Ablass und Reformation. Erstaunliche Kohärenzen by Berndt Hamm (review)

Hamm harvests fruits from his half century of research in the history of late medieval German piety to produce a most helpful collection of evidence that explains the intentions of the church in propagating the popular theory of indulgences in the world of Luther's youth and early career as university instructor. Hamm proposes that "in the two centuries before the Reformation the dynamic of an increasingly expanding theology of grace, a piety based on mercy, and a religion of comfort laid an ever-stronger weight on the freely given, protective goodness of God. Within the dynamic of the reinforcement of these ideas, which were then taken up and radicalized by the Reformation, the proclamation of indulgences and jubilees formed an important strand along with other remarkable forces that advanced the message of grace and the gospel" (9). Within the coordinates of late medieval theology, piety, and the authority of the church there took place "a final intensification, a maximizing of grace and the forgiveness of sins, to which Luther responded in a surprisingly different manner to place great worth on divine mercy and maximize it" (10). Hamm qualifies his striving to highlight the "coherence" between the ever cheaper grace of the indulgence preachers, however, by noting that "the continuation of the late medieval transformation in the same direction of modification is to be noted [in Luther] but it is bound up with a noteworthy qualitative leap" (12).

Hamm traces the development of this ever-easier access to the grace and forgiveness that was attainable through indulgences and similar means which the pope and, under his direction, the clergy had to dispense. His study focuses on the concessions granted by the church's opening an ever-wider portal to the winning of grace, which the indulgence commissioner Raimund Peraudi developed around 1500. This helps readers grasp both the theoretical framework for the church's easing requirements for gaining assurance through a minimal contribution of religious commitment and the perception of officials such as Peraudi of the need for meeting the pastoral catastrophe such requirements engendered. Hamm's years of engagement with the thought of Peraudi's assistant, Johannes von Paltz, provide specific details of the system which Luther encountered since both Luther and Paltz resided in the Augustinian Eremite cloister in Erfurt (85–98). It is unfortunate that Luther never mentioned Paltz since he seems to have been a potential vital link between popular pious culture and Luther in his early years as a monk.

At the end of the book Hamm summarizes his findings: the striving of Peraudi, Paltz, and others to provide good pastoral care within the presuppositions of grace dispensed to those who had fulfilled at least minimal sacred activity through some element of the hierarchical structures of the time produced attempts to assure those who purchased indulgences of 1) total grace and complete forgiveness of sins, 2) good pastoral care, 3) the nearness of grace, 4) the lifting of the burdens of the sinner, 5) the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, 6) certainty of salvation (pp. 233–250).

Hamm's research provides those interested in the texture of Luther's pastoral address to the problems he encountered in this system with detailed analysis of the theological reasoning behind the ever easier access to grace being developed at Luther's time. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the "coherence" or "continuity" that must be recognized between the medieval way of thinking and Luther's theology is better seen as a decisive break with the system that had indeed posed the questions and provided the concepts with which Luther tendered a radically new way of thinking. Hamm sometimes grants this point but too often obscures it with his desire, proper as a corrective, to show readers that Luther grew up surrounded by the raw material for his radically new design for defining being Christian. However, Copernicus did not go beyond the efforts of his contemporary astronomers Georg von Peuerbach and Johannes Regiomontanus, who were refining Ptolemy...