Michael Richard Laffin offers a persuasive friendly amendment to those who critique Martin Luther's theology of politics as a contribution to the privatization of faith and its formal contrast with political life—a conventional critique and one with, as Laffin spells out, a long history. In this book Laffin specifically examines the negative assessments of Luther's political theology by John Milbank and by Jennifer Herdt (as representatives of a broader field including Radical Orthodoxy). Though Laffin does not disagree with their larger critical projects, he does declare their readings of Luther “a caricature of Luther's theology.” He rejects any assessment of Luther's theology as world denying and therefore either indifferent to political life or opposed to it. He argues, one, that Luther's theology is in fact ontologically relational, world affirming, and demanding of our engagement in the political order and, two, that Luther's theology correctly understood actually offers better solutions to Milbank's and Herdt's critiques than do their own proposals.
Laffin has structured the book usefully for the reader. He sets forth his whole project in his introduction: the critiques of the “caricature” of Luther's political theology made by Milbank and Herdt, including the current political science in which their critiques are grounded; the outlines of his own alternative, corrected interpretation of Luther's political theology; and his claim that his reading of Luther contributes to both Milbank's and Herdt's larger projects more effectively than their own proposals.
In his first three chapters Laffin sketches Milbank's critique of Luther's soteriology and “two kingdoms” doctrine. Milbank claims they privatize faith and dichotomize faith and political life. Laffin responds to this critique by recovering an emphatically relational ontology in Luther's theology, wherein faith cannot be separated from participation in Christ, community with others, sanctification, and active love. He also emphasizes Luther's positive understanding of political life as a gift of God for human benefit, not merely as a restraint on evil. In chapter 4, Laffin turns to Herdt's critique of Luther's soteriology. She claims it eliminates any room for genuine habituation of virtue. In response, Laffin demonstrates how Luther holds divine agency and human agency together as interplay, and how the gift of political life to all allows for genuine virtue among both Christians and non-Christians. This brief description cannot, however, reflect the sweep of Laffin's arguments, which offer much more variety and depth than can be summarized here.
For the reader interested in Luther's political theology itself, however, Laffin's last chapter is of the greatest interest. Here Laffin unfolds Luther's language of sanctification as found in his development of the “three institutions”: church, household, and politics. Luther identifies these institutions as God's gift, revelation, and positive context for human life, and thus explicitly affirms this world as well as human political life.
Laffin's arguments are based on a laudably wider reading of Luther's works than is often the case. Though he draws heavily on Luther's Lecture on Galatians, Lectures on Genesis, and commentary on Psalm 101—works from 1534–35—his citations range from Luther's major treatises of 1520 through his Bible commentaries and catechisms to his letters. Further, the breadth of theologians that Laffin builds upon is also impressive: not only the so-called Finnish school around Tuomo Mannermaa, but also Oswald Bayer, Berndt Hamm, and Bernd Wannenwetsch. Along the way he engages Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Stanley Hauerwas, Hans Ulrich, and many others. His diverse citations make the footnotes interesting reading in their own right.
Though I find Laffin's prose and text at times overly dense and worthy of more attentive editing, and though the book addresses a rather particular niche in the Radical Orthodox project, this work is a valuable contribution to the ongoing reassessment of Luther's soteriology and offers us a useful orchestration of the voices identifying relational ontology and faith-as-process in Luther's thought. For this reason the book will also be of interest to theologians working with the Orthodox doctrine of theosis, with process theology's relational ontology, or with the Catholic Church's rich tradition of mystical and corporate ecclesiology. Though beyond the scope of undergraduate or even many graduate courses in theology, the book deserves a spot in advanced coursework and theological libraries.
