Thinking Through the Cross

Abstract

Martin Luther has given little explicit influence on philosophy, and in 1950 Jaroslav Pelikan called for further work into investigating a ‘Lutheran philosophy.’ The beginning of this work lies in Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, in which he attacks the method of scholasticism and counters with the method of truly Christian theology, a theologia crucis. Such counter, this article argues, entails a shift in Christian philosophizing, a shift that sharply distinguishes between God and man and yet, through this distinction, as Luther asserts, allows one to “call the thing what it actually is”—and thus leads to a truly Christian philosophy.