Recent Research Interests and Projects
by Kurt K. Hendel

While my scholarly vocation is that of a church historian, my teaching and publications have focused both on church history and on Lutheran theology. The Lutheran Reformation, Martin Luther’s theological perspectives, the theology of the Lutheran Confessions, and the reforming work and theology of Johannes Bugenhagen have been of particular interest to me and have, therefore, captured my primary scholarly attention. That continues to be the case.

Specific invitations to pursue particular scholarly projects have resulted in four recent publications. Two of those invitations came from Paul Rorem, the editor of Lutheran Quarterly. This fine theological journal continues to publish articles related to the quincentennial celebration of the Reformation. Each article examines a specific event or a publication that significantly shaped the Lutheran reform movement and its theology. My two contributions to this series addressed the Leipzig Debate of 1519 and Luther’s To the Christian Nobility, which was one of several seminal publications by the Reformer in 1520.

The Leipzig Debate marks a crucial moment in the early history of the Lutheran Reformation. The chief debaters were Luther and Johannes Eck, who would become Luther’s most ardent critic in the German territories. The two men addressed theological themes that highlighted the substantial differences between the emerging evangelical theology of Luther and the theology of the Roman Church. Nature and grace, the bondage or freedom of the will, the motivation and purpose of good works, the penitential theology and practices of the church, the authority of Scripture and tradition, and papal power were all explored during the debate. The role and authority of the papacy in the life of the church was a particularly volatile issue, and Eck focused especially on it as he insisted that Luther’s positions mirrored those of Jan Hus and were, therefore, heretical. The charge of heresy against Luther gained significant momentum after Leipzig and eventually led to the papal bull of excommunication and the imperial Edict of Worms. In spite of these developments, the debate also strengthened Luther’s resolve to foster the reformation of the church and its teachings and practices in light of the gospel.

Luther, therefore, continued to articulate his theology in numerous publications. Luther wrote his To the Christian Nobility because he was eager to articulate the implications of his theology for the reform of society, as well as for the reformation of the church. The treatise consists of three parts. In the first section, Luther explicates his understandings of the universal priesthood of the baptized, of good order in the church, and of the doctrine of vocation. The second section addresses three ecclesiastical abuses, namely, the avarice of the papacy, the continuing proliferation of the number of cardinals, and the expansion of the curia, all of which drained the fiscal resources of the church’s members. He also urged the calling of a council in order to remedy these challenges. The third section consists of a list of twenty-seven reform proposals that addressed problems in the church and the society in general. Luther’s articulation of the universal priesthood of the baptized and its implications for ecclesiology and the Christian’s vocation remain the most relevant contribution of this treatise, although his willingness to identify and offer solutions to significant ecclesiastical and societal challenges also remains an admirable example for contemporary Christians. The treatise thus continues to serve as a powerful reminder to the church that it must be cognizant of its own failures, of its need to be a reformed and reforming community, and of its calling to be God’s agent of transformation and justice in the world.

My other two recent publications are translations of original works in German. The first was written in 1520 by an opponent of Luther named Augustine von Alveldt. The original document is part of the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection, housed in the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University. The Collection consists of more than 3900 original manuscripts and printed works written by Martin Luther and contemporaries who supported or challenged the Lutheran reform movement. It includes more than 1000 Luther publications and thus constitutes the largest collection of original Luther sources in the U.S. I was invited to translate and annotate the work by Alveldt, the title of which is simply Ein Sermon.

Alveldt was a friar who lectured on Scripture in the Franciscan cloister in Leipzig. He also served as provincial head of the Franciscan Order in Saxony. He was impacted by Renaissance humanism and its ad fontes emphasis and was an able Latinist and a student of the biblical languages. Alveldt became an early literary opponent of Luther and a diligent apologist of Rome. He particularly defended papal authority in light of Luther’s critique. He also supported the church’s Eucharistic theology and its sacramental practices and piety in response to Luther’s criticisms. Penance, ecclesiology, Mariology, and marriage and celibacy were additional topics of interest to Alveldt.

The ”sermon” is actually not a sermon but a short treatise. It consists of three sections. The first part serves as a self-defense against Luther’s ad hominem attacks on Alveldt in a recent publication of his. In the second section, Alveldt accuses Luther of heresy by linking the Reformer’s teachings to John Wyclif and Jan Hus. The third section summarizes Alveldt’s defense of papal authority. The friar agrees with Luther that Christ is the Head of the church. However, Christ has also chosen Peter and his successors to serve as Christ’s vicars who are called to feed and nourish Christ’s sheep. The papacy is, therefore, divinely instituted and necessary for the well-being of the church because the pope interprets Scripture faithfully and guards the church against heresy.

