Reu Reconsidered:

The Concept of Heilsgeschichte

in the Hermeneutic of J. M. Reu
and J. C K von Hofmann
Paul I. Johnston
What was Johann Michael Reu's position on Scripture, revelation,
and truth? This question continues to be asked today both by those
who look to Reu (1869-1943) somewhat disparagingly as the last great
representative of confessional consciousness within the divisions of
American Lutheranism which today form the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America (ELCA), and also by those who see in Reu an
unrecognized champion of the traditional Lutheran positions on
inerrancy and verbal inspiration. Reu's work on joint church fellowship
committees during the 1920s and 1930s laid important groundwork for
church union discussions among various Lutheran denominations.
However, it is the later Reu to whom apologists and detractors point
today as representative of his position on Scripture and hermeneutics.
It is the contention of this article that the Reu of the late monograph
Luther and the Scriptures must be understood in the context provided
by Reu's overall hermeneutic, which is one that stresses the gradual
development of Christian truth and other significant aspects of
Heilsgeschichte thinking. An attempt will be made, therefore, to
demonstrate Reu's similarity to his mentor, J. C. von Hofmann of
the nineteenth-century Erlangen school, as he developed and worked
with the concept of Heilsgeschichte, and also to show critical
diffrences in his development and use of this concept as he refined his
own hermeneutic.

J. C. K. von Hofmann's Conception of Heilsgeschichte

The University of Erlangen is inseparably linked with the life and
career of Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810-1877), who

The Reverend Paul I. Johnston is Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in

Liberal, KS.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 339

first studied theology there, and who later taught courses in exegesis
and ethics as a member of its theological faculty from 1845 until his
death. Hofmann is remembered as the originator of the peculiarly
Erlangen emphasis on Heilsgeschichte that stood midway between the
radical historical criticism of men like F. C. Baur and D. F. Strauss,
and the theologians like Hengstenberg who wished to dismiss the
historical question raised by rationalism and liberalism by appealing
to the theological world view of the sixteenth-century Reformers.
Hofmann's unique understanding of prophecy and fulfillment in its
relationship to history led him to write three major works dealing with
this very issue from different perspectives.1 It also influenced his
doctrine of the atonement, which during his lifetime was clearly the
most controversial and most bitterly attacked aspect of his teaching.2
Hofmann's view of Heilsgeschichte is one intimately bound up with
the question of the individual's salvation and its place in the universal
plan of God to reveal Himself to mankind. This is in marked contrast
to the views of earlier proponents of Heilsgeschichte thinking such as
Johannes Cocceius and J. A. Bengel. God's eternal will is realized in
history only in progressive stages, for Hofmann, with each new
developmental stage moving mankind closer to the eschaton and the
final communion of God with man. History for Hofmann is "an
unfolding process, that is, each event has its roots in the past, its
meaning in the present, and portends a further development in the
future. God employs this progressive development in such a way that
the extent and character of His revelatory and redemptive activity
correspond at every stage with man's spiritual development.3 Also
primary in Hofmann's hermeneutic is the understanding that God's

1
Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann, Weissagung und Erfllung im Alten und im
Neuen Testamente, Erste und zweite Hlfte (Nrdlingen: C. H. Beck, 1841-1844); idem,
Der Schriftbeweis, 2 vols., zweite, durchgngig vernderte Auflage (Nrdlingen: C. H.
Beck, 1857-1860); idem, Biblische Hermeneutik, nach Manuscripten und Vorlesungen
herausgegeben von W. Volck (Nrdlingen: C. H. Beck, 1860).
2
Hofmann taught that Christ as man's substitute did not suffer the wrath of God over
sin as the penalty due God's justice, but rather that He put His own active obedience to
God's Law in place of God's wrath "that the punishment for sin [might be] swallowed up
by what Christ received as the reward for Hisrighteousness."Cf. Sierd Woudstra, "Old
Testament and Holy History: An Analysis and Evaluation of the Views of Johnann
Christian Konrad von Hofmann" (Th.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1963),
p. 116. For a good contemporary discussion of the controversy generated by Hofmann's
doctrine of the atonement in the context of the confessional question in nineteenth-
century Lutheranism, see Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, Gestalten und Typen des
Neuluthertums: Beitrge zur Erforschung des Neokonfessionalismus im 19. Jahrhundert
(Gtersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1968), pp. 154-176.
3
Christian K. Preus, "The Theology of Johan [sic] Christian Konrad von Hofmann
with Special Reference to His Hermeneutical Principles" (Th.D. diss., Princeton
Theological Seminary, 1948), pp 50-51.

340
revelation of Himself in actions in history takes precedence over God's
revelation of Himself by words. It is the supra-historical reality of "the
Heilsgeschichte itself that is primary. The Scriptures are secondary,
the faithful deposit of the historical development of revelation."4 The
key thought is that history itself is presumed to serve as a vehicle for
God's revelation of Himself, apart from or alongside any verbal
expression which may be contemporaneous with the historical events,
or which may be evolved over time to recall those events to others.
Hofmann's hypothesized "twofold aspect of history" and its relation to
interpretation of the Bible is this: "Every prophecy is a factor in divine
history," and "Every act of that history is also a prophecy at the same
time."5
The other major emphasis to have an impact on Hofmann's
understanding of Heilsgeschichte is the controlling influence in his
work of the personal, subjective dimension to faith and to certainty of
faith. Life and not doctrine, or rather life divorced from any normative
consideration of doctrine in the traditional sense of what it means to
have a norm, is a hallmark of the Erlangen school and of Hofmann's
theology in particular. Hofmann sees each regenerated soul as a
member of a dual community through which God is working out His
eternal purpose in the world: the community of all men, whose history
the divine history and activity enters, shapes, and fills; and the
community of the faithful, the church, in which the salvation mediated
by Christ is being realized in ever clearer stages in the understanding
and development of the Christian's faith and life. It is this specific
emphasis on community as focus of God's saving activity which sets
the paradigm o Heilsgeschichte apart from orthodox Christianity. The
concept of the church as the new humanity in Christ is what Gerhard
Forde sees as perhaps Hofmann's most important contribution to
doctrinal theology.6 This emphasis on the church, its further
development of doctrine and holiness of living, and its bearing toward
the divine telos toward which it continually strives until Christ's
return, is a necessary corollary of Hofmann's historical scheme of

