Brian Gerrish and the Legacy of the Luther Renaissance Today: In Memoriam
- Craig Hinkson
- Oct 31
- 9 min read
Craig Hinkson
In tribute to my friend and mentor, Brian Albert Gerrish, 1931-2025: To his excellence as a scholar and teacher, and kindness to me, his student
Brian passed away on April 14th during Holy Week this year at the age of 93. He and Bernard McGinn were my professors in historical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School in the 1980s. Together, they provided the foundation for my work as an historical theologian and philosopher of religion. McGinn was (and still is) the world’s leading expert on medieval mysticism, and Brian was a Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher scholar of great distinction. The Germans have a wonderful word for one’s dissertation advisor: Doktorvater. The Doctor father for Brian’s excellent work on Luther, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (Oxford, 1962), was Wilhelm Pauck, who had studied at the University of Berlin under Karl Holl, the preeminent Luther scholar of the opening decades of the 20th century. He also sat under, and was deeply influenced by, the polymathic theologian, historian, and sociologist of religion, Ernst Troeltsch, as well as that other towering figure, Adolf von Harnack, the dean of liberal Protestant theology and father of Dogmengeschichte, the history of doctrines.
The Luther Renaissance of the early 20th century, led by Holl, centered on the young Luther: What were the sources of his thought? When, and how, did he come to his reformational breakthrough? At issue was the period 1513-18 when the young professor of Bible gave his first series of Psalms lectures, followed by his Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews lectures, before beginning anew in 1519 on a second series on the Psalms. The year before his death in 1546, Luther recounts a “tower experience” that he ostensibly had while preparing that second series. In the preface to the Wittenberg edition of his Latin works, Luther states that, at that time, he was still struggling to understand the meaning of Paul’s words in Romans 1:17: “For in the gospel is … the righteousness of God revealed.” He recalls his angry thoughts about God: “I hated this word, ‘the justice of God,’ for however irreproachably I lived as a monk, I felt myself to be a sinner with a most unquiet conscience, nor could I be confident that I had pleased him with my satisfaction. I did not love, nay, rather I hated this righteous God who punished sinners, and if not with tacit blasphemy, certainly with huge murmurings I was angry with God, saying: ‘As though it really were not enough that miserable sinners should be eternally damned with original sin and have all kinds of calamities laid upon them by the law of the Ten Commandments, God must go and add sorrow upon sorrow and even through the gospel itself bring his justice and wrath to bear!’ I raged in this way with a wildly aroused and disturbed conscience, and yet I knocked importunately at Paul in this passage, thirsting more ardently to know what Paul meant.” After much prayer and wrestling with this text, Luther tells us that light finally dawned upon his troubled soul and he felt as though he had been reborn with the very portals of Paradise opening before him. At last, he understood that the righteousness of which Paul speaks is not that by which God condemns sinners, but by which he makes them righteous with His very own righteousness in Christ, which Luther fittingly calls an “alien righteousness.”
This very late account of his breakthrough, given by Luther himself, struck scholars as preposterous. How could this understanding have eluded him at the time of his Romans lectures three to four years earlier? Those lectures offered ample evidence that he had already arrived at this doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone. Surely this had to have been a faulty memory on his part! I remember well Dr. Gerrish’s lecture on this topic in the class on Reformation thought that I took in 1983 or 84. I remember, too, the surprise that the entire class felt when he told us that the time and the nature of Luther’s Reformation breakthrough had been the topic of intense scholarly debate for over three-quarters of a century … and that it was still far from being settled!
