Trinity and Martin Luther

Christine Helmer

Description

Martin Luther was classically orthodox. Scholars often portray Luther as a heroic revolutionary, totally unlike his peers and forebears-as if he alone inaugurated modernity. But is this accurate? Is this even fair? At times this revolutionary model of Luther has come to some shocking conclusions, particularly concerning the doctrine of the Trinity. Some have called Luther modalist or tritheist-somehow theologically heterodox. In The Trinity and Martin Luther Christine Helmer uncovers Luther's trinitarian theology. The Trinity is the central doctrine of the Christian faith. It's not enough for dusty, ivory tower academics to know and understand it. Common people need the Trinity, too. Doctrine matters. Martin Luther knew this. But how did he communicate the doctrine of the Trinity to lay and learned listeners? And how does his trinitarian teaching relate to the medieval Christian theological and philosophical tradition? Helmer upends stereotypes of Luther's doctrine of the Trinity. This definitive work has been updated with a new foreword and with fresh translations of Luther's Latin and German texts.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• Christian Church
• Theology
• History of religions
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 08 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683590514
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

The Trinity and Martin Luther
Revised Edition
CHRISTINE HELMER
STUDIES IN HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY
The Trinity and Martin Luther, Revised Edition
Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology
Copyright 2017 Christine Helmer
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
LexhamPress.com
All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [e-mail] .
First edition published by Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz am Rhein (1999).
Print ISBN 9781683590507
Digital ISBN 9781683590514
Lexham Editorial Team: Todd Hains, Abigail Stocker, Danielle Thevenaz, Joel Wilcox
Cover Design: Bryan Hintz

