Luther Reception in America
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The reception of Luther and Luther's theology in America beyond Lutheran churches and seminaries is an interesting and complex subject of inquiry. As is to be expected, the reception and rejection of Luther in American society as a whole has not remained without effect on those churches and seminaries. In what follows, a brief summary of a 1988 study by Hartmut Lehmann[1] is offered as an introduction to the topic.
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[edit] General Characteristics
Concluding his study, Lehmann, drawing on an illustration used by Luther himself, states that the broad reception of Luther and his teachings by Americans was prevented by three walls (310):
The first of these walls was the claim made by many theologians that secular historians were unable to interpret Luther properly; the second wall was the claim made by many Lutherans that only they could give a true portrait of Luther; and the third wall, of course, was the claim made by German nationalists that only they had the right to administer Luther's legacy.
While he considers the third wall to be the strongest, Lehmann does find that by the time of his writing, only traces of all three walls were left: Luther scholars are both theologians and secular historians; they include both Lutherans and non-Lutherans; and they are an international community (311).
Yet Americans did entertain a positive albeit eclectic relation to Luther even prior to the 1980s, as Lehmann shows (303):
As a man who had fought his own battle with the pope, Luther was pointed to in nineteenth century America as the example of a courageous man standing up against the dangers of Catholicism; as a man who had labored endlessly for his cause, but who was at the same time closely attached to his family, Luther was portrayed as the ideal Protestant minister mantaining his "inner world" intact while he changed the "outer world." As a translator of the Bible, Luther appeared to be a man of letters whose source, so to speak, was in God's word; and as a writer of many works and hymns, Luther set afire romantic authors looking to the past for examples they could follow. Having fought the institutions of his time, Luther appealed to American individualism; and as a Saxon he seemed to stand in the best tradition of American liberty.
In the years following the Civil War, when Protestant sought to rebuild America as a Christian nation, Luther also found his admirers in America. This, however, worked against him as "the Protestant empire in America" gave way to a more secular self-understanding of the nation (303f.). And German nationalism's tightening grip on Luther especially in the years following 1870 when "Luther the German" (and Lutheranism / Protestantism as an essentially German form of Christianity) trumped every other facet of the Reformer's legacy also did not particularly foster Luther's reception in America. In fact, this view was by and large adopted by secular historians, although there were dissenters (287f.). The Nazis' copious use of Luther's anti-Jewish writings to justify their racially motivated antisemitism was then, for many, the proverbial straw on the camel's back (305f., 309f.). Some scholars who took a new look at Luther under those circumstances held against him his belief in the divine right of government that saw in him, if anything, a forerunner of the "total state" of Hitler's making; others tried to save some of Luther by differentiating -- like the Pietists before -- between Luther's strengths in teaching the gospel and his weaknesses as to drawing the "social consequences" of his teachings (292-296).
Generally speaking, and unlike in (Protestant) Germany, Luther in America always had to compete with various American patron saints. The Puritans saw their emigration from Britain in biblical terms. Frontier revivalists equally appealed to the bible and not any one period of church history. Believers in American "civil religion" found the founding fathers always more important than Luther and the War of Independence always more relevant than the Peasants' War (304). Even within Protestant America, Luther's position was not unrivaled. In fact, due to the predominance of those in America whom Luther had rejected as "enthusiasts" (also known as the "left wing" of the Reformation, e.g., Baptists), Luther had a difficult position as American religious life solidified more and more in the course of the 19th century (306); increasing studies of the "left wing," beginning in the 1920s, further sidelined Luther in his perceived relevance for American churches (290f.).
[edit] A Closer Look at the 20th Century
As Lehmann points out, Luther the European scholar and church-leader had little or nothing in common with the heroes that occupied American popular imagination around the last turn of the century: the men of the frontier, such as Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill. Luther's impact thus became more and more confined to churches named after him (307f.). And even in those churches, outside small scholarly circles, a complex process of Americanization seems to have made Luther's relevance questionable, for all the reasons given above: While the years after WWI saw reinvigorated Luther-apologetics in America, this time period also saw an increasing rate of intermarriage between Lutherans and non-Lutherans which, after WWII, quite naturally resulted in a more "ecumenical" view of Luther and his legacy (291).
Interestingly, as Lehmann shows, the German Luther Renaissance in the 1910s and 1920s was more widely received by non-Lutherans than by Lutherans in America. This was so because its view of Luther, due to its fascination with religious psychology, resonated with pre-WWI American Luther studies among non-Lutherans (292). Also the reception, and rejection, of Luther by men such as K. Barth, E. Brunner, and P. Tillich made Luther the theologian somewhat more palatable in some American circles (ibid.):
After Luther had lost his reputation as an apostle of world culture, and after his influence on the way many Americans viewed their own world and past had been greatly reduced before 1914, Luther regained some renown, at least for some non-Lutheran Protestant Americans, as a highly interesting, though controversial thinker whose writings were well worthy studying.
While the Nazis' use and abuse of Luther tempered this appreciation, Lehmann credits the Luther-biography of R. Bainton, Here I Stand (Bainton previously had made a name for himself as a student of the "left wing" of the reformation), and E. H. Erickson's analysis of the Young Man Luther with rehabilitating Luther's renown among some Americans to some degree (297). And reformist Catholics, inspired by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, rediscovered Luther as a "devout Catholic who wanted to reform his church but whose proposals were rejected and who was then forced out of his church, against his original intentions, because he did not want to give up his convictions" (298f.). Yet despite these instances of renewed interest, Lehmann is unable to recognize any broader, sustained impact Luther would have on the study of history or theology as a whole; the "burning issues of our time" seem to have irretrievably relegated him to the past (299f.).
[edit] Summary
Summarizing his research on Luther in the American Imagination, Lehmann states (301):
Perhaps one could compare the way Luther is being referred to in the America of today with the way he was remembered in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century America. The Puritans among colonial Americans knew that, once upon a time, there had been a man named Martin Luther who had started something which was very important and in which they themselves were still involved. Although they would never read a line of the original Luther, in their view Luther deserved a monument for what he had achieved. For those in colonial America who were inspired by the early enlightenment, on the other hand, Luther was part of a world which had irretrievably passed. As educated men and women they might remember his name, but the issues Luther had raised were no longer in any way part of what they were interested in. Within two hundred years, it seems, in his orbit over the New World, Luther's star has completed a full revolution.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Martin Luther in the American Imagination (Munich: W. Fink, 1988). The pages numbers in what follows refer to this book.
