The Medieval Luther ed. by Christine Helmer

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Medieval Luther ed. by Christine Helmer Mark Mattes The Medieval Luther. Edited by Christine Helmer. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. xi + 301 pp. This volume of fifteen essays seeks to elucidate a “medieval Luther” as an alternative to the Luther envisioned by the Luther Renaissance which valued forensic justification, the primacy of the Word, and a “relational ontology” (9). Instead, Helmer seeks a Luther deeply indebted to Nominalist philosophy and to the late medieval German mysticism of Tauler. This research program highlights the continuity between the medieval and early modern eras. The book is divided into three main parts: Christology, Soteriology, and Ministry. It is not possible to comment on each essay and so I focus on those most apt to interest Lutheran Quarterly readers. In contrast to Reinhard Schwarz, David Luy shows that Luther’s Christology is no dynamic mixture between the divine and human in Christ, as opposed to a metaphysical, static approach. Instead, Luther’s view is continuous with the scholastic theory of suppositional carrying, which means that while most human natures subsist of themselves and do not depend on an alien suppositum, the humanity of Christ instead uniquely receives its concrete individual existence from the divine suppositum of the Word which carries it (16–17). In other words, Christ is a divine suppositum that also happens to carry a human nature. God the Son has always been simply a divine person but now he happens to sustain a human nature [End Page 356] through an extrinsic causal relation (19). For Luy, this view best accords with Luther’s late Christological disputations. Echoing Luy, Richard Cross draws out the implications of Luther’s view of suppositional union with respect to the assumption, namely, that Luther teaches divine possibility. He notes that Luther denies that Christ’s human sufferings can be ascribed to Christ’s divinity in some way distinct from that in which they are ascribed to his person (27): “Luther . . . explicitly denies that the properties of one nature can be attributed to the other. Indeed, the discussion presupposes that anything ascribed to the divinity here is ascribed to all three persons. So when Luther talks about attributing things to a nature, what he means is to talk about attributing things to a person in or under a nature” (33). Aaron Moldenhauer challenges the notion that Luther taught that words are efficacious in the modern sense of performative. Instead, Luther, similar to Aquinas, sees words as effective when they are spoken according to God’s command and in the person of Christ (49). Such efficacious words still signify the realities to which they refer. Counter to Zwingli, Luther sees words as effective in the sacraments by means of an act of God’s will or command (59). Also writing on the sacraments, the late Marilyn McCord Adams notes that, for Luther, since Christ’s humanity is united to God the Son in hypostatic union, then Christ’s humanity is wherever Christ’s divinity is. Since divinity is everywhere, so in God the Son Christ’s humanity can be everywhere. Even so, she sees Luther’s affirmation of the ubiquity of Christ’s body to be “overkill” (87), since, as medieval scholastics would have noted, Luther’s theory of ubiquity is not necessary for Christ to be really present at many altars wherever the sacrament is observed. Alice Chapman presents the medieval imagery of Christ as a physician and shows that Luther too affirmed that sin is a sickness and that Christ is the physician who heals us (123). Likewise, Candace Kohli shows that in his fight against the Antinomians, Luther advocated an increase in righteousness and a decrease in sin, indeed an active resistance to sin and a kind of purgation through which Christians establish a formal righteousness which begins to fulfill the law in the Spirit through good behavior (127). [End Page 357] Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen draws on the nuptial imagery prevalent in Luther’s bridal mysticism, the happy exchange between Christ and the believer which “means that humans are called to show love and serve in love, love of neighbor. Since God is nothing but love, pouring it abundantly into us...