4
Arlis John Ehlen, "Old Testament Theology as Heilsgeschichte,n Concordia
Theological Monthly 35 (October 1964): 532-533.
5
Preus, "Theology of Hofmann," p. 56.
6
Gerhard O. Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate: An Interpretation of Its Historical
Development (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969), p. 77. However, Forde also notes that,
despite the eschatological emphasis in Hofmann's ecclesiology, his paradigm of
Heilsgeschichte functioned in such a way as to obscure "the eschatological newness of the
gospel." Ibid., p. 131.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 341

Heilsgeschichte, as a number of scholars have noted.7 Even the place
and significance of Christ as the mediator of salvation is changed in
Hofmann's system, as Woudstra points out:

Almost imperceptibly the accent is being shifted from Jesus

Christ to the historical development in which He was a link.
The final effect is, that although salvation still comes from
faith in Jesus Christ, this salvation comes from Him only in a
sense, namely this: that by faith in Him, man is incorporated
into the saving process called Holy History. It is thus really no
longer the union with Christ that saves, but the union with
Holy History brought about by Christ.8

In fact, Hofmann's doctrine of the atonement was but the logical

extension of his denial of traditional orthodox soteriology which sees
Christ as the fulfiller of God's Law in mankind's stead. Rather than
accept a juridical framework from which to evaluate the significance
of Christ's life and work, Hofmann instead chose to construct a
soteriological model based on Heilsgeschichte and the forward thrust
of the new creation of humanity in the eschaton. For Hofmann, the
"new humanity" in Christ which is only gradually revealing itself in
the life of the church even today as a further development of the
Heilsgeschichte completely replaces the idea of a lex aeterna by which
man's duties towards God can be measured. What makes the
Heilsgeschichte scheme so revolutionary in the way Hofmann conceived
it, Forde notes, is that even the center of the Christian faiththe
atonement of Christ for the sin of the worldis completely altered.

Righteousness always consists, for Hofmann, in the penitent

acceptance of God's action in history. Man's obligation is to
accept whatever form of divine activity is revealed to him at a
particular time. The object of faith is always the current mode
of the divine activity, that is, faith in the Heilsgeschichte. For
the Israelite this meant living according to the law in the
context of the promise. For the Christian, it means living in
the freedom of the 'new humanity* given in Christ.9

7
See especially Ernst-Wilhelm Wendebourg, "Die heilsgeschichtliche Theologie J. Chr.
. v. Hofmanns in ihrem Verhltnis zur romantischen Weltanschauung," Zeitschrift fr
Theologie und Kirche 52 (Number 1, 1955): 81-82.
8
Woudstra, "Old Testament and Holy History," p. 145.
9
Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate, p. 32.

342
Every individual Christian is to grow to the point of being able to
recognize the significance of his own salvation experience in the overall
economy of God's plan for the world, even as every event narrated in
the Bible is held to be misunderstood and misinterpreted unless it is
considered from the standpoint of its place and significance in the
gradually unfolding organic unity of God's self-revelation in history,
according to this method of interpretation. It is Hofmann's contention
that history itself is the medium of God's revelation, while the Bible is
only the "literary documentation" or the "historical monument" of this
revelation. Hofmann believed that the prophecy itself consists more in
the event than in the words accompanying it. The words only interpret
the event rather than themselves serve as the medium of revelation.
As part of this awareness, this certainty of individual belief and the
validity of doctrinal statements, Hofmann agrees with Frank that "the
factual evidences of God's working in the individual through
Christ...point to the same history of God's activity as that known from
the Bible or from the church's theological consciousness."10 It is
difficult to understand how such a system of organizing Christian
teleology and epistemology could itself be claimed to have grown out
of the Scriptures. But ideas such as the nineteenth-century
enthronement of history as the key interpretive discipline, coupled
with romantic notions inherited from the Enlightenment via Lessing
and Hegel about the organic unfolding of a single unitary plan over
time, made their influence felt in more than one way in men who were
genuinely concerned that the radical historical criticism of their day
would destroy the foundations of Christian teaching if not checked in
theory as well as practice.

As Otto Piper points out in his foreword to the English translation

of Hofmann's Hermeneutik,11 Hofmann separates himself from the
historical-critical school, which sees the Scriptures as only an imperfect
record of Israel's religious life from which the interpreter is free to
accept or reject any part as true; and also from those who believe that
Scripture is a collection of infallible propositions to be believed as true.
Rather, for Hofmann, Scripture receives normative authority only
when its composition is seen as part of the gradual unfolding of God's
plan of holy history [Heilsgeschichte] whose purpose is to save the
world. Hofmann attempts to interpret Scripture and to prove its
abiding relevance for the church by insisting that it is an appreciation

10
Ehlen,"Old Testament Theology as Heilsgeschichte,n p. 533.
n
Otto A. Piper, foreword to Interpreting the Bible, by J. C. K. von Hofmann, trans.
Christian K. Preus (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1959), pp. v-ix.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 343

