Trueman on Luther on the Christian Life

Trueman on Luther on the Christian Life March 16, 2015

Review of Luther on the Christian Life by Carl Trueman

If you’re the sort of person who knows anything about Carl Trueman, you probably picture him as an aging crank sitting on his porch smoking a pipe, sipping a glass of scotch, and complaining about the ways modern evangelicalism has gone off the rails. Not only is this picture accurate, but it explains why Trueman is the perfect person to write the Martin Luther installment of Crossway’s “theologians on the Christian life” series.

In Luther on the Christian Life, Trueman surveys Luther’s thought on such important topics as liturgy, the Word of God, the church, the sacraments, the mass, the law, and common institutions (marriage, government, business, etc). In each chapter, we see both how Luther is both a major shaper of modern Protestantism and—simultaneously—directly at odds with many of us who claim to be his Christian descendents. In some ways, it is this tension that shapes much of Trueman’s work in this book.

Image Source: Crossway
Image Source: Crossway

Most Protestants would claim to be the spiritual heirs of Luther. We read works like Bondage of the Will and On Christian Freedom and say “yes! This is true and what I believe!” (Most of us are perhaps less enthusiastic after muddling through the more obscure 95 Theses.) And yet, Trueman rightly points out that if we stop there we have really only scratched the surface of Luther’s thought—and not necessarily his mature thought at that. Luther preached and published another two decades worth of material following these well-known works, which themselves came only a few years afterhis explicit separation from the Roman Catholic church. During these years, Luther continued to develop his own thought on what Christian doctrine and practice should look like. Trueman notes that however much we may cheer Luther’s recovery of the Gospel and his stance against works righteousness, evangelical Protestants are so far out of line with the full body of his teachings that Luther himself would say of us (as he did of Zwingli and the Anabaptists in his own day) that we are of a “different spirit.” That is, given our differences of doctrine and practice, Luther would likely not consider you and me to be Christians at all.

Despite our modern ecumenical unease with Luther’s condemnation of his fellow Protestants, Trueman shows us that we still have much to learn from this particular magisterial reformer. To say that Luther is wrong on baptism (both in terms of who he would baptize—unbelievers—and in what he thinks baptism does) or on the Lord’s Supper is not to claim that he has nothing worth saying on the subject—and not just in those areas where we already agree with him. In fact, Trueman does a fantastic job of identifying the very places where modern Protestants would actively disagree with Luther and showing that there is still useful theology and practical advice to be had. For example, though Luther’s position on the Lord’s Supper is wrong—theologically incoherent, even—we can still agree that modern Protestants often have so low a view of the practice that we dance on the edge of blasphemy. We may not see the biblical basis for doctrine of Christ’s physical presence in the bread, but Luther can remind us that we are participating in a solemn and orderly sacrament to be performed devoutly by the church focused on the Gospel.

In short, Luther offers an important corrective to much of what is wrong with contemporary Christianity. So too does Carl Trueman in this well-written and engaging survey of Martin Luther’s view of the Christian life.

Highly recommended.

Dr. Coyle Neal teaches Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, where he does sit on his porch and grouse about kids these days, but prefers coffee to scotch. 


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