Leonard Hutter - Compend of Lutheran Theology

The beating heart of Lutheran Theology, as I understand it, is to confess what Jesus has done boldly in the face of the world and our hearts that often are often Christ deniers.  We claim that there truly is a Gospel message which tells of what Christ (ONLY) is doing for us in the Scriptures.  This message is the only ground on which we can stand before God.  Because of this, it is literally a matter of life and death that the message is true, and that we get it right in our proclamation.

The attached work was written in the early 17th Century to pass on this message as an introduction to Lutheran Theology.  It makes no claims for originality - it instead tries to organize what the Book of Concord says.  And it was used for years for this, for better or worse.  It was works like this against which Spener and others reacted.

I found very little new, personally.  There is MUCH good here.  That said, there are things which I wish were better.  To pick a somewhat arbitrary three for me, personally:

1)  He spends much time defending Lutheran teaching that Christ is present as judge to the unworthy in Communion.  I by NO means deny this, but the Solid Declaration itself seems to be making great pains to show that is exactly those who "feel" unworthy are precisely those who receive the sacrament worthily.  It seems like the polemical situation has overshadowed an important point, at least for me.

2) Much of his discussion on prayer is about how we shouldn't pray like the Papists to Saints.  Luther says MUCH more about prayer in his catechisms...  Again the polemics have shaped it.  This opens himself up for the pietist critique...

3) Yes, Luther was raised and taught within the Roman system.  But he is not an authoritative teacher in that system.  I wish it would quote and reference actual Roman teachings rather than the way Luther presents them in the Smalcald Articles.  I LOVE the Smalcald articles, but just about ANY Roman Catholic Church historian will say that their teachings on how Repentance works was a confused mess at the time.  Critique TRENT, not the pre-trent confussion.

In addition, the scholastic method is a bit unusual to our us today.  We think differently.

That said, it is an important historical text, which is why it was translated into English by East Coast Lutherans who were wanting to learn how to talk Lutheran and to teach their members to talk Lutheran.  I am sure that Hutter would agree that the best use for this work is to open up the scriptures so that we can talk and learn from each other.  Historically, the use of this text for over a hundred years to teach Lutheran Theology (almost as a Lutheran "Sentences") makes this an important source.

The edition was a team project for the translation and it is obvious that some parts were annotated better than others.  I have added most links to the Lutheran Confessions, which were actually inconsistently marked in the original.  Sometimes I didn't feel like chasing down specific passages, and in addition I don't know how to use the datatype for the creeds and the catechisms.  In addition, there seems to be some inconsistency in how different Book Of Concords are tagged, especially in the Apology.

In the introduction they note how some additional references were added based on a German edition and put in small type.  I have NOT done this.  In general the text at Archive.org was quite clean. Interestingly enough, it is Archibald Hodge's old copy that was digitized...

I have fixed a few OCR errors, but am sure I missed a few.  I have tried to leave the errors from the printed version in there as well.

SDG

Ken McGuire