of God's purpose in giving the Bible to the church, rather than agreeing
with the historical truth or factuality of the content of the various
Bible passages themselves, that comprises the normative authority of
the Scriptures. When Hofmann refers to the content of Scripture, Piper
says he means the divine plan Heilsgeschichte to which all isolated
facts in any given text are relatednot the "givenness" of the historical
or geographical observations the texts contain, nor the literal tacticity
or even the possible elements of literal historical truth they may
contain. The question of whether a given event actually occurred in
space and time history is not an issue with Hofmann. The point rather
is to understand what purpose God had for including the action or the
fact narrated in the Biblical account in the economy of
salvationwhere the discrete act or account fits into the
Heilsgeschichte. And God's purpose in giving the Scripture is most
clearly understood by means of the saving events or deeds narrated
within it. Hofmann's notion of Heilsgeschichte is also highly
experiential, as Piper also observes: "The interpreter, and consequently
the reader, too, participates himself in Holy History and thus becomes
responsible for its progress."12 The key concepts in Hofmann's
hermeneutic are thus 1) a controlling divine purpose into which all
events and words must be fit; 2) a theological structure of history; and
3) the primacy of actions over words as vehicle of God's self-revelation.
The organic relationship of these three elements combine in Hofmann's
thinking to produce a progressive revelation, which continues even into
the present day, of God's essence and will. That this divine revelation
is dynamic and not static was axiomatic for Hofmann. His attitude
towards the Lutheran Confessions took on the same cast as well,
where he defended the church's right to continue to make changes in
the form in which the truths contained in the Confessions are
expressed.13 Hofmann believed such changes in form, while reflecting
development in the church's theology over time, would not change the
substance of their doctrinal content. And as Martin Hein points out, he
also held that the Confessions had to be interpreted and used as an
organic wholean idea which also shaped the Erlangen approach to
Scripture.14
It goes without saying that the task of Biblical hermeneutics to
Hofmann is "not the application of a general hermeneutics to a special

12
Ibid., p. viii.
13
Cf. Kantzenbach, Gestalten und Typen des Neuluthertums, pp. 135-136.
14
Martin Hein, Lutherisches Bekenntnis und Erlanger Theologie in 19. Jahrhundert,
Die Lutherische Kirche, Geschichte und Gestalten, no. 7 (Gtersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1984),
p. 170. He notes also the dialectical assumptions implicit in the Erlangen confessional
hermeneutic on p. 145 of this work.

344
kind of literature," but rather an immersion of the intellect of the
believing interpreter in "the historical development of which this
[manifestation of mental life] is a part."15 He labels it as a false
hermeneutic when various interpreters in the church's past such as
Clement and Origen failed to appreciate the Scriptures as an historical
document because they "considered it as a revelation of doctrines."16
It is not the individual words or individual doctrines of the Scriptures
which are needed in order for one to interpret them correctly, thought
Hofmannwhat is needed is an awareness of "the whole content of
Scripture...the totality of Scripture."17 This is the only way in which
Scripture's "actual nature" can be determined, according to him. This
rules out any doctrine of inspiration of the words of Scripture from the
very outset which is not controlled by the concept of history as
revelation, as Hofmann explains:

Exegesis suffered further through a doctrine of inspiration

which had been deduced in a purely rational way from the
principle of the exclusive authority of Scripture in matters of
faith. People conceived of Scripture as the Word of God in a
purely abstract sense, and from this abstract concept, certain
rational conclusions regarding the character of Scripture were
deduced irrespective of its actual nature. Scripture was not
understood as the all-embracing revelation of God, nor as a
document and product of Holy History, but as the revelation of
saving doctrine. Now if Scripture is the Word of God in this
unconditional sense, no contradiction within it is conceivable
unless the text was forced to fit the theory.18

Hofmann commends the hermeneutical labors of Johann Tobias Beck

(1804-1878) for this very reason, as he believes Beck's system has fully
recognized the unity which the Scriptures contain, while also
upholding "the diversity which results from its historical character."19
For Hofmann, such "diversity" can include differences in doctrinal
formulation of different texts themselves, contradictory theologies
expressed in the same book, as well as differences that emerge over
time in the writings of a single author, such as Isaiah. It also can

15
Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, pp. 4, 3.
16
Ibid., p. 7.
17
Ibid., p. 8.
18
Ibid., pp. 10-11.
19
Ibid., pp. 14-15.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992

include differences in idea or expression in the contents of the various
books of both Old and New Testaments.20
Again and again Hofmann makes it clear that he believes no
proper interpretation of the Bible can be made by one who does not use
the fact of his own regeneration as the starting point for recognizing
the plan of Heilsgeschichte and how near each passage of the Biblical
text stands in relation to this historical ideal. For Hofmann, the
Christian faith is not primarily a statement about the existence of a
relationship between God and man, but rather the fact of the
relationship itself. Thus for Hofmann the content of the Christian
faith has to be "an exposition of the contents of the present fact of the
relationship between God and man which has been mediated through
Jesus Christ," not the exposition of the contents of the Bible.21 What
Hofmann actually means by this thought is that the entire content of
the Christian belief system can be deduced from the fact of one's
regeneration. Although Barth sees Hofmann's dependence upon
personal experience to be akin to Schleiermacher's grounding of
religious truth in the existential experience, Preus and others point out
rightly that the role of experience is a different one in each man's
thinking.22
Passages are to be judged as more important for the task of
Biblical interpretation the more closely they are found to be connected
to the idea of Heilsgeschichte, and less important the more indirect
connection they have. The controlling idea for Hofmann is the organic
unity of all parts of Scripturea unity which dare not be broken,
either by levelling all passages to the same status of importance in
Biblical interpretation, or by failure to comprehend the connection of
each single passage to the divine Heilsgeschichte as it has been
growing and developing in the consciousness of the faithful people of
God down through the centuries.
One judges the reality, the certainty of the content of Holy
Scripture in the same way that one judges the reality of the
miraclesthat is, by analyzing in what relationship it stands to
Christ, Hofmann believes. Christ is the center of Heilsgeschichte, and
so each miracle's content is rightly understood in connection with Him

20
Ibid., p. 106. For example, Hofmann mentions the diverse viewpoints present in
Isaiah 13,14, and 19 as evidence that spurious sections have been added to the original
manuscript by mistake; also the interpolated nature of the book of Colossians as evidence
of later additions to the epistle which are not genuine.
21
Woudstra, "Old Testament and Holy History," pp. 34, 37.
22
It is interesting to note that Georg Stckhardt, Missouri Synod exegete who studied
with Hofmann, believed that Hofmann possessed "Schleiermachian tendencies." Cf. Georg
Stckhardt, "Franks Thologie," Lehre und Wehre 42 (1896): 65.

