Iserloh: Der Thesenanschlag fand nicht statt by Uwe Wolff (review)

Next year, the Protestant and Catholic Churches will commemorate an event that probably did not happen. The dramatic story of Martin Luther at the church door in Wittenberg came under close scrutiny in the 1960s in the work of Erwin Iserloh who, with Joseph Lortz and others, helped to reshape Catholic approaches to the Reformation. Iserloh’s thesis, the title of this volume, is only partially about the iconic portrayal of the heroic biblical scholar publicly issuing a challenge to the late-medieval doctrine of purgatory and its associated practices. More significantly, Iserloh’s argument about October 1517 reassesses Luther’s intentions by raising questions about the doctrines and practices of the Church and offers a path toward seeing the beginnings of the Reformation as a moment within Catholic history.

Uwe Wolff combines several pieces intended to set Iserloh’s life and work in the context of mid-twentieth-century German Catholicism. Wolff’s own biographical study of Iserloh, drawn from his recollections and research in the Iserloh archive at the Institute for Ecumenical Studies at Freiburg, shows us Iserloh’s student years, academic training, ordination and the war years, and a distinguished career as priest and academic. This biography is the Catholic component of Wolff’s “trilogy of believing hearts” (p. 120), the other two subjects being the prolific German writer Edzard Schaper and Walter Nigg, a Reformed theologian known for ecumenical engagement with Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Paired with this is Iserloh’s own memoir (Lebenserinnerungen), published in Römische Quartalschrift in 1987 and his final publication; it appears as appendix E of the present volume.

The diptych of biographical sketches is the heart of this work, and there is bound to be duplication in the two accounts of Iserloh’s life. But Wolff provides details (about Iserloh’s mentors, for example) that Iserloh leaves out, whereas Iserloh’s autobiographical observations allow us to see mid-century German Catholicism through the eyes of one of its major figures. Iserloh’s own reminiscences are more colorful than Wolff’s: the reader appreciates touches of irony interspersed in an account of tumultuous decades. Taken together, they offer an intimate look at the life of the Church, and the intertwined trajectories of ecumenical thought and historical scholarship, in the years between World War II and the Second Vatican Council.

Iserloh’s work contributed to efforts to have Luther’s ban of excommunication lifted, an ecumenical breakthrough had it occurred. Following Lortz, Iserloh saw Luther not as a heretic but as a deeply pious individual with a prophetic spirit. In these documents we have sources for the genealogy of an idea controversial at the time but now conventional in a church more ecumenical than when Lortz and Iserloh wrote. Historians of theology will especially welcome the careful assessment of Iserloh’s work by Barbara Hallensleben (a 2011 lecture at Trier), the assessment by Lutheran bishop Friedrich Weber of Iserloh’s contribution to church union, and Iserloh’s original publication on the posting of the Theses. This last item is good to present to a new generation that may be unaware of the circumstances surrounding the dispute about indulgences. Historiographically the question concerns the quality of the evidence available for an event that has been enshrined as a turning point in Western history; and Iserloh’s research serves as a valuable case in the history of scholarship.

In an appendix, Volker Leppin of Tübingen offers a view from 2013 of the controversy of the 1960s and sustains the thesis that the iconic event at the door of the church was a fabrication. In the course of his discussion Leppin critiques the arguments of Bernd Moeller and other defenders of the legend. In Leppin’s hands the controversial Catholic challenge of Iserloh, a Thesenanschlag of sorts in its own right, is now part of the dominant narrative of Lutheran historians of the Reformation.