LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

ZWECK: LUTHER ON JAMES 51
is God’s Word which treibt Christum “inculcates Christ”, and that there are
other words in Scripture which do not treiben Christum “inculcate Christ”,
and, therefore, are not fully inspired. To this end, they insist that Luther held
to a “canon within the Canon”. In other words, they contend that Luther,
like themselves, maintained that there are some things in Scripture which
are not fully inspired, and which, therefore, are canonical only in a
secondary sense. Thus, they speak of proto-canonical and of deuterocanonical
books in Scripture.
However, the fact is that Luther would have recoiled with horror from
any suggestion that the interpreter may distinguish in Scripture between that,
on the one hand, which is God’s Word and that, on the other hand, which is
not God’s Word. One does not have to read very far in Luther before one
realises that, for him, that which is in Scripture is, by that very fact, God’s
Word. Robert Preus cites the research of W. Bodamer, who found over one
thousand citations in which Luther clearly asserted that the Bible is the
Word of God. 1 Luther passes remarks like the following: “So then Scripture
is God’s own testimony concerning Himself”, 2 or “God has spoken the
whole Scripture.” 3
3. THE BASIS OF GOSPEL-REDUCTIONISM
Luther knows nothing of different levels of canonicity or different
degrees of inspiration. Something is either God’s Word or not God’s Word,
inspired or not inspired, canonical or not canonical. The “Gospelreductionists”
have based their argument upon a complete misunderstanding
of Luther’s comments on James.
This error of “Gospel-reductionism” is epitomised by the following
comment in the editor’s “Introduction” to the “Prefaces to the Books of the
Bible”, in Volume 35 of the American Edition of Luther’s Works:
Luther’s prefaces, however, brought something new by means of which
he revealed his understanding of the Scriptures, namely a set of value
judgments and a ranking of the books into categories. For him the Gospel
of John and the Epistles of Paul as well as 1 Peter rank as “the true kernel
and marrow of all the books.” As books of secondary rank come
Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. While Luther’s assigning of a
standard of values to the New Testament books may have been simply an
1 Robert D. Preus, “Luther and Biblical Infallibility”, in Inerrancy and the Church, ed.
John D. Hannah (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984) 121 n. 68. See W. Bodamer, “Luthers
Stellung zur Lehre von der Verbalinspiration”, Theologische Quartalschrift 34 (1936).
2 Preus 117 n. 44.
3 Preus 117 n. 44.