346
and connected to all the other miracles which Scripture records. This
is the way in which the meaning and the reality of the miracles in
Scripture are to be judged, not according to the natural law of cause
and effect. Because Scripture is the "product and testimony of
Heilsgeschichte, Hofmann holds there to be no need to question the
veracity or the factualness of the Scriptural accounts, even when they
are opposed to the working of natural laws. The reason this is true is
because "the individual miracle has to be interpreted as part of an
historical process," and because it "remains unintelligible...when
treated by itself and apart from its special place and significance for
Holy History."23 Hofmann himself therefore accepts most of the
miracles recorded in the Bible as actual historical fact. However,
Hofmann finds "liberties and inaccuracies" in the New Testament
historical narratives, and even "errors."24 As long as the interpreter
finds the religious purpose for which the narrative was written, and
fits this religious truth of the story into its proper place in the
unbroken series of events which make up the Heilsgeschichte, Hofmann
believes his exegesis is unassailable.25 Therefore the exegete is free
to "subject [the subjects of natural knowledge described in Scripture]
to the same tests as all other subjects of natural knowledge," and he
will "see them in the right light" as long as he understands what
connection they have to the eternal purpose of God to save the world
that inheres in the scheme of Heilsgeschichte.2* This connection is
established by Hofmann through the use of an elaborate typology by
which he wanted to explain the thrust of every passage's meaning for
the future, as well as its meaning in fulfillment in its own day. As
Preus points out, for Hofmann "the typical is historical rather than
allegorical, and as such has a significance of its own."27
In his treatment of the unity of Scripture when considered over
against its diverse origins and apparently contradictory theologies,

23
Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, p. 32.
^Ibid., pp. 69-70. Hein notes: "Ideologie ohne wissenschaftliche Freiheit blieb
Hofmann undenkbar." Hein, Lutherisches Bekenntnis und Erlanger Theologie im 19.
Jahrhundert, p. 271.
25
Hofmann appeals to the "necessity" and the "prerequisite" of Holy History and even
"the law of Holy History" to explain why certain events had to happen as they are
narrated in the Scriptures. Hofmann, Interpreting the Bible, p. 73.
26
Ibid., p. 76.
27
Preus, "Theology of Hofmann," p. 21. Thus for Hofmann, the interpretation of every
Bible passage must be able to show what its fulfillment and meaning was for the original
persons at the time when it was given; what its meaning is for the life of the church as
it has developed today in light of the unbroken sequence of events making up the
Heilsgeschichte, and what it means for the future eschaton when the final end of all
things initiated by Jesus Christ comes to its fullness.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 347

Hofmann declares that every single passage, and even every detail it
contains, has to be interpreted in view of the fact that the entire
content and subject matter of every book of Scripture is Jesus Christ.
When one considers, however, that in Hofmann's scheme of history
prophecy's first and controlling hermeneutical significance must be
found in its interpretation and fulfillment in the lives of those to whom
it was originally addressed, it is correct to observe as Preus does that
"the net result of the application of his theory was bound to be a
reduction in the Messianic content of the OT to a point which would
be acceptable even to his opponents of the rational-critical schools....
It is therefore only logical to conclude that the Messianic hope arose in
Israel not as a result of inspired prophecy, but naturally out of
historical events."28 Given this understanding of prophecy and
fulfillment as a function of the gradual unfolding of a universal
historical scheme rooted in the hidden will of God rather than
culminating in a divine-human Person who is Lord even of history, it
is not surprising to find that Hofmann's Christ displays definite
kenotic tendencies.

Reu's Conception of Heilsgeschichte

How far Reu is willing to concede nonnative authority to subjective
religious consciousness and to the concept of Heilsgeschichte in the
task of establishing Christian teaching continues to remain a matter
of considerable controversyand one with important implications for
his theological hermeneutic. The problem becomes especially acute
when the Erlangen impetus toward confessionalism was so strong a
factor in Reu's own theological identity. Reu himself states that he and
Georg Stoeckhardt "were the first to apply Hofmann's exegetical
principles in America,"29 so one should not be surprised to find a
number of parallels in the basic hermeneutical approach of Reu and
Hofmann.
Reu speaks about the "specific methodical advance" made by
Hofmann in the science of Biblical exegesis and commends his
replacement of the glossarial method of merely rephrasing the words
of the text with a method which introduces the reader into "the

28
Ibid., pp. 85-86,87. Woudstra believes that Hofmann rejected all messianic prophecy
as this term has traditionally been understood. Cf. Woudstra, "Old Testament and Holy
History," pp. 70, 85.
29
Reu, "The Course of Theology Itself," pp. 137-138; part 2 of "Introduction to
Theology," Johann Michael Reu Collection, Wartburg Seminary Archives, Wartburg
Seminary, Dubuque, IA.

348
development of the sacred writer's thought."30 He goes on to remark
that it was Bengel who

helped the Church to understand the whole Scripture from a

new viewpoint. For to him Scripture is an unum continuum
systema, an organism of divine acts and testimonies revealing
a great divine economy of salvation, which unfolds itself step
by step, beginning with creation, finding its climax in Christ's
person and work, and aiming at its consummation through
Christ's second advent and the creation of the new heaven and
the new earth.31

Reu understands Hofmann's teaching of Heilsgeschichte to be in

harmony with the doctrine of revelation found in the Scriptures
themselves; the only history known by the sacred writers is
Heilsgeschichte?2 Hofmann's exegetical principles are superior to all
others to Reu because of "the great dialectical advantage" one gains
from a study of his work, and also because of "the dialectical work
which is expected of each user."33
Reu rejects the notion that Hofmann is a "consciousness
theologian," believing instead that "for him what is subjective can
possibly know the truth only because he absolutely considers the
objective valid."34 Reu comments that he regards Hofmann as "the
greatest exegete of [the nineteenth] century, and this in spite of the
fact that I cannot follow him in a few important points." An
explanation of what these "points" were in which Reu could not follow
Hofmann appears in an article published in the Kirchliche Zeitschrift
in 1924, one of which was "when he made the self-consciousness of the
faith of the Christian the fruitful point of departure from which