If all this piques your curiosity, you can now read A Sermon online.

The second translation is of a 21^st century work by Helmut Hartmann, a Lutheran pastor and superintendent in the former German Democratic Republic. He prepared a memoir of his life and ministry as a gift to his family on his seventieth birthday. The volume consists of a series of remembrances and reflections, one for each year of his life. While it is obviously personal in nature, the memoir provides keen insights into the challenges and opportunities that individual Christians, pastoral leaders, and the institutional church faced in East Germany. The persistent challenge of negotiating with those in power without compromising both one’s faith and one’s ethics is a consistent theme throughout this volume. Triumphs and failures are named with gratitude or with regret.

All told, the memoir is a fascinating, informative, and perceptive commentary on the individual believer’s and the church’s mission in a sociopolitical context that was intentionally antagonistic to the institutional Christian church and its members as they sought to remain faithful to Christ, to fulfill their vocation as Christ’s witnesses, and to serve as God’s agents of grace and love in the world. Because Hartmann refers to numerous individuals, places, and events in his memoir, the translation also includes copious annotations which provide necessary contextual information. The English title of the book is The Quest for Faithfulness. You can find it at Amazon.

As to my scholarly research:

I have had the joy and privilege of continuing to teach at LSTC as an emeritus faculty colleague. Accordingly, much of my research and writing continues to be related to the courses I have been offering. Invitations to lead adult forum sessions or to present individual lectures in congregations have also inspired research and writing. The seminary and congregational lectures and presentations have not been prepared with the goal of publishing them, although I may offer at least some of these written materials to journals for their consideration. A significant part of this research and writing has been focused on current justice issues and commitments. This is due largely to the emphasis placed on the public church and the quest for justice in both the seminary’s curriculum and the ELCA’s current understanding of mission. My own theological and ethical interests are involved here as well. Martin Luther’s writings and Lutheran confessional theology have continued to remain primary resources for me as I address these matters.

Here are some topics that have been of particular interest to me:

• The care of creation
• Church and state relationships, particularly in light of contemporary religious nationalism—Christian nationalism, to be specific
• The Christian response to poverty
• Responsible Christian behavior during a time of pandemic
• War and peace
• Racism, and especially antisemitism

Here are some theological resources I have found both relevant and helpful in addressing contemporary justice issues:

• The doctrines of creation and incarnation
• Lutheran sacramental theology, especially in its insistence that the finite is a vehicle of the divine
• Luther’s two governances theory (aka the doctrine of the two kingdoms)
• Luther’s affirmation of the orders of creation
• The biblical and Lutheran ethic of faith active in love
• Luther’s emphasis that Christians have been freed to be servants of their neighbors
• The Lutheran doctrine of vocation
• The Reformer’s assertion that the only war Christians may support is a defensive war
• His insistence that the use of force and violence is neither justifiable nor effective in matters of faith and conscience

I commend all of these both to individual Christians and to the wider Christian community as they wrestle with the issues of the day. They have certainly been of use in my own research, writing, teaching, and witness.

 

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Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
A publication of the Crossings Community

Edmund Schlink’s Ecumenical Dogmatics: A Publication Announcement
by Matthew L. Becker

I’m pleased to announce the publication of Edmund Schlink’s Ecumenical Dogmatics. It is coming out in hardcover in two half volumes (1277 pages total). The work is really the equivalent of four 320-page volumes of church doctrine. It is the culmination of Schlink’s many decades of ecumenical work and teaching, principally at Heidelberg University, where he established an ecumenical center after World War II.

Ecumenical Dogmatics reflects Schlink’s deep understanding of both Western and Eastern traditions of Christian doctrine and practice. He was the principal Lutheran participant in the World Council of Churches (WCC) in the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s. He also served as the official observer from the German Protestant Church at Vatican II, where he became a leading spokesperson for the non-Roman observers. He has influenced many American Lutheran theologians, especially Walter Bouman, Won Yong Ji, Robert Jenson, Carl Braaten, Eugene Skibbe, and others.

