity. [End...

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