I have some ideas about the peculiar history of Lutheranism which stands behind our knotted reality. Historically, if we begin with period between 1517 and 1580 and call that the Confessional period, there have been three additional Lutheranisms: Orthodoxy, Pietism and Liberalism. Each in its own way can claim the legacy of the first, though the authenticity of each claim is viewed with considerable skepticism by the heirs today of the other two (in my scheme, no one gets to claim the initial “Confessional Period,” for reasons adduced below). All three Lutheranisms evolved in part in reaction to what preceded, and continues in opposition to what follows, but each operates on the common principle that the true-blue Lutheran is obliged to critique theological opponents as veritable deformers of the gospel. This habit of passionate denunciation, what historian James Burkee calls “the Luther syndrome,” is the common thread running through all three. Nothing then so modest as clearing up muddled thinking, defeating ignorance with knowledge, or expanding small-mindedness with generosity of vision can be the work of genuine Lutheran theology! Behind the perceived error of our foes lurks apostasy, for nothing less than the gospel is at stake! Thus the three Lutheranisms de facto, if not de jure, habitually anathematize each other.

To paint with a very broad brush: in American Lutheranism, the LCMS has claimed the mantle of Orthodoxy, the old ALC (but also the Muhlenberg tradition of the old ULCA) inherited the legacy of churchly Pietism, and elements of the old LCA (the American tradition of Samuel Schmucker) claimed the liberal Lutheranism of biblical criticism and the social gospel. Today, interestingly, both wings of America’s polarized Lutheranism, the LCMS and the ELCA, have their own conflicted relations with Pietism. In the LCMS it is Orthodoxy at war with American evangelicalism; in the ELCA, it is liberalism at war with the remnants of Scandanavian Pietism.  More precise portraits can undoubtedly be drawn. But let me explain my categories more carefully.

The Confessional Period (1517-1580) came to an end with the signing of the Book of Concord, a compromise formula that purchased Lutheran church unity at the cost of persecuting Anabaptists, disowning any relation to Calvinists and pledging eternal opposition to Rome. What is interesting is that recent research is showing how uncertain and fluid this period actually was. Olli-Pekka Vaino has shown that during these five decades there were at least five contending interpretations of the doctrine of justification. Jill Raitt shows how far Melanchthonian Lutheranism traveled from Luther’s doctrine of bound choice in her delicious portrait of the Calvinist Theodore Beza waving a copy of Luther’s De servo arbitrio at Georg Major in a disputation on predestination in the 1570s. Calvin scholars in turn have uncovered the correspondence between Calvin and Melanchthon, reminding how Calvin himself subscribed to Altered Confession of Augsburg in 1540. Were it not for Bullinger in Zurich, the Calvin–Melanchthon relation might well have blossomed into another Protestantism than we have known.

In this whirl of confusion we can, however, see the seeds of all three future Lutheranisms. It is found in the Augsburg Confession’s very definition of justifying faith: “when they believe they are received into mercy on account of Christ.” Orthodoxy would make the Bible doctrine of the propter Christum standard of genuine Lutheranism, namely, that Christ’s death on the cross makes satisfaction for sin. Pietism would seize upon the pro me of living faith, which regenerates, which is not the dead fides historica which even the devils have, even be it all so correct orthodox assent to Christ’s vicarious representation. Liberals in turn would reclaim the mercy of God as the leading motif, saying that it is not God who needs to become merciful, nor is it merely we as individuals who need mercy, but it is the world which needs to be transformed into a Beloved Community and can be, since God is love.

Orthodoxy reigned from 1580 until it declined in the course of the 18th century. It was the official theology of the legally established Lutheran church in the alliance of throne and altar in the various forms of the emerging nation-state. These were, moreover, the awful years of the Wars of Religion, when European Christianity committed a fratricide that amounted to a moral and spiritual suicide. But the theological problem of Orthodoxy was that the issue had shifted from Luther’s rediscovery of the Pauline apocalyptic question, which is God’s prophetic question to His own lost and wayward creation: How will we stand before the judgment seat of God who comes to reclaim the earth for His kingdom? Justification by faith, after all, is an answer to the question of justification, that is, judgment. How will we justify ourselves before God? But in Orthodoxy, Luther’s Pauline question lost its primary power to frame theological debate. Rome had succeeded in making authority as such the leading question. The problem now became: Which is the true, i.e. rightly authorized church? The Lutherans were boxed into the corner of claiming that the inerrant, miraculously dictated Bible was pope, not the bishop of Rome. The Lutheran church, which reads that Bible without interpretation, is therefore the true church. The problem with this argument was that the multiplication of Protestant sects and theologies all claiming to read the inerrant Bible without human addition produced multiple, contradictory theologies. Some few Orthodox Lutherans around Calixtus understood how they had been boxed into a corner and sought a patristic resourcement as a way out, recognizing that the Bible is the Book of the Church which owes its existence to the Gospel as a viva vox in Word and Sacrament. Futilely and stubbornly, most of the Orthodox sought to shore up the inerrant Bible with apologetic arguments that became increasingly unconvincing. Reduced to special pleading before the rise of rationalism and its historical criticism of the Bible, Orthodoxy retreated into the ghettoes in which it remains to this day.