Remarkably, the controversy as to the dating of Luther’s reformational breakthrough had been sparked by Brian’s “intellectual grandfather,” Karl Holl, whose pioneering essay appeared in 1910, “The Doctrine of Justification in Luther’s Romans Lectures with Particular Consideration of the Question of the Certainty of Salvation.” Interest in the young Luther had already been piqued by publication of the initial volumes of the Weimar critical edition of Luther’s works beginning in 1883, the 400th anniversary of his birth. His first Psalms lectures appeared in volumes three and four in 1885 and 1886, giving insight into the origins of his thought in these very first works (initia Lutheri). Then, excitement skyrocketed in 1899 with the discovery of the lost manuscript of Luther’s Romans lectures — in, of all places, the Vatican library! That was the year in which Pope Leo XIII opened its archives to scholars and a German church historian who had been seeking the lost manuscript, Johannes Ficker, discovered it there. What the Vatican actually possessed were the hand-copied notes of Luther’s original manuscript by his student and secretary, Johann Aurifaber. These had been seized by the victorious Catholic prince, Maximilian of Bavaria, during the Thirty Years War and given in triumph to the pope. Having found this copy, Ficker continued his quest for the original notes in Luther’s own hand, eventually locating them in 1905. Where did he find them? “Hidden in plain sight” in a display case in the University of Berlin library! Wilhelm Pauck relates the entire story in the introduction to his translation of the Romans lectures (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), pp. xvii ff.
It was the discovery of these manuscripts that led to Holl’s groundbreaking essay in 1910. And it was his collected essays on Luther, written between 1910 and 1922, that gave birth in earnest to the Luther Renaissance of the early 20th century. The enormous interest in the young Luther that Holl’s essays piqued, along with the introduction of Søren Kierkegaard’s thought to Germany at the same time, created the ferment within liberal theological circles that launched the movement known as crisis or dialectical theology (neoorthodoxy), led by Karl Barth. My doctoral work in Kierkegaard and Luther, directed by Brian, explored their shared framework, a theology of paradox that Luther called the “theology of the cross” in his Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. It was an approach that shook the theological world to its core in Luther’s day and did so again in the early 20th century with the publication of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans.
But Luther was not the only reformer to capture Brian’s scholarly interest. John Calvin did, too. Like Calvin, Brian came to the study of theology via the classics, which he studied at Queen’s College, Cambridge, receiving his BA in 1952 and MA in 1956. Brian’s preparation for the Christian ministry began at Westminster College, Cambridge and culminated at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, to which he came as a Fulbright Fellow, earning his S.T.M. summa cum laude in 1956, followed by his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Columbia University in 1958. It was at Union that Brian met Pauck, who had, himself, migrated across the Atlantic in 1925. In a fascinating parallel, upon graduating from Columbia, Brian was hired by McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago — mere blocks away from Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago Divinity School, where Pauck had taught from 1926 to 1952 before moving to Union. Pauck was a close friend and colleague to yet another eminent theologian and German expatriate, Paul Tillich, who, like Pauck, taught at Union and the University of Chicago at different points in his career. Several years after coming to McCormick, Brian was called to the Divinity School, where he succeeded his mentor in the chair of historical theology. These were enormous shoes to fill since Pauck was considered the dean of historical theology in the U.S., even as his teachers, Holl, Harnack, and Troeltsch had been in Germany. Pauck was also one of the few theologians in the Protestant liberal tradition fully to appreciate, and in significant ways, concur with, Karl Barth’s trenchant criticism of it. It was my great good fortune to inherit such a distinguished theological patrimony in the person of Brian.
As his student, I quite revered him, for — like his teacher, Wilhelm Pauck — he was a captivating lecturer and consummate scholar. But I was also very afraid to have him as professor because he was such a notoriously difficult grader. I remember the in-class essay question that he assigned our class for our final exam in Reformation theology. It was a quotation having to do with the Apostle Paul’s “third use of the law” (its didactic, as opposed to theological and political uses). The quotation, on its face, seemed clearly to have been taken from Calvin. Yet we were told on our exam copy that it, in fact, had been made by Luther — even though, as everyone thinks he knows, Luther allowed for only two uses of the law (the didactic use leading too easily to works-righteousness and legalism). As I recall, we were supposed to say whether Luther could have made such a statement, and if so, how. I read the question, utterly baffled, looked up in dismay (with the expression on my face, “How am I ever going to be able to answer this question?”) only to see the mischievous grin on Professor Gerrish’s face looking back at us as we mystified, bullet-sweating students struggled to explain how this Calvinistic teaching might have come from the pen of Luther! As I recall, after thinking awhile, I answered that Luther probably had made such a statement (he is ever dialectical with a love for paradox, not infrequently saying things that seem contradictory) and I suppose I explained how such a statement might have had a place in Luther’s usual two-use framework. And guess what? Dr. Gerrish approved of my answer! As his student, before really getting to know him in later years, I approached Professor Gerrish with an admixture of extreme admiration and trepidation.
