Die Luther-Gesellschaft 1918–2018. Beiträge zu ihrem hundertjährigen Jubiläum ed. by Johannes Schilling and Martin Treu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die Luther-Gesellschaft 1918–2018. Beiträge zu ihrem hundertjährigen Jubiläum ed. by Johannes Schilling and Martin Treu Robert Kolb Die Luther-Gesellschaft 1918–2018. Beiträge zu ihrem hundertjährigen Jubiläum. Edited by Johannes Schilling and Martin Treu. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2018. 351 pp. For a century the Luther-Gesellschaft has served as an important institution for conveying Luther's life and thought among both professional and lay audiences. Writing a history of an institution is a delicate task, filled with the danger of external criticism in the service of an ulterior agenda or the weakness of internal bragging. This sober assessment of the Society's development avoids both dangers even though it is written by a team of insiders. The editors, the current president of the Society, Johannes Schilling, retired professor of Reformation history at the University of Kiel, and Martin Treu, the Society's business manager, retired from long years of service at the Luther House in Wittenberg, marshalled eleven others to assist them in reviewing the activities of the Society in the turbulent century since its founding in the last days of World War I. The authors render careful assessments of how scholarship and culture are interwoven in the practice of the scholarly task. Essays focused on the presidents of the Society provide a chronological thread that highlights how the general atmosphere of German culture shaped the agenda and activities of the Society at each stage. In addition, the current editors of the Society's scholarly periodical, the Lutherjahrbuch, Christopher Spehr, and its more popular journal, Luther, Helmut Zschoch, trace the development of their publications, revealing how cultural pressures from German nationalism, National Socialism, and the concerns of a divided Germany, with the necessity of taking Marxist Reformation scholarship seriously in the 1960s–1980s, stood in tension with the ever-present concern to preserve text-driven scholarship while providing aid for parish pastors and laypeople through exposition of Luther's way of thinking. [End Page 461] Further essays explore the vital work of regional groups organized to conduct seminars and conferences dedicated to fostering Luther's theology through good scholarship brought to the popular level. The regional groups have come and gone in various parts of Germany but have provided a forum for demonstrating the relevance of Wittenberg thought. Other essays treat recently developed prizes and the valuable Luther bibliography of the Lutherjahrbuch. Personal recollections of two presidents, Schilling and Bishop Gerhard Müller, provide insights into the challenges of fulfilling the goals of the Society, among which scholarship in its purest form sometimes took second place to bringing Luther's insights to the educated public. Müller's and Schilling's particular perspectives lend depth and color to reviews by others of other leading personalities, including Karl Holl, who served briefly as president; Paul Althaus, whose thirty-seven years as president (1927–1964) spanned the break in the Society's existence caused by National Socialist crackdown and the collapse of 1945; Walther von Löwenich; Reinhard Schwarz; and also the founder and organizer of the Society, Rudolf Eucken, a philosopher, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, and ardent German nationalist. Eucken devoted the Society to making his vision of the German Luther speak to contemporaries in the dreary days after the German defeat of 1918. Eucken soon abandoned the Society, but in the 1920s the concern for the German Volk and nation that drove Karl Holl into Luther scholarship continued to influence the activities of the Society. The long, dedicated service of Theodor Knolle, pastor in Wittenberg and Hamburg, as vice-president held the Society together from the 1920s to the 1950s. His rejection of his initial commitment to the German Christian movement sympathetic to National Socialism and his later activities in the Confessing Church embody the tensions that all Germans felt throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The post-war situation revived earlier desires to attract participation from those outside Germany, particularly the Nordic lands and North America. Details of the pressures placed upon Luther scholars and those who used his thinking in preaching and teaching enrich the feel of the book for the interaction of...