Finished #reading Reading the Bible with Martin Luther, by Timothy Wengert.

Argues that Luther provides an approach to the Bible that takes it seriously as God’s Word while avoiding a literalist/inerrantist approach. The Bible is God’s Word, not because it presents an inerrant picture of history or science, but because “it does God in me, killing the old and raising the new” (p.8). For Luther, what was crucial in Scripture was the question: “Was Christum treibet”, “what pushes/drives Christ”: it was on these grounds that he considers the Epistle of James to fall short, for example. 

In human terms, the Bible is unimpressive: “We worship a weak, foolish God revealed in a weak, foolish book” (p.49) - though this is difficult for Americans, in particular, to accept, Wengert observes. 

He proceeds to show Luther’s distinctive approach to the Bible’s authority, his method of interpreting the Bible, and his ethics (where Wengert quotes Franklin Drewe Fry, who said the Lutheran approach to ethics is to give it “their best, reverent guess”). He concludes with examples of Luther’s biblical exegesis in his interpretations of Galatians 3:6-14 early (1519) and late (1535) in his career. “Variety of interpretive possibilities did not for Luther undermine the certainty of God’s promises embedded within those texts, and that certainty was his goal in interpreting the Bible” (p.103). The heart of his project was “to illuminate the work and the glory of Christ and to strengthen and comfort troubled consciences” (p.122).  

Criticisms? It’s a little dry to read at times, and I felt that Wengert’s final chapter was caricaturing the “new perspective on Paul” (which Wengert portrays as reheated Erasmianism). But there’s lots of good stuff in here, and overall Wengert is spot-on in his approach to the Bible: not an inerrant and infallible text in everything it says, but a book which “does God” to us: the God who “kills to make alive, dies to make alive” (p.127).