Epilogue

Abstract

Recent scholarship has often focused on the failure of sixteenth-century reform aspirations; scholars have also questioned the coherence and historical significance of the Reformation. The present study brings into relief a yet-unresolved question underlying these debates: what did reformers want to achieve? Scholars have highlighted numerous goals (relief from the social and psychological burdens of late-medieval religion, Christianization, consolation, certitude); this book views the reformers’ central concern as truth and the alignment of Christian life around truth. Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer agreed that human self-assertion in thinking and willing was the root of religious deception; thus, they agreed in seeing suffering both as key to the reception and perception of truth and as an inevitable consequence of life according to truth in a fallen world. Eckhartian mysticism inspired and aided their work to teach discernment and self-discipline. Such pedagogical efforts continued through the preaching, printed sermons and postils, and devotional literature of the early modern era, and it is inappropriate to pass judgment on the success or failure of the Reformation without attending to that literature.

Cutting the roots or transforming them? Luther and mysticism after 1522

“…44I gratefully notice Vincent Evener (2019, p. 432) picking up this term and evolving it for further scholarly use.…”