Luther’s Christological Legacy: Christocentrism and the Chalcedonian Tradition. By Johannes Zachhuber

Abstract

It was an excellent idea to ask Johannes Zachhuber to give the Marquette lecture for the fifth centenary of the Reformation. He offers an attractive recommendation of Luther as theologian, and his contribution will figure honourably among the many classics in this prestigious series. I learned much from this book on a second reading, but also felt some unease at a feature it shares with so much scholarship on Luther today, namely the subordination of the teaching on justification to an over-arching metaphysical schema. Zachhuber celebrates the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification and deplores those who have ‘started dismissing this progress as endangering the purity of their own traditions’ (p. 11). But the objections of theologians such as Eberhard Jüngel and Ingolf Dalferth go much deeper than this suggests. Zachhuber’s lecture is very close to another rich and fascinating publication, Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der Idiomenkommunikation, edited by Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (De Gruyter, 2007). This book, too, refers to justification by faith only to note that its ground lies nowhere else than in Chalcedon. One has the disheartening impression that the long-beloved Rechtfertigungslehre has become the Cinderella of Lutheranism and that Lutheran theologians have replaced the event of justification with a metaphysical simulacrum.