30
Ibid., pp. 97-98.
31
Reu, "The Course of Theology Itself," pp. 103-104.
32
"It was Hofmann of Erlangen and Franz Delitzsch who...expressed] that special
character which distinguishes Biblical history from all other history...when they
maintained the history of O.T. and N.T. is the history of our salvation or
redemption....Redemption or salvation is the basic thought under which all Old and N.T.
history and histories can be comprehended." Reu, "The Course of Theology Itself," pp.
150-151.
33
J. M. Reu, review of Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, by Theodor Zahn, in
Kirchliche Zeitschrift 29 (Number 1, 1905): 43.
^J. M. Reu, review of Theologie und Philosophie bei von Hofmann, by Martin
Schellbach, in Kirchliche Zeitschrift 60 (February 1936): 109.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 349

systematic theology is to furnish Christian truth."35 But in the same
breath, Reu also commends Hofmann for teaching him

the proper exegetical method...letting him show us as well the

law of the gradual development of divine revelation and of
salvation history [Heilsgeschichte] and of the one-sidedness
within revelation, as compared with the position of the old
dogmatics which conceived of revelation almost only as
doctrine and thereby never properly came to the inclusion of
revelation by action. That resulted in a better understanding
of the Scripture, permitted us to remain completely within the
boundaries of the confessions, but necessitated many a going
beyond with regard to the propositions of the old dogmatics.36

God's gradual self-revelation as witnessed to by the Scripture and

contained in it is something quite different for Reu than the
understanding of the hermeneutic of Welhausen and his school, which
Reu understood to be nothing more than a natural development from
lower to higher concepts uninfluenced by supernatural revelation. But
the notion of progress of thought and development over time, coupled
with a conception of divine revelation which is somehow an organically
interconnected, living whole, is found also in Reu's own hermeneutic.
Scripture is for Reu "the embodiment and re-presentation
(Vergegenwaertigung) of the divine revelation,"37 the norm and also
the source for all matters of faith each of whose prophecies "holds the
germ of future development in its bosom and is a prfiguration of
it."38 Act of God takes precedence over Word of God in Reu's
conception of divine revelation, in that the words can only record the
event (albeit infallibly) after it has taken place, to make an "authentic
monument, the sufficient, trustworthy and essentially harmonious
document and account of this history."39 To Reu, if one does not
locate any given fact of the divine revelation within the flowing context
of the whole Heilsgeschichte of which it is a part, he cannot understand
or rightly appreciate it. All revelation is progressive; it is unfolding
down through the ages and continues to unfold, advance, and develop

35
J. M. Reu, "Zum Unterschied in der Theologie und kirchlichen Praxis zwischen
deutschem und amerikanischem Luthertum," Kirchliche Zeitschrift 48 (April 1924): 221-
222.
36
Ibid.
37
J. M. Reu, "What is Scripture and How Can We Become Certain of Its Divine
Origin?," Kirchliche Zeitschrift 63 (July 1939): 425.
8
* Ibid., p. 406.
39
Reu, "The Course of Theology Itself," pp. 150-151.

350
in the life of the church today. Reu maintains that the Erlangen
school's search for a single unifying hermeneutical principle upon
which to base all of Christian theology was motivated by their need to
express their conviction that all Christian truth is part of a larger
unity, and to demonstrate the scientific character of Christian theology
as an intellectual discipline. Although Reu quite clearly rejects
Hofmann's dictum, "I myself, the Christian, am for myself, the
theologian, the object of my theological science," he yet sees even in a
revelation that he freely admits is "fixed in writing in the
Scriptures"40 a decided tendency toward progress of thought that is
shaped and influenced by its Sitz im Leben, and that is conditioned by
the interrelationship of its various parts to a nebulous "whole of
Christian truth."
One of the best passages in which Reu reveals what his conception
of Biblical history or salvation history is, is this one from the year
1911:

Christianity in its entirety, and Jesus Christ as its center, are

a historical fact, the end of a magnificent history occurring
between God and the human race; because that which is
fundamental and which creates something new is a revelation
through an act, beside which the revelation by means of the
word merely marches along, either preparing for it, or leading,
afterward, to an understanding of its meaning.41

Reu maintains that the key idea in understanding Biblical history is

"the laying of the foundation and a new creating are the revelation of
deeds which the verbal revelation only accompanies, either preparing
for or supplementing the understanding of the significance of the
other."42 Reu speaks in a similar way of a Christian dogmatics "which
stands in living contact with the life of faith of the present, which
brings the indispensability of its fundamental truth out of the
necessities of the human soul to consciousness, one which grows
organically out of the Scriptures before the eyes of the students."43

40
J. M. Reu, "Do We Need A New Dogmatics?", pp. 31-32, J. M. Reu Collection,
Dubuque, IA.
41
J. M. Reu, "Grundsatze zur Herstellung von Sonntags-schul-Literatur," Kirchliche
Zeitschrift 35 (April-May 1911): 166.
42
J. M. Reu, "Die Sonntagsschule," Kirchliche Zeitschrift 25 (Number 1, 1901): 19.
43
J. M. Reu, "Die lutherische Kirche in einer Krisis?", Kirchliche Zeitscrift 53
(February 1929): 134. Reu in another place refers to the Heilsgeschichte schema as "the
organism of saving truth" into which every Bible passage must be placed if it is to be
correctly understood. Cf. J. M. Reu, Homiletics: A Manual of The Theory and Practice of
Preaching, trans. Albert Steinhaeuser, 4th ed. (Chicago: Wartburg Publishing House,

