Promissio: The Reformational Turn in Luther’s Theology

By Oswald Bayer.

Translated by Jeffrey G. Silcock. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025. 464 pp.

One of the most important and illuminating works of modern Luther scholarship is now available in English, thanks to Fortress Press, Lutheran Quarterly Books, and Jeffrey Silcock, who has been translating Bayer’s writings for many years now with the author’s active cooperation. This book, which combines Bayer’s doctoral dissertation and Habilitation thesis, is his fundamental contribution to Luther research and the basis of his later work in systematic theology and ethics. This publication in English comes to us with a new preface and retrospective afterword by Bayer, as well as a translator’s preface.

Bayer’s method is modeled on New Testament historical criticism, supported by close literary reading of selected texts carefully situated in historical context. Rather than a broad, quasi-Hegelian history where a key idea unfolds with a kind of inevitability over time, Bayer offers painstaking exegesis of a relatively small number of texts in which Luther is working out key insights that came as a surprise to him—including the insight that earlier scholars called his “breakthrough” (Durchbruch) and Bayer calls his “reformational turn” (reformatorische Wende).