That being the case, the way in which he became my advisor is worth telling. While doing my dissertation research at the University of Copenhagen, I spoke with the Danish Luther scholar, Leif Grane (pronounced Life Grah-nuh) about my interest in the clear similarities between Luther’s theologia crucis and Kierkegaard’s. I asked him if he thought that the former had influenced the latter. Grane told me that it had to have been indirectly since, at the time that Kierkegaard studied theology at the University of Copenhagen in the 1830s, Luther was not read or taught at the Theology Faculty (in fact, when Kierkegaard did finally read Luther for the first time at the midpoint of his authorship in 1847, he remarked in his journal, “I’ve never really read anything by Luther”). At best, Kierkegaard had attended lectures on church history and the Augsburg Confession. Grane’s own thinking was that Kierkegaard had absorbed most of his authentically Lutheran theology through the lyrics of the pietist bishop and hymn writer, Hans Adolf Brorson. I would liken Brorson to the Charles Wesley of Danish hymnody. Both were theologically learned, devout pietists. I thanked Grane for that insight and told him that, although I had an excellent German Kierkegaard scholar, Hermann Deuser, to advise me on the Kierkegaard portion of my dissertation, my knowledge of Luther was too deficient for me to pursue the topic of Luther’s influence on Kierkegaard as it ought to be done. I mentioned that Dr. Gerrish had been my professor at Chicago, and Grane suggested that I ask him. Grane had served with him on the international Luther Society’s leadership committee and knew him well. I said, “I don’t think he’ll do it. I was so afraid of him that I only took two courses from him, and he’s very selective about whom he will accept as an advisee,” to which Grane, a wonderful person along with being a Luther scholar of the first rank, replied: “Tell him: ‘Leif Grane told me to tell you that you should be my advisor!’”
And so, when I returned to the States, I did just that — I called Gerrish and said that, to which he laughingly responded: “You tell Leif Grane that I’ll think about it! Call me in a couple of weeks, after I’ve had some time to consider it.” When I called back at the appointed time, to my immense relief, he said “Yes, I’ll be your advisor,” and for the Luther aspect of my research, he immediately guided me to key works of Luther scholarship that existed only in German — works that, groundbreaking though they were, had never been translated into English. And, yes, there were an equal number of works in English, too – his own included. This reading so enlarged my understanding of Luther that by the time I had finished it, I’d become a tolerably good Luther scholar in my own right. On the day of my graduation, Dr. Gerrish invited me and my wife up to his office on the second floor of Swift Hall to congratulate me, and, knowing my self-effacing nature, offered me some parting words of advice. They ran something like this: “Craig, though it’s true that the meek will inherit the earth, down here you have to promote yourself a little.” True though his words were, I never really managed to put them into practice, though, for his part, he certainly did what he could on more than one occasion. Once we had each moved to Virginia some years later, we reestablished contact, and from that point on, he insisted that I drop the “Dr. Gerrish” and call him “Brian.” From then on, I came to know him in a different way: as my friend, as well as mentor. How I will miss his pleasant nature, his fatherly advice, and fascinating recollections of scholars whom I have always regarded as theological legends – himself and Leif Grane included. How I will miss our enjoyable hours together. How I miss him already.
Craig Hinkson earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School and specializes in historical, philosophical, and systematic theology. He conducted dissertation research from 1987 to 1990 at the Kierkegaard Library located in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen.