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 351

The important question here is what Reu means by the phrase "the
necessities of the human soul." It would seem from a consideration of
his other sources that Reu could not take this in the crass
understanding of Frank or even with the anthropological optimism of
Hofmann. If the "necessities" he speaks about here are somehow innate
within the soul as spiritually active and valid qualities or tendencies
existing prior to conversion, then Reu is at odds with the doctrine of
man as it has been elaborated by the Lutheran dogmaticians of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and officially embodied in the
Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580. As far as his comment here that his
own conception of Heilsgeschichte necessarily implies an "organic"
growth out of the Scriptures themselves, Reu remarks in one place that
the acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity in the West is required by
"the economy of the divine revelation itself' inasmuch as "the fact of
the personal revelation of God in Christ necessitates the recognition of
the divine Son in addition to the Father, and the personality of the
Spirit is a result of the personal work of God in the salvation which He
carries out for us."44 Granted that these words may refer to the
position of Elert rather than to his own position, it is nevertheless true
that Reu in this review of Elert's book does not distance himself in any
way from the very Erlangen import of these words. Men such as Frank
and Hofmann believed that the Heilsgeschichte contained within itself
its own inner dynamic which "necessitates" certain dogmatic
formulations which can be "recognized" by the regenerate ego as it
contemplates the fact of its own regeneration and as it comes to
understand its own place in the divine economy of salvation. And in a
revealing comment on the concept of Heilsgeschichte from his
homiletics text, Reu criticizes Luther and his exegesis because it does
not reflect the concept of holy history as its organizing base. He
comments on Luther's "failure to grasp fully and apply consistently the
law of development and gradual progress of divine revelation."45
It is interesting to note that Reu understands the factual events of
the Biblical narrative to be part of a much greater whole which shapes
and controls them. He says that it is an "undeniable fact" that the
Scriptures are primarily "a book of history, relating to us that holy
history between God and man in the course and by means of which the
salvation of mankind has been prepared and established and will be
acquired and consummated. All the doctrine it contains rests upon

1934), p. 344.
44
J. M. Reu, "Dr. Elerts' 'Morphologie des Lutherstums/" Kirchliche Zeitschrift 55
(October 1931): 581-582.
45
Reu, Homiletics, p. 279.

352
facts, is inseparably bound up with this history."46 It would seem
clear from these and other passages in his writings that Reu definitely
understands some sort of over-arching Heilsgeschichte history to
control ("by means of which") divine revelation and even salvation.
Reu speaks of a gradual development of Christian doctrine,
considered as an historical entity and drawn from the Scripture. But
even here, Reu is very cautious that both the meaning and the content
of dogmatic formulae be preserved. He believes that new formulations
of the saving truth into which the church is supposedly led over time
can easily compromise or destroy Scriptural teaching, as these
comments from one of Reu's addresses from the early 1920s show:

We admit the possibility of such a progress, and, for principle's

sake, also acknowledge the duty of the Lutheran Church to
work in this direction as long as this work is based entirely
upon the accepted confessions. But we believe at the same
time, that the Church of today has so much to do, in order to
firmly ground herself in the confessions of the past, that she
will hardly find time to attempt much in the direction of the
growth and progress indicated.47

The priority of God's saving deeds over God's saving word in Reu's
thinking about Heilsgeschichte is nowhere more in evidence than in his
address to the Lutheran World Convention in 1929. Here Reu observes
that it is the Christian's task "to cling tenaciously to the great saving
deeds of God, revealed in the Scriptures, as the immovable rock on
which our Christian faith and life are founded."48 Here too it is the
deeds of God which get the emphasis and not the words of God. He
goes on in this same monograph to expound his view of Biblical history
as Heilsgeschichte by stating that sacred history is "an organism of
divine deeds and testimonies" which progresses step by step until it
reaches its culmination in Christ's resurrection.49 For Reu, God's
self-disclosure was a gradual one, and mankind's relation to God was
a growing one which requires of Biblical theology a progressive and
ever-changing character. Reu is very clear in distancing himself from

^J. M. Reu, "The Place of Biblical History in the Curriculum of Lutheran Schools,"
pp. 48-49, J. M. Reu Collection, Dubuque, IA.
47
J. M. Reu, "The Lutheran World Convent at Eisenach," pp. 44-45. Reu Collection,
Dubuque, IA.
^J. M. Reu, "The Origin and the Significance of Luther's Catechisms," in The Second
Lutheran World Convention: The Minutes, Addresses and Discussions of the Convention
at Copenhagen, Denmark, June 26th to July 4th, 1929 (Philadelphia: United Lutheran
Publication House, 1930), p. 39.
49
Reu, The Course of Theology Itself," pp. 159-160.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 353

the view of Biblical history prevalent in the age of Lutheran orthodoxy,
e.g.: "we distinguish our view from the view dominant during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theologians ofthat time had
no understanding for this gradual process....They did not have what we
today call Biblical Theology."50
When it comes to the history out of which the holy writings
proceed, Reu is able to specify in some detail in what manner he
understands the Scriptures to relate to the intervention of God in
history which produced them. He makes this revealing statement in
another work: "Even though the revelation of God by means of word as
for instance, in the teachings of Christ was indispensable for our
salvation; nevertheless...God's revelation through His acts as they
make up the major content of Biblical History has always been the
primary and fundamental form of His self-revelation, not His
revelation by words."51 In a similar vein, Reu in this same volume
asserts that any historical event can be properly understood to have
two meanings:

[Sacred] History, however, is composed of a series of separate

events. Each event has a meaning of its own. It has further
meaning and value as a link in the chain of events that makes
up the whole of sacred history. The teacher must know this
twofold aspect of each event and seek to make it clear to his
pupils....To this must be added another fact, namely that all
Bible stories together form a unity. They are not only members
of a group such as the stories of Abraham, or the story of the
patriarchs, of Moses and David, but they are at the same time
members of the one great story, which extends from the fall to
Golgotha, Pentecost, and beyond, the story of the salvation of
mankind.52

A preference toward understanding God's revelation more in terms

of deeds than words shows up also in Reu's Catechetics. Here Reu says
straightforwardly that "God's revelation by acts, presented in Biblical
History, has been the fundamental and creative factor in a much
higher degree than his revelation by words which finds more extensive

50
Ibid. It is interesting to note that on page 191 of this same work Reu recommends
Frank's Die Theologie der Concordienformel as the best theological introduction to the
Formula of Concord.
51
Reu, How to Teach in the Sunday School, pp. 139, 569.
52
Ibid., p. 178.

