How Scholastic Were the “Lutheran Scholastics”? The Cultural Dynamics of Early Lutheran Orthodoxy

The research of Heiko Oberman and his students and colleagues about the medieval theological roots of the Reformation notwithstanding, the primary narrative of the German Reformation remains one of rupture with the medieval past. This paper looks at two issues often incorporated in such narratives: preaching, which is thought to have improved or at least proliferated under Lutheran supervision, and theological polemics, which are thought to have increased and intensified in negative ways after the middle of the sixteenth century. I will be focusing on a sample of pericopic and occasional sermons written by Johannes Mathesius in the 1540 and 1550s, a crucial decade for the political preservation of Lutheranism in the German Empire, in comparison to late medieval pericopic sermons, and on the theological polemics around the crypto-Calvinist controversy of the early 1570s. What both examples show is that (in line with Bernd Hamm’s idea of a persistent “normative centering”) important tendencies from the medieval period persist even in early Reformation orthodoxy. At the same time, however, new dynamics (including a discourse about moderation as a Lutheran value) emerge. The hybrid quality of Lutheran confessional culture suggests a need to ask fundamental questions about the pre-Reformation period anew.