Abstract
Kierkegaard was educated at a Lutheran theological faculty and lived his entire life within the context of the Danish Lutheran State Church. Martin Luther was thus the unquestionable authority in Kierkegaard's theological environment. Still, Kierkegaard had a somewhat distanced relation to the Reformer, reading Luther systematically only after 1847, and then only his sermons. How did he read them, and what was the outcome of Kierkegaard's study of Luther's sermons? The investigation of these questions is the task that the author of this book, who is an assistant professor of theology and philosophy at Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska, has given himself and his findings are interesting.
Coe is not the first to discuss Kierkegaard's relation to Luther, and in the introduction, he gives an overview of earlier research. While the earlier investigations contain valuable insights, they lack a philologically precise comparison of Kierkegaard's comments, the edition of Luther's sermons that Kierkegaard read, and the historical background of that particular edition. The exploration of these facts is therefore the starting point of Coe's investigative work. In the eighteenth century, the scholarly edition of Luther's works including his sermons and postils was the Leipzig edition. In 1741 and 1742, Benjamin Lindner published an edited and abridged version of the sermons, making them more easily accessible for the eighteenth-century theologically interested reader. Lindner's edition was then translated into Danish and published in 1828 by Jørgen Thisted, and it was this edition that Kierkegaard used. The clarification of the relationship between these editions is in itself a valuable piece of scholarship, and Coe's study will therefore be indispensable for all further research concerning Kierkegaard's understanding of Luther.
In editing Luther's sermons, Lindner left out much of the polemics against the papists, though he kept much of the critique of the Jews. He also abridged the sermons by deleting unnecessary repetitions, though in Coe's view he is fairly accurate in letting Luther keep his own voice. Lindner's book is an abridged Luther; it is not Luther redressed in the garb of Orthodoxy or Pietism. Still, the absence of parts of the polemics may change the emphasis and the theological content of the sermons.
As a reader, Kierkegaard was selective. He was not interested in analysing the sermons systematically. On the contrary, he found expressions that challenged him and commented on these, either favourably or negatively. The analysis of these favourable comments, which Coe calls Kierkegaard's lauding of Luther, and the negative ones, which he calls Kierkegaard's lancing of Luther, is the main content of Coe's book.
The interpretative tool Coe uses in his analysis of Kierkegaard's approach is Kierkegaard's critique of his contemporaries for suppressing the call to obedience and discipleship in favour of an easy message of forgiveness and acceptance. As Coe reads Kierkegaard's comments on Luther, Kierkegaard praised Luther when he found this perspective confirmed, and criticized him when he found an overemphasis on the gospel of grace without the necessary emphasis on trials, tribulations, and works of love. He thus commends Luther when he speaks about trials and Anfechtung, criticizing Luther when he in Kierkegaard's view overemphasizes the gospel as liberation from life's vicissitudes. In Kierkegaard's view, Anfechtung is a permanent experience, whereas Luther, as Kierkegaard reads him, tends in the direction of making it punctual.
In his published works, Kierkegaard did not criticize Luther, but rather pointed to him as an ally in Kierkegaard's own struggle with the Church's authorities, but in his journals, Kierkegaard could be quite critical. However, according to Coe, the deletion of the anti-Roman polemics from Luther's sermons in the edition Kierkegaard read lets Luther appear more accommodating than was actually the case, for example, concerning the question of Anfechtung as a permanent or limited aspect of the life of a Christian. In Coe's view, Luther thus agrees with Kierkegaard to an even greater extent than he seemed to do according to the sources Kierkegaard worked from.
The strength of Coe's work is his overview of and familiarity with the sources. I have already commended him for his contribution in making clear the limits of the edition Kierkegaard worked with. Coe is also sufficiently at home in Lindner's German and Thisted's and Kierkegaard's Danish texts to be able to give us the key words in the original languages. This is important, as the English translations on occasion can be quite inaccurate. Danish has a precise translation of the German word Anfechtung (Anfægtelse); English has not. Coe thus appears as a reliable guide through the texts he investigates.
However, his investigation has its limitations. We can only deplore the fact that Kierkegaard never found the time and occasion to work with a broader selection of better editions of Luther's works, which had been available to him if he had been interested. Kierkegaard knew both German and Latin and could have worked with Luther's own texts. Are there any indications in his works why he did not? Coe does not discuss this question. Still, Kierkegaard knew Luther from other sources than the sermons. For one thing, he was taught the Small Catechism as a boy. The possible influence on Kierkegaard of the catechetical tradition of the nineteenth-century Danish Church thus presents itself as an interesting question. In an endnote, Coe makes his readers aware that Kierkegaard must have been familiar with Luther's Catechisms, but Coe does not follow this topic any further. In addition, Kierkegaard had an intimate knowledge of the works of the arguably most interesting Luther reader of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Hamann, and the understanding gained by reading Hamann must have been substantial. The question of the significance of this and similar sources is, however, a question Coe does not ask.
Another limitation of Coe's work is his consistent use of the framework of (1) law, (2) gospel, (3) struggle and obedience, as his only interpretative tool. While this perspective clearly is central in Kierkegaard's comments on Luther's sermons and undoubtedly is important both for Luther and Kierkegaard, the analysis could have benefited from being expanded to a broader study of the intellectual context both thinkers worked in. What is the relation, for example, between Luther's critique of late medieval Scholasticism and Kierkegaard's critique of Kant and Hegel? What about Luther's and Kierkegaard's common dependence on and reference to Plato? What about the relation to Augustine, who was important for both of them? Perspectives like these are absent from Coe's book. He may argue that the selection of sources he works with does not allow these questions to be answered, but it may also be related to the fact that Coe is unwilling to ask them.
Despite these limitations, there is no doubt Coe has written a valuable Kierkegaard study that will raise the investigation of his relationship to the Reformer Martin Luther to a new level.