354
expression in the Catechism.53 And in a 1938 essay, Reu specifically
discusses the degree to which he understands his own position on
Heilsgeschichte to be related to that of the Erlangen theologians. Here
Reu comments that he is "indebted to the school of Erlangen" for both
the insight that Scripture is most properly conceived of as history, and
that "this history is the history of our salvation." These two insights
brought such a wholesome corrective to theological hermeneutics
because "the old dogmaticians" had conceived of divine revelation
primarily as doctrine and had "almost completely forgot what is
fundamental, namely, the revelation by deed." Although Reu believes
that God's saving acts cannot be understood except by means of the
accompanying revelation by word, still for him the revelation by deed
is primary.54 Important here is Reu's admission that Hofmann is
correct in his basic stance that revelation should be conceived of
primarily as historical acts rather than as words, in fact that
Hofmann's approach was "wholesome and necessary." While Reu does
not endorse Hofmann's view of revelation entirely, he does see great
value in it, and even calls it "fundamental."
No more convincing evidence is available of Reu's unchanged
stance on Scripture's nature as divine revelation and what kind of
nonnative authority it has for the church than his own article "Mssen
die Verhandlungen mit Missouri nun aufhren?", which was written
less than two years before his death.55 In this extensive examination
from Reu's perspective on the problems in Biblical interpretation which
separated the American Lutheran Church from the Missouri Synod,
Reu shows beyond a doubt that his position on the authority of the
Bible is not that of the sixteenth-century Lutheran confessors, nor that
of the repristination theologians of the nineteenth century, nor that of
the Missouri Synod. In this piece, Reu takes issue with a paper
published by Missouri Synod pastor Paul H. Burgdorf because "it
maintained...that agreement in all points, also in the so-called
'non-fundamentals,' should be foundational to church fellowship."56
Even though Reu strongly affirms the doctrine of verbal inspiration in
this articleeven to the point of saying that the American Lutheran
Church by convention resolution had endorsed the same teaching on

53
J. M. Reu, Catechetics, or Theory and Practise of Religious Instruction, 3rd ed.
(Chicago: Wartburg Publishing House, 1931), p. 291.
54
Reu, "What Is Scripture and How Can We Become Certain of Its Divine Origin?",
p. 405.
55
Reu, "Mssen die Verhandlungen mit Missouri nun aufhren?," Kirchliche
Zeitschrift 65 (October 1941): 577-607.
56
Ibid., p. 587.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 355

Scripture as that confessed by the Missouri Synod's "Brief
Statement"57he still views the Bible as a gradual development of
God's self-revelation, and he still calls for toleration of certain basic
doctrinal diversity between the two church bodies in such teachings as
the Last Things and the Antichrist. His view of verbal inspiration is
limited to inspiration of Holy Scripture "as a whole" (verbi) and does
not include the individual words themselves (verborum). This also is
the position that Reu took in the negotiations with the ULCA
commissioners at meetings prior to and during the drafting of the
Pittsburgh Agreement, which uses Reu's draft document to define
inspiration primarily in terms of all the books of the Bible, which,
"taken together, constitute a complete, errorless, unbreakable whole."
Other writings by Reu on the question of church union from this
same time period display the same sort of willingness to tolerate
divergent teachings within the church on some articles of the Christian
faith. For example, in Reu's article "Unionism" he states that different
doctrines in non-fundamental articles of the faith cannot be considered
divisive of church fellowship because such doctrines, while they are
indeed the Word of God, still have "nothing to do with our salvation"
and stand "far out in the periphery of Christian doctrine."58 The only
qualification Reu puts on this assertion is that "the interpretation of
the Scripture texts dealing with non-fundamentals must not run
counter to the analogy of the Scriptures." But he also points out that
he means the "analogy of the Scriptures" to be understood not in terms
of the sum total of the number of proof passages that establish or
pertain to a given teaching of Scripture (i.e., "we must not assume that
the analogy of the Scriptures is identical with the dogmatics of the
seventeenth century"), but rather in terms of "the entire Bible."59
Here is certainly strong evidence for the fact that Reu views the task
of exegesis the same way as the Erlangen theologians doas involving
a weighting of Bible passages as more or less important according to
how they fit into the Heilsgeschichte motif, and using the "whole
Scripture" to establish doctrines or determine doctrinal tendencies at
the expense of express single statements of the Scriptures. The fact
that Reu entertains the notion of freedom for different interpretations
of the same Scripture texts within the same church body reveals that

57
Ibid., pp. 591-592. This comment is made in clarification of how the American
Lutheran Church understands the section on inspiration of the Bible in its Pittsburgh
Agreement with the United Lutheran Church in America.
58
J. M. Reu, "Unionism," In the Interest of Lutheran Unity, Sponsored by the Board
of Publication of the American Lutheran Church (Columbus: Lutheran Book Concern,
1940), pp. 37-38.
59
Ibid., p. 38.

356
for him "all sorts of individual doctrines somewhere in the outer
circumference of the doctrinal system" do not each require a single,
simple sense in which they are to be understood.60 Reu's exegetical
procedure, at least in the case of non-fundamental doctrines, also
appears to label the Scripture as being an obscure book rather than to
locate the source of obscurity in interpretation in the human mind and
heart.

Summary

"I am compelled to say that, with the exception of my old teachers,

I have not learned so much from anyone as I have from Hofmann,
Frank, and Zahn."61 As directly indebted as Reu by his own admission
seems to be to the theological construct of Heilsgeschichte proposed by
Hofmann and by other leaders of the Erlangen theological school, it is
a fact that his own position on Heilsgeschichte is substantially different
from those taken by his teachers.
As the preceding analysis has shown, Reu does not precisely share
Hofmann's view of Heilsgeschichte, although he frequently uses this
term. Reu manifests a much less developed understanding of this
concept as controlling world-historical principle than Hofmann displays
in his writings. The strict cause-effect chain of causality present in
Hofmann's theory of Heilsgeschichte is not present in Reu's
understanding of holy history; God in Reu's system is at all times
positioned above the definitive sequence of events which He has
ordered through which the plan of the world's salvation is being
worked out. However, Reu does appropriate the notion of organic
wholeness to Christian truth and also the idea of gradual development
of revelation of divine truth from Hofmann's system and makes these
features key elements in his own hermeneutic.62 This is the reason
why Reu could maintain that membership in the Old Testament

