Luther and the Mystics, Part Two—An Interview with Volker Leppin

We learned about the Luther-mystics con­nec­tion from Prof. Dr. Volker Lep­pin, Pro­fes­sor of Church His­tory at Friedrich Schiller Uni­ver­sity in Jena, Ger­many. So we asked him to say a bit more on the subject.

You have writ­ten about the influ­ences of the mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion on Luther. Who were these mys­tics and which of their works did Luther know?

The most impor­tant mys­tics that Luther engaged with were Bernard of Clair­vaux and Johannes Tauler. Above all it was Tauler, who fol­lowed in the tra­di­tion of Meis­ter Eck­hart, that most heav­ily influ­enced him: Luther kept a vol­ume of his ser­mons that he marked up with his own hand­writ­ten notes—you can see them still today. They show how inten­sively and even enthu­si­as­ti­cally Luther dealt with these late medieval mys­tics dur­ing the period of his first aca­d­e­mic lectures.

What in Luther’s own writ­ings shows the influ­ence of mysticism?

There are many signs of influ­ence. When Luther wrote in his trea­tise “The Free­dom of a Chris­t­ian” (1520) about the soul as the bride of Christ, he was speak­ing from the tra­di­tion of Bernard of Clair­vaux. You can also see the influ­ence in one of the most impor­tant foun­da­tional ideas of Lutheran the­ol­ogy: the dis­tinc­tion between law and gospel. The law (in the Lutheran sense) reveals the sin of humankind, and the gospel speaks God’s grace. In this you see the effects of a mys­ti­cal con­cept as found in Tauler and Eck­hart: in humans, every­thing that comes from their own will must first be made noth­ing, so that there is room for Christ in them. So much in us stands against God—but God comes to us any­way and gath­ers us in. The mys­tics saw this, and Luther gave the insight to us once again.

What part do you think the mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion could play in the lives of Luther­ans today?

Once again fol­low­ing in Tauler’s foot­steps, Luther opened the way for mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ence and liv­ing to be found not only behind clois­ter walls; God’s near­ness can also be expe­ri­enced in the every­day life of the world. As Luther­ans we should take seri­ously this promise of God: He is near to us—and who­ever lives with this promise can achieve a new dis­tance from all the pres­sures and demands of a performance-oriented soci­ety. It’s not our sta­tus in our career, not our salary, not our exter­nal suc­cesses that deter­mine who we are, but God alone.

Jed Wilson says:
August 30, 2010 at 4:21 pm
One mod­ern hymn came to mind while read­ing the last sen­tence of the post: In Christ Alone. We have sung this many times and it is espe­cially mean­ing­ful to me in our more con­tem­pla­tive ser­vice on Mon­day evenings. A quick search found many quo­ta­tions of its words on the web; how­ever, the con­text of this quo­ta­tion struck me, due to the tag line at the top of the blog “Striv­ing for the Unity of the Faith for the Glory of God ~ Eph. 4:3,13; Rom. 15:5–7″ The quo­ta­tion is here: http://www.fundamentallyreformed.com/2005/12/12/in-christ-alone/
Much grace to you both, and peace!
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Allison says:
August 31, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Oh how excit­ing it is to have some one pay atten­tion to Pater Bern­hardus! http://www.cistercianpublications.org/Detail.aspx?ISBN=0879076682
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