Schlink’s dogmatics is the most significant summary of Christian doctrine written between Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology. Indeed, his work contains material that is found in no other dogmatics text with which I am familiar. While Schlink is most known among Americans for his Theology of the Lutheran Confessions and his little book on baptism, his Ecumenical Dogmatics was his opus magnum. It has never been translated into another language until now. In its German form, it has continued to be an important resource for university theology students who are preparing for their exams in Christian doctrine. I’m hoping that the book will be read by American pastors, seminarians, and graduate students, but given the editorial notes that are unique to the American Edition, I think even lay people will find its content accessible and edifying.

Pannenberg (who was Schlink’s assistant for many years) wrote the preface. One of the two forewords was written by Schlink’s long-time friend, the Roman Catholic theologian Heinrich Fries. The other foreword was written by another of Schlink’s friends and WCC associates, the Greek Orthodox theologian Nikos Nissiotis. The afterword is by one of Schlink’s last assistants, Michael Plathow. In addition to serving as the principal translator (assisted by Hans Spalteholz, Robin Lütjohann, Mark Seifrid, Ellie Wegener, and Ken Jones), I wrote the 25-page introduction and all of the editorial notes (more than 500 of them).

The abiding strength of the work is the way in which Schlink brings theological insights from all of the principal church fathers and subsequent key theologians (both Eastern and Western) into conversation with one another. He identifies points of convergence and areas of ongoing disagreements. He also suggests ways forward for overcoming the differences and historic conflicts.

While Luther is clearly Schlink’s most important non-biblical influence, other thinkers who receive significant attention include Irenaeus, Augustine, the Cappadocians, Cyril of Jerusalem, John of Damascus, Gregory of Palamas, Anselm, Aquinas, and Calvin. They also include Schlink’s most important 20^th century contemporaries, e.g. Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, Karl Rahner, Fries, and the principal Orthodox participants in the WCC. (Rahner was also a friend, as were Joseph Ratzinger—later Benedict XVI—and Hans Küng, who also make appearances in the book). Thus the book is not only a contemporary summary of the Christian faith but also an excellent resource for gaining a deeper understanding of the history of Christian doctrine. There are more than 2000 Scripture references, but Schlink also draws heavily upon the Lutheran confessional writings and other historic confessions in the history of the churches.

I hope that the book might be used in ecumenical study groups or as a text that invites theological dialogue among pastors and other church leaders. It could serve as a discussion starter for a set of pastoral circuit meetings. I also hope that at least a few professors of systematic theology will use the book in their teaching, and perhaps will even assign it as a text for their seminarians or graduate students. And I do think that the work could serve as a kind of “refresher course” in Christian doctrine for pastors and other church leaders.

The book is now available from its publisher, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage, and from Amazon. If someone wants to order a review copy, it will be available through V&R’s American distributor in Bristol: tel. 860-584-6546.

Whatever proceeds I receive from the sale of the book will be given to charities, e.g., Bright Stars of Bethlehem, the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, as well as local Lutheran congregations.

If you’d like to see a sampling of the table of contents, go to my blog page.

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Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
A publication of the Crossings Community

Who’s Fooling Whom?: Reflections on David Bentley Hart’s
Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009)
by George C. Heider

Long ago and far away, my seminary graduating class gathered for its farewell banquet. The featured speaker was famed Reformation historian Lewis Spitz, Jr., of Stanford University. I shall never forget an epigram he shared during his after-dinner speech: “Let me write a nation’s history, and you may write its laws.” His point is that who we are and understand ourselves to be is in fundamental ways a function of our understanding of our history.

Such is the premise of David Bentley Hart’s 2009 work. The title is a mash-up of the titles of two well-known books: Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799 et seq.). It is clear from the very first page that “New Atheists” like Dawkins are squarely in the crosshairs of Hart’s argument, and while Schleiermacher is never cited by name, Hart definitely writes in the tradition of one who sees the decline in the influence of religion (and specifically of Christianity) and wants to push back—hard. (Moreover, to confirm the Schleiermacher allusion beyond doubt, he even refers to his opponents as “cultured despisers” [p. 19].)

Hart’s “essay” (his term) pursues a historical path, seeking to show that the rise of Christianity was a “revolution” unlike any other in the West and that, despite undeniable abuses and betrayals along the way, it has proven of unique and inestimable worth. To this end, he focuses particularly on the changes that he believes the faith worked in the “pagan” Roman Empire during late antiquity.