^Ibid., p. 42. Reu believed that there had to be absolute unanimity in the
fundamental doctrines in order for church fellowship to exist.
61
J. M. Reu, "Theodor Zahn,* Kirchliche Zeitschrift 57 (May 1933): 298-299. And in
another place Reu says that he owes the Erlangen theology "deep gratitude." Cf. Reu,
review of "Festgabe fr Theodor Zahn," in Kirchliche Zeitschrift 53 (January 1929): 40.
62
Cf. Reu's commendation of Schleiermacher's dogmatic methodology because he
"requires...that Christian truth be presented as a system, as a unified, self-consistent,
organic whole, derived from one fundamental thought which permeates and controls it."
Reu says he agrees with Schleiermacher's method because it is his own belief that "not
all parts of Christian doctrine lie on one line and are of the same importance, much
rather...there must be distinctions between that which is central and that which is
peripheral and, again, within the latter, between what lies closer to and what lies further
from the center." Reu, "Die Ueberwindung der Aufklarung und die Rckkehr zu Schrift
und Bekenntnis 1830-1875," Kirchliche Zeitschrift 64 (September 1940): 518-519.

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 357

church was purely a matter of performing external ceremonies. This is
also the reason why Reu had so many difficulties coming to grips with
a single position on Scriptural infallibility in the life of the
contemporary church. These two features also explain Reu's vacillating
position between the notion of a confessionally distinct body of doctrine
to which one pledges himself, and the notion of a body of doctrine that
grows more expressive of the divine will over time as it changes its
expression and reflects deeper insights into the divine will. Also
appropriated from Hofmann is Reu's preference at all times during his
career in viewing revelation in the first instance as divine action and
only afterward as divine word. Reu even refers to Scripture
occasionally as the "monument" of God's revelation, precisely as
Hofmann does, but Reu differs from him in that he believes the
original texts of the Biblical books are without error of any kind.
Hofmann, on the other hand, believed that the term "inerrancy" could
never be used to describe the Scriptures; indeed, it was axiomatic with
him that they contain historical errors.
It also is obvious that Reu does not share Hofmann's (and Frank's)
understanding of the atonement. The theanthropic Christ is always at
the center of Reu's soteriology as Lord of history, in it but always
outside of it and greater than the concept of Heilsgeschichte itself. Reu
also does not hold to Hofmann's understanding of Christ's passion as
obedience to the decree of His Father's will, but not a payment of
mankind's debt owed to God. For Reu, Christ's death is juridical,
substitutionary, and experienced to the utmost limit of both His divine
and human natures. Hofmann held, on the other hand, that Christ's
suffering was mitigated by His knowledge that His obedience to the
will of the Father also in death was but the presaging of a redeemed
"new humanity"the real purpose of the atonement and of the
Heilsgeschichte,,63
The methodological assumption of Hofmann that Scripture
interpretation has to start with the contents of the Christian
experience is not accepted by Reu either, at least not in the sense in
which Hofmann meant this. Reu is far more Scripture-centered in his

^It is interesting to note, however, that the Erlangen influence upon Reu's
propositional conceptualization of the atonement is not entirely lacking. For example, in
the Ethics Reu writes: "This work of expiation was to be the basis for the creation of a
new life in man as Paul clearly writes in Rom. 7:25b-8:ll, especially in the purpose
clause: 'that the requirement of the law might be fully met in our case.' The ultimate
purpose of the work of Jesus was not expiation. This was rather to be the means toward
the final goal, which was the creation of a people of God who should rest in communion
with their God, recognize the will of God as their highest and only norm, and live
accordingly." J. M. Reu and Paul H. Buehring, Christian Ethics (Columbus: Lutheran
Book Concern, 1935), pp. 123-124.

358
approach to theology and to the certainty of faith, and rejects the
assertion of his teachers that an exposition of the contents of one's
faith is a sufficient basis from which to derive all Christian doctrines,
especially those dealing with such supramundane matters as the
existence of the Trinity or the teachings about the Last Days. However,
once again it can be seen how the Erlangen theology has had an
impact on Reu's position. Christian experience in the sense of genuine
piety, however, is very much an important fruit of faith in Reu's
theological system, and it has implications for his hermeneutics as
well. Reu believed that only the humble believer who came to the
Scripture text in sincere faith would be able to interpret the text's
meaning correctly. Reu's lifelong call for more "inwardness," for more
true Christian piety as a way to solve the emerging doctrinal and
missions problems facing the church, seems very much to reflect the
Erlangen assertion that the believer can use his activity of cognition
to arrive at a conviction of certainty by directing it "scientifically" upon
his own conversion experience. But Reu at all times maintains a
"wholly other" orientation of the experience of the new birth and the
fact of its divine causality which indeed often appear to be contrary to
human reason. It has also been shown above how great a consideration
the discipline of pietas had in Reu's willingness to tolerate errors in
doctrinal formulation and in outright teaching, inasmuch as Reu
believed that in the case of such Christians, God would eventually lead
them to the right teaching on His own because their faith was centered
in Christ and because they were seeking to bring every thought captive
to Him, as God gave them increasing insight into the truth.
Reu and Hofmann agree that it is primarily the believing
community through which God reveals new and deeper insights into
the meaning of Scripture, and in this Reu appears to follow Hofmann
in his insistence on viewing the church as the locus for organic
development of Christian consciousness. But Reu never stresses the
"new humanity" aspect of the church to the degree that Hofmann does,
preferring instead to adhere to the more ancient understanding of the
church as all those who here in time trust in Christ alone for their
salvation. This fact is, of course, not absent in Hofmann's view of the
church, but its significance recedes behind the all-important universal
history which is yet to fully unfold itself in the eschatona humanity
in which all things are moving toward their final fulfillment.
It is to be hoped that the evidence presented here will lead to a
rvaluation on the part of scholars of their position on Reu's Biblical
hermeneutics and of his stance on the question of inspiration and how
it relates to the hermeneutic of Heilsgeschichtenot only for the sake
of truthfulness to the historical record, but also to clear away the

CONCORDIA JOURNAL/OCTOBER 1992 359

misconceptions about Reu's hermeneutical principles which dogmatic
misinterpretations of both liberal and conservative scholarship within
American Lutheranism have produced in the years since his death.

360
 ^ s
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