By Edmund Schlink. Edited by Matthew Becker. Translated by Matthew Becker et al. Edmund Schlink Works, Volume 2/1 and 2/2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2023. 2 vols. 1,277 pp.

Book Review Clarification

My review [LQ 38 (2024): 451–53] of the American Edition of Edmund Schlink’s Ecumenical Dogmatics, which was edited and translated by Matthew Becker, did not clearly identify the improvements that Becker made in his edition over the German original or its recent republication. The American Edition makes Schlink’s references into footnotes, includes additional citations that were not included in the German edition, provides a complete bibliography, and adds more than 500 editorial notes that provide background information and cross-references to Schlink’s many publications. These editorial decisions make the American Edition more accessible and easier to use than the German edition, whose references occur in the body of the text and are not uniform.

Gregory Walter

Edmund Schlink (1903–84) published his Ecumenical Dogmatics in German in 1983, only a year before his death. Although much of Schlink’s work was translated into English in his own lifetime, the Dogmatics was not. English readers now have the work, not only a remarkable contribution to theology on its own, but also Schlink’s integration of nearly all of his work into a singular theological vision. For the anniversary of his birth in 2003, a group of German  scholars and students of Schlink collected his works in a German edition, comprising five volumes. The publisher also commissioned Matthew Becker to edit  and translate the whole series into an English edition, of which two volumes have already appeared. Theologians and historians of Lutheran theology and  ecumenism will benefit from this translation.

Read the full review here.