Robert Kolb is one of our superb church historians and Luther scholars. This book demonstrates a full range of Kolb's command of appropriate primary and secondary sources. But it also amply illustrates his thesis that Luther and his Wittenberg School of followers had a thoroughly scripture-centered view of Christian faith and life. The fourteen chapters focus on how Luther and his adherents understood what the Bible is, their activities in interpreting scripture through commentaries and preaching, and how God's message of salvation in Jesus Christ is to be proclaimed through God's “multimedia approach, via oral, written, and sacramental forms” (450).

Kolb's mastery of Luther's thought is thoroughly apparent through the first seven chapters where he examines Luther's developing views on the nature of scripture, his hermeneutical framework, and Luther's work as a professor, preacher, and translator. Kolb begins by noting that the maxim “God's Word remains forever” was on the title page of Luther's translation of the Bible (1534) while also being the motto of the Smalcald League, and the alliance of Evangelical princes and municipalities, formed in 1531. This means, says Kolb, that by this time, the assertion had become “the foundation of a new worldview, a new definition of what it means to be Christian, formulated by Luther and his colleagues at the University of Wittenberg” (1). In essence, this meant that through his study of scripture, Luther came to characterize the meaning of being a Christian as a movement away from “persons approaching God with their own good works, primarily sacred works and ritual activities” (467). Luther found that “God initiates the relationship that rescues human beings from their sinful state” by “coming into conversation with them, renewing the dialogue that had marked the Creator-creature relationship in the beginning” (467). God's identity was redefined, away from medieval theological and ecclesiastical emphases. God's identity was, for Luther, “in its essence, mercy and steadfast loving-kindness, expressed supremely in Christ's death and resurrection” (3). The human creature was now understood as “a dependent creature, charged by God to care for his creation in love and service to neighbor” (3). Between 1520 and 1522, Luther spelled out his core ideas through six major writings which presented views that were durable for the Reformer for the next quarter-century, until he died.

Through all Luther's reforming activities in the church and society, “the Bible served as center of his entire enterprise” (8). For “permeating the whole of life for the Wittenberg theologians was the presence of God, particularly of God in conversation with his people in, through, and by means of Holy Scripture” (8). Kolb's book, he says, is designed “to provide a digest of existing analyses of various aspects of biblical interpretation and proclamation in the Wittenberg circle” (15). Kolb intends to concentrate on Luther's “formal exegetical and homiletic efforts to convey the biblical message as these efforts were recorded in written or printed form” (15).

Well-known are Luther critiques of medieval religion in its various facets. In the context of a religious temperament that stressed the visual—in the ritual actions of the mass—Luther stressed the aural and oral. For “Luther's God did more than permit himself to be observed: God addressed his hearers and gave them his Word intended ‘for you’” (37). For Luther, says Kolb, “everything began and begins with God talking, and he talks through human beings as the instruments of his grace in oral, written, and sacramental forms” (41).

Luther's hermeneutical framework included a careful concern for language. He and his colleague Philip Melanchthon emphasized that “effective communication of God's Word demands both rhetorical and logical skills” (101). Luther's presupposition and foundational conviction for biblical interpretation emerged from his view of the “grand narrative” (or “metanarrative”) of scripture (105). In commenting on Genesis 10, Luther contended the Bible “contains the thread that is drawn from the first world to the middle and end of all things” (105). Luther's basic hermeneutic for reading scripture was the law/Gospel framework. Says Kolb, for Luther, “the law reveals sin; the gospel reveals God's help and deliverance; those who trust the gospel proceed to practice the life of faith” (122).

Luther's ongoing interpretation of scripture expressed his view of “the entire Christian life as immersed in God's Word” (130). Prayer and meditation are to accompany scriptural interpretation and, said Luther, “Holy Scripture's inseparable companion is the Holy Spirit” (131).

These beliefs formed the basis for Luther's work as a professor, preacher, and translator, as Kolb carefully details these three forms of Luther's ministry. These chapters provide a treasury of Luther quotations. Luther interpreted scripture, stressing its historical nature, yet as Kolb notes, “allegory never disappeared from his interpretive toolbox” (158). Preaching, which Luther may have done four-thousand times (180), must always proclaim the message of Christ “according to the rule of faith” (188).

Kolb's treatment of Luther's colleagues who formed the Wittenberg community of scholars is an extensive examination of ways Luther's followers continued a scripture-centered proclamation in preaching. Kolb presents twenty-eight authors who “studied under Luther and/or Melanchthon and their colleagues in the next generation” (302). As Kolb shows throughout, these students repeated but also refashioned “what they had learned from the epoch makers, adopting but also adapting their insights for a new generation in new circumstances” (311). Kolb's work here is the most far-reaching and detailed study of this group which has appeared. His rightful hope is that his volume will “arouse more interest than has been shown to date in analyzing the perceptions and procedures of these members of the Wittenberg school of exegesis” (469).

This book is a deep mine of information. But it is also a compelling expression of Luther's and his followers’ experience of the Bible as what Kolb calls “a trysting place with God” (14). To them, God was present in scripture, continually speaking. In the Bible, the Holy Spirit continually addressed these scholars, “engaging them as means and instruments” through whom the Spirit exercised “power for the salvation of hearers and readers” (14).