Luther Under Scrutiny is a series of revised essays by Ollia-Pekka Vainio, Professor of Dogmatics at the University of Helsinki. Vainio is a leading scholar of the Finnish School of Luther interpretation and, as made clear by the essays themselves, a skilled philosopher. For the uninitiated, Vainio summarises the Finnish School’s history and broad theoretical commitments; in response to criticism that the school reads Luther ahistorically, he also describes Finnish hermeneutical commitments. These brief remarks help the reader ground Vainio’s work in a specific tradition of Luther interpretation, one that emphasises Luther’s continuity with mediaeval and patristic modes of thought – as opposed to (mostly German) interpretations of Luther, which emphasise Luther’s break with, and distance from, these same modes.
The book is not a singular, sustained argument but instead a collection of critical, perceptive analyses of topics in Luther’s thought: reason and its relationship to faith, the bound will, and life in Christ are examples. The form – essays dedicated to specific topics and thematically grouped (as reflected in the book’s subtitle) – serves well one of Vainio’s major convictions: contemporary readers of Luther make his thought too whole at our peril. Instead of over-schematising Luther’s thought or merely appealing to Luther’s authority, Vainio draws the reader’s attention to the intricacies, and at times contradictions, within Luther’s own corpus. The book proceeds with the following assumption: Luther’s contemporary value does not depend on shielding the great reformer from criticism but instead on seeing Luther as an important, at times authoritative, dialogue partner. Such an approach allows searching, critical conversation with Luther, and honest disagreement when Vainio thinks it is earned.
Take the essay ‘Bound Choice’ as an example. I suspect that this essay will prove among the most controversial in the book and will produce a good deal of scholarly response. Vainio offers no defence of Luther’s strident claims about the human will and its bondage to sin. Instead, he takes the famed debate between Luther and Erasmus as an occasion to 1) demonstrate how Luther’s various commitments in De Servo Arbitrio fail to hang together, and 2) demonstrate how this failure threatens the enterprise of public theology in a Lutheran mode. Inheritors of Lutheran theology should not turn to De Servo Arbitrio to find a coherent precis of Luther’s theology. Rather, De Servo Arbitrio demonstrates that siding with Luther in some ways means siding against him in others.
If ‘Bound Choice’ finds Vainio at his most critical of Luther, the essays in the book’s final section find Vainio at his most appreciative. In the related essays ‘Theosis’, ‘Metaphysics of Deification’ and ‘Relational Ontology’, Vainio reaffirms the Finnish School’s reading of Luther and theosis, responds to common criticisms of this perspective and examines the metaphysical and ontological questions that his reading of theosis implies. While true throughout the book, Vainio’s work in this section is remarkable for its argumentative patience, charitable response to critics and interdisciplinary reach.
Given how Vainio approaches Luther, it would be odd if commending his text also entailed foregoing criticism. Two points bear mentioning. First, given the wide range of topics, I was surprised that Vainio did not dedicate an essay to the sacraments, especially in view of their role in theosis. Second, in the epilogue, Vainio sketches potential contact points between postmodern philosophy and Lutheran theology. To persuade, many of the claims made in this section require more evidence than Vainio offers. The epilogue reads as underdeveloped, especially coming after roughly 200 pages of careful, patient argumentation. Regardless, Luther under Scrutiny deserves wide readership, particularly among Luther’s interpreters. In his back-cover comments, Volker Leppin describes the book as a sum of the Finnish School’s research results. As such, the book is equally useful for those who read Luther in a Finnish mode and those who push back against such readings.
