Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation ed. by Mark A. Lamport (review)

Is it too much to ask that a reference work built around Martin Luther's life, work, and legacy include a genuine image of the Reformer in the entry on "Luther, A Biography"? Instead of an authentic Cranach portrait, readers are shown a picture of Luther commonly found on internet searches, which a morning's worth of research reveals to be a wrongly labeled nineteenth-century depiction of an English Catholic bishop. English art historians of the 1800s discovered the error and corrected it; but now that a picture labeled "Martin Luther" is on the internet, a minor local mistake has taken on a global life of its own and impacts how we see Luther today.

In a similar way, basic problems limit the overall usefulness of this otherwise often-illuminating reference work. On the one hand, very strong contributions appear in topics such as Luther's influence on modernity and postmodernity, the relationship between philosophy and theology, and women's contributions to the Lutheran tradition. Readers will enjoy succinct articles by scholars like Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth, Dirk Lange, Andrew Pettegree, John Pless, Kirsi Stjerna, and many others.

On the other hand, while most contributors make use of recent research, a surprising number of entries use outdated sources and methods. A new encyclopedia should not include so many mentions of Roland Bainton's Here I Stand (1950) or Frederick Bente's Historical Introduction to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1921) as references and resources. Important as they were among English-speaking Lutherans, those works have been surpassed in contemporary scholarship. This uneven engagement with current research gets in the way of this encyclopedia being an entirely reliable resource, which non-specialists will have a hard time navigating.

For instance, the work contains internal inconsistencies. An entry on "Liberation Theology, Influence on" concludes by saying, "Luther's theology—and ethics—of the cross legitimize a preferential option for suffering, poor, and marginalized persons consistent with liberation theology" (434). The inclusion of an article on Luther and liberation theology suggests an editorial willingness to grant a positive correlation. However, the article on "Vocation, Doctrine of" undermines that idea: "To Lutheran academics . . . the doctrines of vocation and justification together amount to a liberation theology in the actual sense of the word. It is, however, the very opposite of its 20th-century homonym of South American provenance, which emphasizes social injustice and class struggle" (802). Which is it? Readers of this one encyclopedia could come to two very different ideas about the relationship between Luther and contemporary liberation theologies.

A similar confusion arises in the depiction of Philip Melanchthon. A biographical article and an essay on Melanchthon's Loci Communes present the reformer as a valued coworker with Luther in Wittenberg. They say little about Melanchthon's career after Luther's death, other than to acknowledge that Melanchthon was engaged in "enormous controversies." Essays on the specific controversies themselves, however, present Melanchthon's role in a purely negative light, ignoring decades of major research by scholars like Nicole Kuropka, Heinz Scheible, Günther Wartenberg, and Timothy Wengert. Readers are given incomplete information, which muddies rather than clarifies the study of Lutheranism and the Reformation.

Additionally, the entry headings are often disorienting. Are "Resurrectionism," "Self-love," and "Undecidability" essential categories in studying Luther and his theological legacy? Why is there no entry on prayer but one on "Meditation," which itself refers to Luther's idiosyncratic meditatio, oratio, tentatio pattern for engaging the Bible? Furthermore, essays on Pietism can be found under the disparate headings "German Pietism," "Lutheran Revivalism as the Root of Nordic Democracy," "Pietism in Northern Europe, the Descendants of," "Scandinavian Pietism," "Transdenominational Branches of Lutheranism" and two entries on Laestadianism. In many cases, readers will be glad there is an index to help them explore central topics like Pietism that were not categorized in more user-friendly ways.

Even worse, for a religious tradition with over thirty...