By Volker Leppin. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025. 198 pp. + viii.

Reviewd by Ronald K. Rittgers.

Volker Leppin needs no introduction to readers of LQ. One of Germany’s leading Reformation scholars who now teaches at Yale Divinity School, Leppin stands in the scholarly tradition of Heiko Oberman and Berndt Hamm with his commitment to situating the Reformation in its late-medieval theological context. He is cautious about positing radical breaks between the Reformation and late-medieval Christianity. Transformation, not rupture, is his most important interpretive category.

This book is informed by Leppin’s Reformation-as-transformation thesis. Its central argument is that “we cannot understand Luther without mysticism”. The book explores the myriad ways that Luther was influenced by certain strands of medieval mysticism
along with how he transformed this mysticism in the development of his evangelical theology.

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