Bildung und Konfession: Theologenbildung im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung by HermanJ. Selderhuis; Markus WriedtReview by: Susan R. BoettcherThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 271-272Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20478850 .

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Book Reviews 271

Bildung und Konfession: Theologenbildung im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung. Ed. Herman J. Selderhuis and Markus Wriedt. Tilbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. viii + 320 pp. e79.00. ISBN 978-3-16-148931-0.

REVIEWED BY: Susan R. Boettcher, University of Texas at Austin

As the concept of confessionalization gains primacy and challenges to it become more frequent, education in the late Reformation, an area that long suffered under conspicuous neglect, is becoming an important test case for the theory. In particular-although the title skates around the issue of whether education was either confessionalized or a confessional izing activity, and although the foreword says that the point of the book is not to develop new theories-the question of how confessionalization worked at a local level, how author ities educated pastors and preachers to serve as agents of confessionalization in particular local circumstances, is at the center of the twelve essays included here, which were drawn from papers at a conference held in Mainz in 2003.

Herman J. Selderhuis begins the volume in his typically energetic style, with a discus sion of the attraction of the University of Heidelberg for students of Reformed theology. He underlines the interesting point that what we think of as "Heidelberg theology" stressed sim ilarities with Lutheranism rather than differences, trying to bring theologians and students together under a big intellectual tent. Heidelberg was thus a confessional theological faculty that was not always as involved in confessionalizing-at least with regard to other evangeli cals-as we might suspect. Wim Janse makes a similar point in his study of Bremen's Gymna sium illustre: that despite its position as a "stronghold" of Reformed education and although the actual theological interactions of its faculty must still be elucidated, the theological posi tions they took at the Synod of Dordt suggest that they were confessional moderates. Rainer Postel's too-brief essay fits poorly here, with no argument about clerical education except to establish that both before and after the Reformation, despite lay complaints, Hamburg clergy enjoyed a university education. A lengthier essay by Sven Tode does an excellent job, via a detailed quantitative social history, of establishing the educational background of Danzig's Lutheran clergy, suggesting that the rural clergy were less likely than urban clergy to have completed an academic degree of any kind, a frequent source of tension in the period he studies, but does little to suggest the relationship of this data to confession other than to sug gest the unsurprising conclusion that confessional microzones developed according to the theological direction that local pastors had absorbed at the university. Johannes Kistenich takes a similar approach with a more manageable sample in a more concisely formulated study on the clergy of the confessionally complex counties of Mark and Ravensburg, where local sovereigns' inheritance arrangements created a confessionally mixed area. These clergy tended to attend schools with humanistic and Ramist influences, but then moved on to a rel atively limited number of universities-84 percent attended Wittenberg, Helmstedt, Rostock, Cologne, or Marburg-that were attractive either because of their historical significance in the area (Cologne) or their adherence to orthodox Lutheranism. Frank Kleine Hagenbrock's study of the examination of future pastors and the staffing of parishes in Hohenlohe and

Wertheim suggests that while theological knowledge was a welcome quality in a prospective pastor, rhetorical gifts, an impeccable personal life, and a forceful personality were consid ered more important by the sovereigns and officials who filled parish positions, especially given that these territories bordered on Catholic areas where their activities were more likely than not to be drawn into question. Mostly by drawing together previous studies, Julian Kiimmerle discusses the important tendency of theological careers to run in families, a social strategy that verged on being an economy of scale. Marcel Nieden's contribution is the most

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272 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIX/ 1 (2008)

interesting of the volume in its suggestion of interpretive paths for understanding a central normative source of the period, the rationes studii theologici. Frank van der Pol treats the content of a similarly normative source, a sermon of Ysbrandus Trabius on ideals of theolog ical education. Peter Walter treats the too often neglected theme of the extent to which many of the ideals of confessional education were foreseen in the humanistic calls for reform of the lower clergy; though all of the authors he treats agreed on the necessity of education as a pre requisite for service in the cura animarum, this demand fell into the background in compar ison to an insistence on an improvement in the morals of the clergy. Andreas Wendland offers a suggestive essay on why it would be useful to consider the educational patterns of the sixteenth-century Capuchins as an alternative to the current focus on the activities of the Jesuits. Anja-Silvia Going concludes the volume with a treatment from the viewpoint of the history of education on the education of future pastors and preachers in Zurich, a project that shares some comparative potential with Amy Nelson Burnett's recently completed work on Basel.

In general, despite the excellent quality of several of these essays as individual studies of their topics, even as a barometer of the condition of this field at present, rather than sug gesting new directions for research, the volume as a whole largely underlines the fact that the (nonopposing) poles between which the pendulum of scholarly consensus on this theme swings in Germany and the Netherlands are still the Habilitationsschriften of Thomas Kaufmann and Luise Schorn-Schutte, both of which were occupied with Lutheranism. Rel atively little work and nothing synthetic is available on Calvinist institutions of higher edu cation; Howard Hotson's work on Johann Heinrich Alsted is the closest we come to a comparison of different Reformed institutions' educational styles. If the authors of these essays are right, such work is overdue, since these essays suggest an intriguing amount of variety and confusion in comparison with the relatively straightforward and simple confes sional pictures presented in Kaufmann's and Schorn-Schiitte's work. But the provisory qual ity of some of these contributions does little to clarify our picture, and the fact that many of them treat their subjects in the absence of the political factors that surrounded confession alization suggests that more work will be needed to answer the increasingly pressing ques tions about the relationship of confessionalization to the education and training of central Europe's pastors.

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Metapher und Kreuz: Studien zu Luthers Christusbild. Jens Wolff. Hermeneutische Untersuchungen zur Theologie 47. Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005. 677 pp. El 19.00. ISBN 978-3-16-148605-0.

REVIEWED BY: Ronald K. Rittgers, Valparaiso University

This impressive book is a revision of the author's dissertation, which he completed in 2002 at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Miinster. The point of departure is a debate between Gerhard Ebeling-to whom the book is dedicated-and Eberhard Jiingel about the place of metaphorical language in Christian theology; Ebeling has argued that "Glaubens sprache die Metaphorik [sprengt]" [faith language explodes the metaphorical], while Jiingel has maintained that metaphor is theologically indispensable (1-2, 586). Wolff evaluates this debate historically through a close analysis of Luther's comments on Psalm 22 in the Opera tiones in Psalmos (1519-21). The result, as the title of the book suggests, is an examination of the relationship between metaphor and Christology in Luther's thought. The author takes up a mediating position between Ebeling and Jungel: Luther objected to the use of meta

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