These four lecturers by two leading German scholars, one a church historian, the other a systematic theologian, explore the message and the legacy of the Reformation, understood as a theology of liberation. Berndt Hamm carefully traces the origins of the Reformation ‘breakthrough’, which lay in the simultaneity of long-standing intellectual concerns over the Catholic understanding of faith and Luther's reduction of a minimum of human agency in the receipt of grace and salvation to a radical nothing. For all the diversity of Reformation teaching and acceptance, in Hamm's judgement all paths lead back to Luther. Michael Welker seeks to rescue the Bible from one-sided attempts to reduce a thousand years of witness to a single core of belief and practice. But when he comes to investigate the place of sola scriptura in a pluralist world, and the contemporary role of biblical theology, his German becomes clotted with latinised neologisms and abstractions, the meaning of which is hard to discern. Though this last piece cites copiously from modern American and British theological authors, the focus of the essays remains essentially German and Lutheran. The reader will profit from the elegance and clarity of the first three essays; the fourth is likely to perplex.