Martin Luther's Two Ways of Viewing Life and the Educational Foundation of a Lutheran Ethos

"Leonard Smith is a superb scholar of German intellectual history. He has used his work on the German Enlightenment and later periods to add a new dimension to the thinking about the sixteenth-century scholar and reformer, Martin Luther. In particular, Smith argues that Martin Luther's paradoxical way of thinking and his deep mysticism culminates in the idea that there is a special 'Lutheran Ethos,' one that is related to all areas of life, education, vocation, civil and political life."

--Richard G. Cole

Emeritus Professor of History

Luther College



"Luther's influence continues as a remarkable source of continuous relevance. Smith uncovers yet another dimension. I am grateful for his work."

--Larry Rasmussen

Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics

Union Theological Seminary



"Some important ideas lie buried just below the surface of intellectual history; obvious to one generation, they become invisible to the next. Leonard Smith's roots, which reach unusually deeply into German intellectual and cultural life, help him lay bare the most basic epistemological and hermeneutical (and indeed spiritual) assumptions of the founders of modern German history and theology. To hear these thinkers anew, embedded in the Lutheran context they shared, is to hear them fully for the first time since their own era."

--R. Guy Erwin

Gerhard & Olga J. Belgum Professor of Lutheran Confessional Theology

California Lutheran University



"Smith offers a penetrating study of Luther's central insights with an eye on its implications for the cultural role of morality-a fascinating sequence to his Religion and the Rise of History."

--Eric W. Gritsch

Emeritus Professor of Church History

Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary