An interview with Christine Helmer

Fortress Press: Your recent project with Fortress Press--The Global Luther--offers many new perspectives on Martin Luther. What in your mind are the freshest and most promising features of Luther scholarship today?

Christine Helmer: Luther scholarship has been dramatically changing over the past five years.

First of all, younger people are being drawn to the field. I was worried for a long time that the contemporary generation of historians and theologians had been scared off Luther scholarship. Is there anything new to say about Luther? Are there older scholars who will welcome younger colleagues to the conversation about Luther? But over the past several years, I have been greatly encouraged by my encounters with young academics, primarily from the Nordic countries, and especially with young women who are fascinated with Luther and who are generously supported by their mentors. The contributors to The Global Luther all took the responsibility seriously of opening areas of study that they anticipated would be of interest to younger scholars looking for new ways to interpret Luther for today. James W. Jones’s piece on psychology and theology, for instance, addresses the key relation of justification to the human person, demonstrating that psychology is essential for understanding Luther’s religious development, as well as the psychological implications of justification.

A second big change is that Luther is “going English.” This means that the communication of Luther scholarship is more and more turning away from German and to English as the lingua franca. There are of course advantages and disadvantages to this shift, yet this linguistic shift seems to be correlated with the increased interest among young people in Luther.

A third change (and I’ll stop here, although I could go on) is that North American and German scholars are increasingly paying attention to the new directions in Luther scholarship underway among Nordic theologians. This reorientation of attention toward the Nordic contributions started about ten years ago when the “Finnish School” was introduced to North America. Luther scholars from Finland vehemently protest this term, balking at the effacement of individual contributions by the language of “school,” and they have a point! Perhaps the “Finnish conversation” is better. The Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish theologians have also contributed to the development of compelling interpretations of Luther for today. For example, Birgit Stolt from Sweden in her essay in The Global Luther uses the literary-linguistic disciplines in order to gain a deeper understanding of the important emotional aspects of being justified—a doctrine of justification with joy and dancing! I hope that in the near future, the works of these theologians will be published more widely in North America.

This is an exciting time in Luther scholarship.

FP: Luther is a large figure with deep influences on culture, both positive and negative. What is the larger impact of Luther’s life and work on his culture and ours?

CH: It is precisely the issue of Luther’s enormous impact that inspired me to bring together a team of scholars representing different disciplines to work on The Global Luther. Each author was asked to highlight the impact of Luther, either historically or from a transhistorical perspective. Ultimately, The Global Luther converged on two points of similarity.

The first is to address honestly the issue of interpretive and historical ambivalence. Luther continues to inspire, motivate, fascinate, and preoccupy people and scholars in different areas from writers to pastors. Yet an honest look at Luther’s impact in a number of fields brings us to tensions, conflicts, disharmonies—to ambivalence, I say. The example of Luther’s formidable impact on the German language is a case in point. He opened up possibilities of speaking about religious realities in many discourses. He introduced the use of vernacular terms in his Bible translation and even his academic disputations departed from a strict theological Latin to a Latin rich with novel formulations and exclamations. What Luther teaches us in this respect, then, is that thinking about religion is a linguistically creative enterprise. If theology is to be a living enterprise it is inherently bound up with the creation of new and living language. The ambivalence occurs when later generations of Luther fans petrify his language as authoritative, particularly distinct formulations, without regard for the abundance of words he used to depict a religious reality. So that the appeal to Luther as an ally for “scripture and tradition” is an appeal to remain locked in a historical discourse rather than to ask questions of what this discourse might mean to us today. The ambivalence arises when Luther’s own living language is turned into authoritative discourse and as authoritative, it becomes a standard and norm rather than a living conversation.

The most compelling and urgent matter for us, the most unavoidable, has to do with Luther’s anti-Judaism. How can one read Luther and appreciate his dramatic insights into God, world, and self, and not acknowledge that some of these insights are formulated in proximity to anti-Jewish ideas? The fact of this must not be domesticated by arguments that “Luther was a child of his time” or Luther addressed “types” rather than real people. The latter is definitely not true. Luther was asked by Wolfgang Capito to intervene personally on behalf of a mutual personal friend, Rabbi Josel von Rosheim, when the Elector issued an edict exiling Jews from Saxony on Aug. 6, 1537. Although Luther personally knew Rabbi von Rosheim, Luther rejected the plea. I think that an admission of how Luther was deeply wrong can open the door to productive conversation about Luther today and better prepare Christian theologians to work out theologies of religion in ways that promote a serious commitment to justice and love between individuals of different faiths.

A second way to think about Luther’s impact is to go backward historically rather than forward. The Global Luther represents authors who are intellectually committed to placing Luther within a broad trajectory of Western thought that precedes Luther. Luther’s doctrine of justification didn’t appear from nowhere but was a contribution to a rich Catholic tradition of reflecting on scripture, sacraments, life, and theology. The Global Luther illustrates this point with the sound recording that is included with the book. The trajectory in music from Luther to Bach is famous. But what does this trajectory sound like when it is contextualized in music history from the eleventh century forward? The recording’s program, created by my father, Paul Helmer, traces a musical story from an eleventh-century Sequence in the Latin mass through the centuries, including in this story Luther’s own German hymn Christ ist erstanden and Bach’s organ prelude on this tune. The original concert was performed during the Global Luther conference, and afterward members of the audience said that they came to a new understanding of medieval chant in relation to Bach’s prelude, which was a wonderful experience. You could feel a decisive “aha” in the church!

FP: You studied Luther’s exegetical work in depth. How do you see his biblical work relating to his work on more systematic loci? What do we have yet to learn in this area?

CH: My views on the relation of Bible to theology have changed a lot over the years. I can start here with Luther’s Works. The first thirty volumes are on Luther’s biblical interpretation; his works on theology and pastoral theology begin in volume 31. But when you look at the German edition of Luther’s works (the Weimarer Ausgabe), the sequence is more or less chronological. So the “bias” that is written into the English translation of Luther’s works is that the exegetical commentaries are the foundation of his theology, which is based on the Bible. This is a bias that needs to be critically examined about Luther, but also more broadly in view of the ways in which the Bible is contextualized and conceptualized in new contexts.

I think we need to look at Luther’s interpretation of the Bible in a complex matrix. First, philosophy plays a huge role in Luther’s interpretation of scripture. Take for example his love for specific biblical passages that highlight a symmetry in God. God is the one who “builds up and destroys.” “God loves Jacob and hates Esau.” The theological amplitudes that Luther drives into his doctrine of God are more than what he took from the Bible’s prophetic corpus. Luther interprets the divine symmetry through his own intellectual formation in the art of disputation. Disputation trained logic in binary oppositions. But in my research on Luther’s understanding of divine omnipotence, which Luther defines as the divine capacity to create and to destroy what is created, I discovered that Luther took this definition from William of Ockham. This gets to the question of which philosophical tools and resources Luther used to interpret the Bible.

Second is the issue of the language of the Biblical text. Luther made serious adjustments to the Christian Bible. He translated the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew rather than from the Latin Vulgate, as was a practice during his time. With the turn to the Masoretic text as the Hebrew basis for his Bible translation, Luther made this text canonical, replacing the canonicity of the Greek Septuagint (the basis of the Latin Vulgate). Furthermore, he made use of Erasmus’s critical edition of the Greek New Testament and appealed to the Hebrew scholarship of his day to improve his translation of the Old Testament. Theological issues in translation are intimately joined to grammatical and syntactical issues.

Third, I’d like to see scholars move away from Luther’s understanding of the text and to think in terms of Luther’s understanding of the text’s referent. Luther was preoccupied with “what conveys Christ.” His concern was not ultimately what the text says but what it refers to, even if understanding this meant rejecting parts of the text. Of theological interest is what Luther says about the text’s referents: Christ, Trinity, the human condition. And when we get a better sense of the reality of the text, then we might be in a better conceptual position to work out a theology in dialogue with Luther that speaks to people today.

FP: In his time, Luther appealed to people’s need for forgiveness and acceptance. This does not seem to be people’s primary concern today. What is a helpful strategy for employing Luther apologetically today?

CH: I think you are asking a question about how Luther might be useful as a dialogue partner in today’s culture. So I can begin with what I think the broader cultural challenges are. I think that we are living in a culture of distraction in which intersubjectivity is the hardest thing in the world to achieve. Ours is a culture of self-promotion and self-absorption, and you can see the effects all over, from texting while driving, to students who multitask while sitting in class, to ersatz celebrities who thrive on promoting themselves on the web and in public. It seems to me that the art of intersubjectivity, meaning the art of truly listening, having a conversation, where the I is not foregrounded but motivated by interest in the other, is the task. It is our task to be human in a culture that threatens to rob us of our humanity.

When reformulating the human condition in this language, we bring Luther into conversation with our world. What can Luther tell us about God’s work in the world today? Luther was fascinated with God’s work, God’s dramatic work, in human lives and in creation. Sometimes this fascination is understood as an obsession with maximizing God at the expense of the human. But I don’t think this is the case. Rather, I see Luther fascinated with God’s work because it radically changes the human situation. The language of forgiveness refers to God’s work, to how Christ restores humanity to its true being. And in the language I use, radical change means the turn of the self away from distraction to a healthy integration of the self—a mature person so to speak—who is capable of relating with serious attention to others as persons and to the environment as God’s creation. Luther focuses on Christ’s work precisely because he is interested in the self’s conversion to “being human,” a person who cultivates healthy ways of being in relationship with others. This is hard work, it is much harder to be truly human than to pretend to be divine. This is the work of incarnation, the radical step Christ takes to us, so that we