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  • The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation by Berndt Hamm
  • Michael Root
The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation. By Berndt Hamm. Translated by Martin J. Lohrmann. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. 2014. Pp. xx, 286. $36.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8028-6924-1.)

A cottage industry of twentieth-century studies of Martin Luther was the reconstruction of his Reformation “turn” (Wende) or “breakthrough” (Durchbruch). In the preface to the 1545 edition of his Latin works, Luther described a sudden [End Page 403] insight into the active righteousness of God, after which he felt that he had “entered paradise itself through open gates.” Unfortunately, his references to the date of this discovery are unclear, and his description of what he discovered does not easily mesh with his early writings. The scholarly task has thus been twofold: to describe what was the new discovery that transformed Luther from late-medieval monk into Protestant Reformer and to date just when this discovery occurred.

Berndt Hamm of Erlangen University has been at the forefront of the rethinking of this problem in recent decades. Rather than seek a single breakthrough, he traces the complex development of Luther’s thought from his earliest notes from 1509 through his tracts of 1520, by which time the essential elements and form of his Reformation theology are set. There is no single breakthrough or turn in Luther’s thought but rather a complex, interrelated series of shifts and breaks. Driven by his engagement with scripture in the classroom and by his own spiritual and theological problems, he developed a different way of thinking about Christian faith and life. This volume, although a collection of essays mostly printed elsewhere over a twenty-year period, constitutes a comprehensive and careful analysis of the most important of these shifts. Each essay can be read independently, but together, they constitute the most up-to-date and detailed analysis in English of Luther’s development during these decisive years.

As Timothy Wengert notes in the introduction, the most important elements of Luther’s proposal are in the first three essays, which focus on the shift between 1510 and 1516 from love to faith as the central concept that undergirds his portrayal of the Christian life. This shift was rooted in late-medieval developments related to penance and humility in the context of an emergent “piety theology” (Frömmigkeitstheologie). In a far more detailed way than was the case fifty years ago, Luther’s evolution is situated in its late-medieval setting.

Also especially worthy of note is the essay on the way in which Luther appropriated and transformed strands of late-medieval mysticism into a new vision of the union of the Christian with Christ that focused on the Word as a mode of mediation that produced its own sort of immediacy. The volume closes with Hamm’s own summary of Luther’s mature theology of justification.

A tension that permeates the essays is between Hamm’s careful delineation of continuities and discontinuities between Luther and his immediate medieval forebears and his own insistence, common to most Protestant Luther scholarship of the last hundred years, that what finally results constitutes a “total break” (p. 177) with what preceded it. Here Hamm’s own theological commitments perhaps shape his reading.

The translation is occasionally clumsy but, in the cases where this reviewer checked the original German, accurate.

This volume is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Luther’s early development. [End Page 404]

Michael Root
The Catholic University of America
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