For Brevard S. Childs
“You have set my feet in a broad place” (Psalm 31:8).
Contents
Preface to the New Edition
Select Bibliography of Recent Literature on the Trinity
Foreword to the Original Edition
Preface to the Original Edition
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. Luther’s Understanding of the Trinity in the Doctoral Disputation of Georg Major and Johannes Faber (Dec. 12, 1544)
3. Luther’s Understanding of the Trinity in the Hymn, “Now Rejoice, Dear Christians” (1523)
4. Luther’s Understanding of the Trinity in the Two Sermons on Romans 11:33–36 Preached on Trinity Sunday (May 27, 1537) and the First Sunday after Trinity (June 3, 1537)
5. Conclusion
Bibliography
Names Index
Scripture Index
Preface to the New Edition
My interest in the subject of Martin Luther’s theology of the Trinity was initially inspired by the “Trinitarian turn” in Protestant theological writing of the 1970s and 1980s . Christian theology at the time was still largely taking its cues from German theologians, who had taken up Karl Barth’s placement of the Trinity into the prolegomena of theological systems. While traditional systems of theology had situated the doctrine of God as significant for these introductory sections, Barth had changed the order. He understood the doctrine of the Trinity—the content of divine revelation—as the necessary ground for systematic theologies. The Trinity was very much on the minds of Protestant theologians after World War II.
Barth’s vision was a powerful one. It identified both the content of Christian theology and its method. Christian theology would be introduced by the speculative doctrine of the Trinity revealed to be differentiated already in eternity; methodologically, the Trinity functioned as the principle of coherence for systematic theology’s work of organizing doctrine. The Trinity fulfilled two crucial criteria for systematicity. The first was coherence. As Barth had learned from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ( 1770–1831 ), the immanent Trinity was the condition for economic revelation. The second was comprehensiveness , specifically at the level of the economic Trinity. A doctrine that functioned as the principle of both coherence and comprehensiveness could serve as content for the theological system as it had developed since Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ( 1646–1716 ). But the role of the Trinity in the prolegomena of systems of theology would not come until Barth. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s ( 1768–1834 ) understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity as such was too far ahead of its time, and it earned for him the opprobrium of Trinitarian theologians; situated in the conclusion of his system, it was mistaken for an appendix.
When I began my studies of Luther at Yale University in the early 1990s , the doctrine of the Trinity constituted a vibrant field of research—everywhere, that is, except in Luther scholarship, which maintained that Luther was above all else a theologian of the cross. Basing their research on the portrait of Luther worked out in the early twentieth-century Luther Renaissance, Luther scholars focused primarily on the young Luther. They identified the young monk’s experience of grace and salvation as leading him to the doctrine of justification by faith that was the theological breakthrough precipitating the Protestant Reformation. Christ’s cross was the place where God revealed divine mercy. It was this revelation that, when preached to sinners, confronted them with both the inefficacy of any human works and the sufficiency of divine forgiveness. Likewise, it was this perception of a seismic shift from the Catholic to the Protestant paradigm that resulted in my interest in the topic of Luther and the Trinity being greeted with little more than quasi-polite skepticism. Luther was a theologian who preached Christ, not the Trinity. His theology had to do with the word of divine promise that announced as it created the reality of divine forgiveness.
To maintain that Luther might be regarded as a Trinitarian theologian, as I hoped to do, would require a lot of theological spadework. First, I had to find the texts to make my case. Luther scholarship focused on his early writings, those before 1520 , principally his early exegetical works on Romans and his polemics against Rome. But these were the very works that led to the consensus on Luther as theologian of the cross in the first place. These early writings, moreover, most often arose in contentious exchanges between Luther and his interlocutors, and so because the Trinity was never a point of contention, there were no texts of Luther’s specifically concerned with this doctrine.
I was fortunate that by the time I began researching Luther, German Luther scholar Oswald Bayer, under the new methodological rubric of genre studies, had made the specific and varied genres of Luther’s writings uniquely productive for theological reflection. I still recall my impression upon hearing Bayer lecture on the genre of catechism, a text Lutherans learn as youngsters in confirmation class. The assumption had been that catechism was a genre for children, not academic theologians. But Bayer argued that it was precisely such practical theological texts—meant to be sung, preached, taught, and memorized—that had distinct and revealing theological perspectives. I found myself thinking how interesting it would be if the Trinity might be detected in these genres!
This seemed unlikely, however. Consensus among Luther scholars and Lutheran theologians said that the Trinity was a speculative doctrine. Barth’s Trinitarian turn, on the one hand, had situated the immanent Trinity, or the Trinity in eternity, at the start of his theological system, before the doctrines of creation and redemption. For Luther scholars, on the other hand, the Reformer’s oft-cited polemic against “speculation” into the divine majesty was taken as fundamentally prohibitive of such speculative theologizing. Furthermore, Lutheran theologians in the twentieth century had doubled down on Luther’s insistence that knowledge of God is available “under the opposite” ( sub contrario ). It was to be found at those places where God reveals the divine mercy under its opposite, specifically at the cross of Christ. Any speculation on aspects of the divine being in eternity was to disobey God’s injunction against being concerned with matters with which humans ought not to be concerned.
But what emerged as my study moved forward through a process of educated guesswork and textual discovery was the opposite of what had been so long maintained as Luther’s Reformation theology. In the sermons, hymns, catechisms, and exegetical works I was reading, I found not only expositions of the Trinity but evidence that Luther viewed the Trinity in eternity as essential to Christian piety as well as necessary for knowledge of God. What I did not find was any anxiety about theological speculation!
Discovering the disputations of the later 1540s opened up a new area of research for me. These later disputations provided evidence against the antispeculative direction supposedly authorized by Luther’s focus on Christ on the cross, calling into question many of the assumptions about Luther’s theology as it was presented at the time. Luther hated philosophy, it was said. He was a theologian, not a philosopher! He insisted on faith, not reason, as the instrument for appropriating the gospel. As a theologian of the word, he had articulated a new language of faith. This was the Reformation breakthrough!
But this was not the stance I saw in the later disputations. Instead, I found a theologian who insisted on using philosophical tools to make theological truth claims; a theologian who was interested in communicating to his students and hearers the need for understanding Trinitarian relations and processions and who used reason to articulate these claims; and a theologian whose new language deployed medieval semantics, in which language in any one field of communication or understanding signified in relation to a particular subject matter while allowing for signification in other fields. In other words, I found in the later disputations a Luther who was most interested in the speculative Trinity and who not only did not prohibit such speculation but actively encouraged it as belonging to Christian life and understanding.
I needed help to get to this point, because as a Protestant theologian taught to regard Luther in modern Protestant terms, I was unprepared for what I was seeing in the disputations. Another Luther scholar interested in Luther on the question of philosophy, Theodor Dieter, recommended to me Graham White’s book Luther as Nominalist. In this important study, White had done groundbreaking work on Luther’s disputations. He had researched many of the medieval theologians whom Luther explicitly and implicitly cited in conjunction with his developing articulation of Christological and Trinitarian doctrines, namely Duns Scotus ( c. 1266–1308 ) and William of Ockham ( 1285–1347 ), Robert Holcot ( c. 1290–1349 ), and Pierre d’Ailly ( c. 1351–1420 ). White had shown, furthermore, that Luther had appropr