Lutheran Theology: A Critical Introduction

by Paul R. Hinlicky

In this book Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky makes the deeply conflicted origins of Lutheran theology fruitful for the future. Exploring this intellectual and spiritual tradition of thought through its major historical chapters, Hinlicky rejects essentialist projects, exposing the debilitating binaries such programs engender and perpetuate, to establish an authentic Luther-theology or Lutheran theology. Hinlicky excavates the ways that throughout a five-hundred-year tradition the legacy of Luther texts has been appropriated, retooled, subverted, or developed. Readers of this introduction will thus be critically equipped to make intellectually honest appropriations of the Luther legacy in the plurality of contemporary contexts in which this iteration of Christian theology will continue.

134 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 20, 2020

About the author

Dr. Hinlicky is an internationally-known theologian who has published more than seventy articles and many books. He is an authority on the theology of Martin Luther and how Luther's theology played out in history since the time of the Reformation. He also works on the re-integration of Reformation and Patristic theology, ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, and is concerned with the interplay between Christian theology and contemporary, "post-modern" philosophy. He is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America who has served congregations for extended terms in Delhi, NY, and Blacksburg, VA. He was editor of the Lutheran Forum and Pro Ecclesia. Dr. Hinlicky came to Roanoke College in 1999 after teaching theology for six years at Jan Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Reviews

[Christopher Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful book that gives a broad brush overview of the history of Lutheranism in its different forms. A little difficult for me (as a layman) to get my head around at points, but he offers a hopeful and constructive path forward for evangelical theology that is informed by the past.