Book Review: Lutheran Theology: A Critical Introduction by Paul R. Hinlicky

Abstract

This brief volume tells the story of half a millennium of the Lutheran theological tradition from its origin in Luther’s initial call for reform to its present global condition of conflict and confusion. I cannot think of anyone better equipped to tell this sorry tale than Paul Hinlicky, no stranger to conflict and controversy himself. This book is a concise digest of things he was written about Luther and Lutheran theology over many years in weighty tomes and learned articles. Hinlicky concludes his book with “A Brief Prolegomena to Any Future Lutheran Theology,” informing his readers on where he stands in the midst of the “contested contemporary world of Lutheran theology.” As Hinlicky surveys world Lutheranism he observes a decadent and dying post-Christendom Lutheranism in Eastern and Western Europe, he sees the younger churches planted by the nineteenth-century missionary movement developing indigenous theologies of their own, he sees American Lutheranism divided between pseudo-orthodox evangelical fundamentalism and ecumenically oriented evangelical Catholicism, and both of them being challenged by a resurgence of liberal Lutheranism blending with various liberationist and feminist theologies. What Hinlicky proposes as a more promising alternative emerges from his narrative of the successive types of Lutheranism, starting with Luther’s own multiple, self-contradictory theological positions, followed first by the period of confessional Lutheranism culminating in the Formula of Concord, next by seventeenth-century scholastic orthodoxy which, contrary to Luther, put Aristotle back into the driver’s seat, then the rise of Pietism, critical of “dead orthodoxy,” led by the fervent devotional writings of Johann Arndt, Philip Jacob Spener, and August Hermann Francke. Both Lutheran Orthodoxy and Pietism came tumbling down with the relentless rationalistic critique of traditional Christian dogmatics by the leading philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant. Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason opened the Book Review