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Half A Lifetime with Luther in Theology and Living

Martin Luther has been for me, during more than forty years, a source of engaging theological insights. These left their mark on my teaching in Chicago and Rome from 1967 to 2004, and they percolate through my essays and reviews to this day. More personally, notions I find in Luther enhance my preaching, especially in Lent, and give me points of spiritual nourishment that combine in unexpected ways with my own formation in the school of St. Ignatius Loyola. This story of a Jesuit’s theological and personal “affair” with Luther will unfold in three steps, beginning with what I gained during concentrated study of Luther’s early works in Münster in the mid-1960s, when my mentor was Erwin Iserloh. A second phase began with new perceptions during postdoctoral work in Mainz in 1969 with Joseph Lortz. Part of this new beginning was exchanges with other Luther scholars, especially Oswald Bayer in Tübingen and Kurt Victor Selge in Heidelberg. What I grasped then, on Luther’s conception of fides sacramenti, has resonated through many years of telling both Lutherans and Catholics about Luther’s understanding of the gospel word in its sacramental actuality and its pastoral impact. Around 1980 a third engagement began, as I turned to the realized form of the Reformation in Lutheran territorial churches that took their stand on the Augsburg Confession. This led naturally to study of Luther’s pastoral pamphlets and especially his catechesis of the creed, with his emphatic teaching on the church’s constitutive practices of both receiving and handing on Christ’s gifts through the Spirit. This major dimension of Luther’s