Pietism, which is usually dated to Philip Jacob Spener’s treatise in 1675, Pia Desideria, was for the most part a churchly movement of renewal, not separation. Carter Lindberg has done great service in putting together a collection of studies, The Pietist Theologians, which brings the features of the original movement back to life as a recognizable “second” Lutheranism. For it was here that Luther’s original teaching of the righteousness of faith—that “living, mighty active thing,” regeneration according to the Augsburg Confession (though not the Formula of Concord), Luther’s “divine faith, that gift of the Spirit”—was rediscovered and appropriated anew (not without transformation from Luther’s battle with Anfechtung). How the Orthodox—God’s cops, so to say—feared this outbreak of living faith! They hunted out and punished the prayer circles and Bible studies, ecclesiola in ecclesia! Their fear, of course, was justified. Here in these intimate groups, the contrastive identity machinery of Orthodoxy constantly policing confessional boundaries was challenged by the lived experience of living faith in and among confessional “others.” Here, the attempt to turn Christian dogma into a fixed worldview controlling all aspects of culture was undermined from within, as Pietist became acutely aware of the tension between discipleship and the allures of “the world.” In Pietism, correspondingly, the urgency of mission was rediscovered: both inner-mission as urbanization and industrialization increasingly eroded traditional forms of settled church life, but also mission abroad, riding the wave of European colonialism with new worlds to conquer for Christ, new chances to get Christendom right. Therein, however, lay the weakness of the second Lutheranism. Its turn away from the critical task of Christian theology towards a theology of the heart made it quietistic, largely uncritical towards the colonial project. Its individualism and otherworldliness made in effect a deal with the devil: you can have the public world of politics, economy, science, but we claim the region of interiority.

Liberalism too was an authentic development of Lutheranism, both of the social, this-worldly orientation of Luther’s evangelical ethics (modernized as the “social gospel”) and also in its courageous intellectual honesty that applied critical reason to the study of its own sacred Scriptures. Of course, this later move was forced upon Lutheranism by the breakdown in the plausibility of Orthodoxy’s authoritarian claims about an inerrant and uninterpreted Bible and the force of new studies of Scripture pioneered by rationalists intent on showing the unmistakable humanity of Scripture’s authorship. Both moves were codified in Lutheranism’s most influential philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who gave the marching orders for the liberal Protestant theology of the 19th century. Kant took up Luther’s apparent fideism but gave it a new twist: reason cannot know God, and even if there were a revelation of God, reason could not recognize which revelation is authentic. Thus, Kant declared, “he had destroyed knowledge to make room for faith.” By faith, however, he meant practical reason’s postulate of a heavenly reward for those who live strictly to do their duty and thus become morally worthy of heaven. Christ is the Prototype of the life of moral duty. The task is building the kingdom of God on earth, a kingdom of ends, a pure moral meritocracy.

In this development we can nevertheless recognize a third Lutheranism when we see how Kant and his followers had to discredit their predecessors in Orthodoxy and Pietism for failing to complete the Reformation, as the liberals now claimed to do. We can also see, especially in later figures like Ritschl and Harnack, a retrieval of a Leitmotif of Luther’s theology: divine love, Barmherzigkeit, compassion as the motive in all God’s ways. The polemical strife of Orthodoxy and the otherworldliness of Pietism alike fall short of the main thing, divine love for the world. Wasn’t liberalism right about that? To be sure, they were, as none less than Dietrich Bonhoeffer affirmed in his early work, Sanctorum Communio. But, as the same Bonhoeffer realized, with the loss of scriptural authority, the propter Christum, and the living faith of the regenerate taking worldly shape in new lives of discipleship, liberalism’s correct intuition that the gospel is concerned with reclaiming the world for the Beloved Community was bound to collapse after its critique had been executed. People just moved on to join the Communist, or Socialist, or Democratic Party. Indeed, just like Orthodoxy and Pietism, the third Lutherannism fed like a bird of prey on the corpse it has slain. Increasingly, the bones are picked dry.

The moral of the story: it is time to stop the killing. Maybe it is too late. Maybe my friend and colleague, Bob Benne, is right when he argues that Lutheranism is an exhausted tradition. But my own hunch is that Lutheranism can revitalize when, but only when, we recognize that relative validity of all three of its iterations and, returning to the sources, seek to harmonize their valid concerns in a new post-denominational formation.

Paul R. Hinlicky is the Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.