This rich and informative study clears a path to the new appropriation of the Luther legacy in the global South. Justice cannot be done to its many contributions, including the critique of old Lutheranism's Luther in the global North, in the space of this review, which will focus on Westhelle's account of Luther's apocalyptic christology in tandem with his creation theology.
Westhelle's programme is to show how ‘the principle by which Luther articulated his theological thought … offered space for the people to articulate the language concerning their relationship to themselves, to the world, and to God, beyond the confines of the regimes that controlled and regulated the proper use of language, creatively transgressing and crossing them’ (p. 39, emphasis added). As such, it makes a virtue of the ‘unsystematic’ nature of Luther's theology, eschewing comprehensive representations or theological worldviews that fossilise Luther and reify his doctrine. Westhelle regards such attempts at systematisation (beginning with Melanchthon) as cover-ups of the ‘embarrassing hybridity’ (pp. 110, 190) of the Christ-event, which Westhelle's ‘burlesque’ Luther attests as a fool for Christ.
The irony of representing Luther's foolish witness to Christ as event in an academic study does not escape the author. He recognises that his retrieval of Luther and Chalcedon can only appear as ‘the symptomatic expression’ of Derrida's ‘archival malady … the feverish recruitment of the past to justify the present’ (p. 97). In any event, Derrida's worries about the betrayal of apophatic presence through kataphatic representation (in doctrines and systems of doctrine) inform Westhelle's discussion, especially of Luther's well-known binaries of law and gospel, letter and spirit, and justice and justification.
The heart of the study is an account of Luther's christology as Chalcedon's communicatio idiomatum with an apocalyptic twist. According to Westhelle, Luther's apocalyptic christology cannot be represented by a chronology: it is not the end of time, but the time of the end breaking into the transactional regime of do ut des and suum cuique. Luther's joyful exchange explodes this regime's repressive and calculating legalisms with an unheard-of righteousness that consists in God's giving precisely what is not deserved. In taking sin not His own, slavery not His own and death not His own, Christ gives as a gift the righteousness, freedom and life of this personal act of love. This new economy is ‘the alterity of Christ in the midst of the world’ (pp. 271–2). It must accordingly be proclaimed as a paradox, that is to say, as a catachrestic metaphor which by the jarring Pauline oxymoron, ‘Christ crucified’, bespeaks the presence of this novum in the world. The new creation comes, then, as an ‘incision’ which defies regulation or even coordination with the legality, rationality and economic calculus of prevailing structures of malice working injustice.
But how does this apocalyptic framework generate a hopeful ethic? The Chalcedonian doctrine of the incarnation identifies the creation of God in humanity, groaning under the structures of injustice, as the very object of the redeeming act of love. Calling upon the anti-Gnostic witness of Irenaeus of Lyon, Westhelle argues that creation theology ‘provides criteria for distinguishing relative good and evil’ (pp. 260–1). This corrective is especially needed because modern constructions of Luther's law-gospel theology in the ‘two-kingdoms doctrine’ represent a disfiguring acculturation of the Reformer's teaching that led to the ‘cynical’ (and socially conservative) argument that ‘we ought to join God in the task of preserving a helpless world while God saves our souls’ (p. 281).
Westhelle's Luther proves to be a resource for the ‘planetary’ theology of the future, with the shift from the two-kingdoms doctrine to creation theology marking an instance of the change that a contextual hermeneutics makes in the questions put to a figure like Luther. According to Westhelle, what grabs the attention of the global South in reading Luther is not the two-kingdoms doctrine, but Luther's attack on usury and his concomitant insistence that economic justice is integral to the goodness of God's ongoing creation.
Westhelle follows Oswald Bayer in reconstructing Luther's theology of the three orders of creation: ecclesia, oeconomia and politia. To be sure, this retrieval acknowledges medieval limitations in Luther's formulation of the doctrine, namely, assumptions about the static nature of the orders and the individualistic framework of redemption that accompanies them. But he goes on to argue that the orders contain irreducible anthropological dimensions, which both relativise the particular institutional forms the orders take, yet in their mutual irreducibility protect against tyranny. The materiality of creation in its dimensions of production and reproduction (oeconomia) are protected by intersubjective negotiation of interests (politia), such that praise and thanksgiving can sound on the earth (ecclesia). In this way, the orders together speak against gnosticisms that disembody or atomise salvation.
There are difficulties with this attractive and promising retrieval of Luther for ‘planetary’ purposes. I will mention several in terse formulation. First, there is an overreliance on Derrida, who is Kantian modernity continued in post-colonial garb. Materialist theologians will do better with Deleuze. Likewise the genre of genealogical essay that Westhelle attempts does not escape the peril of representation or even system. It is still writing that violently appropriates the other.
Second, while the trinitarian nature of Luther's (and Chalcedon's) christology is duly noted (pp. 108–9, 118), it does no work in overcoming the aporias caused by superimposing (via Derrida) the Cartesian-Kantian subject–object dualism on Luther. In short, what the late Robert Jenson spoke of as the ‘pneumatological deficit’ of modern western ‘binitarianism’ continues to frame even the vigorous christology here proposed. The theological fear is that restricting knowledge of God to his self-revelation in Christ evacuates God of transcendence. Westhelle consequently affirms Luther's speculation about the deus absconditus ‘unbound by His Word’, supposedly to preserve a penumbra of ‘mystery’ (pp. 119–20, 161). A better alternative would be to take incarnational theology as limiting but also informing the way we conceive of God's transcendence – namely, as the eternal perichoresis of the love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.
Third, it is surely right to see in Luther's apocalyptic doctrine of inherited sinfulness the recognition of universal complicity (pp. 236–7), and correspondingly to reground ‘the impossible possibility’ of social justice in disruptive grace (p. 239). But a self-critical reckoning on precisely this basis with the bloody legacy of Bolshevism – a rival-in-kind modernism to the capitalism Westhelle excoriates – goes begging, at least in this book.
