Kolb - Martin Luther confessor of the faith

CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY IN CONTEXT

SERIES EDITORS

Timothy Gorringe Serene Jones Graham Ward

Any inspection of recent theological monographs makes plain that it is still thought possible to understand a text independently of its context. Work in the sociology of knowledge and in cultural studies has, however, increasingly made obvious that such divorce is impossible. On the one hand, as Marx put it, life determines consciousness. All texts have to be understood in their life situation, related to questions of power, class, and modes of production. No texts exist in intellectual innocence. On the other hand, texts are also forms of cultural power, expressing and modifying the dominant ideologies through which we understand the world. This dialectical understanding of texts demands an interdisciplinary approach if they are to be properly understood: theology needs to be read alongside economics, politics, and social studies, as well as philosophy, with which it has traditionally been linked. The cultural situatedness of any text demands, both in its own time and in the time of its rereading, a radically interdisciplinary analysis.

The aim of this series is to provide such an analysis, culturally situating texts by Christian theologians and theological movements. Only by doing this, we believe, will people of the fourth, sixteenth, or nineteenth centuries be able to speak to those of the twenty-first. Only by doing this will we be able to understand how theologies are themselves cultural productsprojects deeply resonant with their particular cultural contexts and yet nevertheless exceeding those contexts by being received into our own today. In doing this, the series should advance both our understanding of those theologies and our understanding of theology as a discipline. We also hope that it will contribute to the fast developing interdisciplinary debates of the present.

Confessor of the Faith

Robert Kolb

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In 2000 the American magazine LIFE placed Martin Luther third among the one hundred most important figures of the millennium, following Thomas Edison and Christopher Columbus. LIFE heralded his posting of his Ninety-five Theses as the third most important event of the period, behind Gutenbergs invention of movable type and Columbuss landing in the Americas. Such surveys flaunt their own subjectivity, but nonetheless Luther looms large in the publics imagination in parts of the Western world even yet.

One of Luthers own students ranked him higher:

Everyone who heard him knows what kind of man Luther was when he preached or lectured at the university. Shortly before his death he lectured on Genesis. What sheer genius, life, and power he had! The way he could say it! in my entire life I have experienced nothing more inspiring. When I heard his lectures, it was as if I were hearing an angel of the Lord. Luther had a great command of Scripture and sensed its proper meaning at every point. Dear God, there was a gigantic gift of being able to interpret Scripture properly in that man.

So said Cyriakus Spangenberg, preaching on the great prophet of God, Dr. Martin Luther, that he was a true Elijah, on 18 February 1564, Luthers eighty-first birthday, one sermon in a series Spangenberg preached twice-yearly on Luthers birthday and deathday from 1562 to 1573.

His opinion differed from that of Luthers contemporary, Johannes Cochlaeus, theologian and bureaucrat in the service of Duke George of Saxony, who concluded the first (albeit polemical) biography of Luther