A Documentary History of Lutheranism. Volume One: From the Reformation to Pietism ed. by Eric Lund, and: A Documentary History of Lutheranism. Volume Two: From the Enlightenment to the Present ed. by Eric Lund and Mark Granquist (review)

These two volumes provide a broad range of primary source materials for those who seek to understand the Lutheran heritage better. Many of the selections appear here for the first time in English translation. Lund, professor emeritus of religion at St. Olaf College, prepared all nine chapters in the first volume, as well as the eight chapters in the second that concern continental Europe and the non-Western world. Granquist, professor of church history at Luther Seminary, organized the other four chapters in volume two that deal with America, Scandinavia, and inter-religious dialogue. The format for both volumes is the same. A general chronological ordering of the excerpts is occasionally broken up by chapters on specific themes. While some chapters focus on intellectual developments in Lutheran theology, others concentrate on social-political changes and institutional-ecclesial debates and transformations. Each volume begins with a helpful chronology of Lutheran history and ends with a bibliography of English-language resources for further study. Volume one, which also includes a timeline of Luther's life, covers key individuals and events through 1750. Volume Two begins with the first Lutheran immigrants to North America in the early seventeenth century and brings the narrative forward to the 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses.

The twenty-one introductory essays for the chapters are clear, concise, informative, and well-written. They not only identify lines of continuity between the excerpts in a given chapter but also offer a coherent interpretation of them in light of important features from their social, intellectual, and historical contexts. Indeed, a strength of the project is its recurrent concern to underscore specific connections between the history of ideas and developments in social history. Interspersed among the source materials are helpful illustrations, portraits, and photographs. Several editorial notes define unfamiliar terms or give additional contextual information.

According to Lund, two criteria guided the selection of the 526 excerpts: (1) these texts had "to highlight developments that promoted cohesiveness among Lutherans and a common sense of identity across the centuries"; and (2) the texts had to demonstrate "the presence of significant diversity within Lutheranism" (xvi). While both volumes generally meet these criteria (which manifestly are in tension with one another), the first seems to do a better job of balancing them than the second. While both volumes include, for example, more women's voices than Lund's earlier anthology did, a distinctive aspect of the story that unfolds in the second book is a growing sense of disunity among Lutherans—despite moments of ecumenical rapprochement—in part, because of the significant expansion of diversity within global Lutheranism.

As with any anthology of this size and type, people will quibble about individual selections (and their placement) and argue about omissions. For example, a student unfamiliar with the history of Lutheranism on reading the second volume could easily conclude that there have been no important American Lutheran theologians since World War II. The reader is treated to excerpts from many twentieth-century German, Scandinavian (more than 40 pages!), and non-Western theologians, but almost nothing from modern North Americans, save for Carl Braaten's important 1995 essay, "No Other Gospel." Most of the selections in the chapter on North America come from institutional documents, for example, "The Madison Agreement," "The Brief Statement," the LCA's statement on race relations, the ELCA's 2009 statement on human sexuality. Surely a few pages could have been devoted to at least a handful of the most important recent American Lutheran theologians, such as Reu, Sittler, Caemmerer, Piepkorn, Jenson, Neuhaus, Bertram, Lindbeck, and Marty, among others. Should not the second book have included at...