Kierkegaard and Luther by David Lawrence Coe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kierkegaard and Luther by David Lawrence Coe Ronald F. Marshall Kierkegaard and Luther. By David Lawrence Coe. London and Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic, 2020. xvi + 257 pp. Professor Coe, Concordia University, Seward, Nebraska, has written a book which is close to being the first comprehensive treatment of Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Luther (19 n.3). In 1858 Jacob Ørum wrote the first book on Kierkegaard and Luther, showing how they both attacked the corrupt church of their day (21 n.23). But there was more to this connection than that. Kierkegaard [End Page 366] famously said that Luther’s Ninety-five Theses could all be reduced to one in his day—namely, that Christianity did not exist because Christians did not care about dying to themselves and walking in Christ’s steps (Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed, Hongs, 23:39). Kierkegaard also liked Luther’s saucy lines about telling doubt to shut up, calling wayward theological innovations rubbish, and claiming that God burned down churches with lightning strikes because of the smugness of Christians (KW 17:190, 20:68, 247; Luther’s Works 26:228, 44:276, 75:321). Coe takes up this comparison by focusing on what Kierkegaard thought about Luther’s sermons—as recorded in Kierkegaard’s unpublished journals. Kierkegaard’s interest in Luther’s sermons fits into “Denmark’s abiding devotion to homiletic literature” (37, 226). Coe studies many of these sixty some sermons from Luther (17)—noting Kierkegaard’s three favorites on the Good Shepherd, on Christ in the boat during the storm, and on faith, hope, and love (195). He concludes that Kierkegaard is both positive and negative about them. He also thinks Kierkegaard reads them superficially— picking points of interest with no thought of being comprehensive. And Kierkegaard’s Luther collection was abridged in ways that he did not know about (58–70). Nevertheless, what Kierkegaard gleans from these sermons is usually accurate, revealing “deep evangelical insights” (2) regarding faith and works, sin and suffering. Coe also shows that in spite of Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Luther, their agreement is paramount (4)—most strikingly on how they honor the Epistle of Saint James (187). Finally, Coe notes that he is “the first to lay open the concrete content of the Luther sermons on which Kierkegaard commented,” showing how they were “heavily edited and abridged” (4, 104). When Kierkegaard criticizes Luther, Coe believes that he is often harsh and mean (4, 147). But this does not take into account that Kierkegaard thought his criticisms of Luther are only “little exceptions” (Journals, ed. Hongs, §1922)—something to which others, unlike Coe, give abiding significance (Paul R. Sponheim, Existing Before God: Søren Kierkegaard and the Human Venture, 2017, pp. 61–62). Coe’s major criticism of Kierkegaard’s reading of Luther is that he misses how Luther “more moderately views eternal and temporal [End Page 367] goods in a God-ordained hierarchy” (142). He thinks Kierkegaard illegitimately imposes his asceticism on Luther (139). Kierkegaard misses how “Luther regularly expresses a hierarchy that does not disdain temporal goods and marriage but keeps them in proper perspective” (140). But Coe has not made a strong enough case here. Luther did preach, after all, that the Christian “leaves the temporal behind and forgets it and always stretches for the eternal” (LW 77:200). According to Luther, humans are “nothing but bags of worms or bags of manure, infested with lice, maggots, stinking and foul” (LW 22:133). And even though marriage is honorable, coitus itself is “indecent” because of “conjugal lust” (LW 4:233, 239). No wonder for Luther “the world is a pigsty of unabashedly evil people, who abuse all God’s creation in the most brazen way possible, blaspheme God, and provoke him to his face” (Luther’s House Postils, ed. E. Klug, 1996, 2:187). Even so, Coe rightly concludes that what we learn about Luther from Kierkegaard is basically that without Christian struggle and pain, no one “can understand Scripture, faith, the fear or the love of God” (227). “For Luther and Kierkegaard there is no concordia without antecedent and attendant misericordia” (201). Ronald F. Marshall First Lutheran Church of West...