Put negatively, Hart’s purpose is to disabuse the reader of what he terms the myth that the Christian West engaged in wholesale rejection (and even destruction) of the wisdom of Greece and Rome. In this myth, the Christian West is therefore responsible for bringing on a “Dark Ages” that persisted from the decline and fall of the (Western) Roman Empire to the recovery of classical knowledge during the Renaissance. Hart bookends his work with bare-knuckled polemic against moderns like Dawkins and others of his ilk for failures philosophical, logical, theological, and, above all, historical.

There are times, to be sure, when Hart appears to want it both ways in his description of the role of Christianity in the emergence of modernity’s achievements, especially in the pure and applied sciences. Sometimes he argues that, far from destroying (or losing) the legacy of ancient, classical wisdom, Christian institutions preserved it (especially in monasteries and mediated by the Byzantine realms). At other times, he holds that it was precisely in forgetting the assumptions of the past (above all, of Aristotle) that real progress was enabled.

Above all, Hart appears concerned to defend institutional, medieval Western Christianity against the charges of superstition and the suppression of freedoms. In fact, he avers, it was only as the modern state emerged from beneath the aegis of the Church that the truly horrific (and scientific!) manifestations of warfare developed. Thus, he holds that the “wars of religion” of early modernity were not primarily religious at all. They were rooted in the development of the unfettered secular state and, in Josef Goebbels’s infamous phrase, of “total war.” (Hart’s concurrent claim that the Protestant Reformation succeeded only because it was in the interest of supportive princes betrays a simplified notion of causality that is, in my view, all too common in the book [p. 90].)

Hart’s contention is that a modern obsession with the “triumph of the will” (his phrase, p. 224) fails to take into consideration the morality of objects of free choice. As a result, the West is in danger of losing the underpinnings for the charity that, he says, represents Christianity’s most distinctive contribution to the world. (He uses “charity” in its classical sense. Charity in not merely gifts to those in need, but inclusive of all acts of mercy, especially as found in institutional settings such as hospitals and orphanages.)

Of most particular interest to me was Hart’s claim that it was medieval Western universities that enabled the “great leap forward” (my phrase) in matters “scientific, technical, and theoretical” (p. 71). No doubt, my interest is in large part piqued by my having spent my career as a teacher/scholar and administrator in Lutheran Christian institutions of higher education. To the extent that my students were aware of the overarching story of the history of the West, they did likely hold to the narrative that Hart seeks to debunk. (In part, this may be a function of the tendency among Lutherans to skip in one bound from the apostolic age to the Reformation era, leaving a dark hole, if not Dark Ages, in between.) On the other hand, students acquainted with history on such a grand scale were all too few.

More seriously for Hart, especially the second generation of students whom I taught (following a score of years focused chiefly on senior administration) were chiefly imbued with a perspective that the author hardly mentions: post-modernism. Thus, I got some hints that students argued over religious matters outside of class. A few Roman Catholic students complained to me about being hounded by more exclusivist Lutheran peers at Valparaiso University. But for the most part, relativism vis-à-vis others’ beliefs was the order of the day, such that what class discussions lacked in intensity they gained in civility.

I tried to set a tone that allowed students of all persuasions—and none—to feel comfortable expressing their convictions by telling them on the first day of class that I was a pastor, but not their pastor. I was their professor. The upshot, at least as reflected in student evaluations of instruction, was plaudits even by self-proclaimed atheists and agnostics that the courses were both fair and interesting. I suspect (without having tried it) that a teaching style that displayed the polemical bite of Hart would not have been as well-received, if for no other reason than that students by and large seemed to have absorbed our culture’s stance that faith is a private matter.

It is for that reason that I wish Hart had written a somewhat different book (even as I acknowledge that it is the cheapest trick of book reviewers to complain that a work is not the one that they themselves would have written). Hart’s essay is above all a fascinating work of broad-brush historiography, as it offers an alternative to what is doubtlessly the default understanding of the history of the West.

I certainly appreciated and concurred with his insistence on holding faith and reason together, as mutually illuminating. Where I most wish Hart had said more is as regards the future. He mentions the worldwide claims and presence of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere (where these days the faith is expanding most rapidly), but only on the last page. What comes through most clearly is a gloomy assessment of the twilight of Christendom, which he explicitly compares to the fade-out of Roman paganism in the face of Christianity’s rise. He does hold out a general hope that something analogous to the desert ascetics of the fourth century of our era might spur a renewal. But what I longed for was some clearer idea of what my students and I might actually do to make a difference.

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Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
A publication of the Crossings Community