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The God of the Hebrew Bible—A Historical Edition

The concluding chapters, six through eight, shift attention from Luther’s soteriology to his ecclesiology. It is in this area that Saak claims Luther’s real breakthrough occurred. Resituating Luther in relation to William Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and Jan Hus, Saak argues that his ecclesiology simultaneously placed him on the margins of the late medieval Reformation and empowered his apocalyptic conviction that he was making a stand for truth at the end of the ages. For Saak, the origins of the Protestant Reformation thus lie not in debates over justification, but in a conflict over authority, prompting an epochal shift from an ecclesiological to a biblical foundationalism. Echoing Brad Gregory, he sees this conflict as both resolutionless and destructive, signalling not only the failure of the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages, but also the ultimate failure of Luther’s own Reformation and the onset of an age of confessional division and strife. Saak’s Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages is a brilliant and insightful book. While in its intricacy the work is sometimes hard to follow, it richly rewards a careful reading. It might perhaps be wished that Saak had given more space to discussion of the mystical, paradoxical Luther, especially given the resonance of Luther’s account of faith and passivity with currents of German mysticism. He also never quite manages to negotiate the dilemma he sets up concerning Luther the late medieval Augustinian reformer—but perhaps this is his point? Regardless, his account of Luther as a conflicted figure caught between the ages, while in many ways a tragic one, is also one that captures the imagination and reveals new and exciting perspectives on both the Reformer and his Reformation.