We are pleased to announce the release of The Hollaz Legacy: Lutheran Atonement Facing Rationalism and Pietism, a landmark volume in English-language Lutheran theological scholarship that brings together two centuries of Pomeranian Lutheran witness in a single, carefully edited collection.
Purchase The Hollaz Legacy here
A Recovery Long Overdue
The name Hollaz is not unknown to students of Lutheran theology. Robert Preus called David Hollaz the Elder’s Acroamatic Theological Examination “the last great orthodox dogmatics,” and Wilhelm Löhe — the great nineteenth-century confessional Lutheran — credited it alongside Luther’s own writings with forming his Lutheran convictions. Francis Pieper and C. F. W. Walther cite the elder Hollaz favorably. Few major works by either David Hollaz the Elder (1648–1713) or his grandson David Hollaz the Younger (1704–1771) have been available in English translation, none of which are on the atonement.
The Hollaz Legacy changes that.
What You Will Find Inside
The volume opens with a substantial theological essay by Jack D. Kilcrease setting the historical and doctrinal stage. The early eighteenth century was a moment of genuine crisis for confessional Lutheranism: Pietism had relocated the ground of salvation in subjective religious experience, while the Enlightenment’s rising rationalism subjected Scripture and doctrine to the tribunal of unaided human reason. Kilcrease shows how the two Hollatzes — separated by a generation in age and a world apart in style — each responded to these pressures with a common conviction: that the atonement of Jesus Christ is objective, finished, and the sole ground of every spiritual benefit.
Timothy R. Schmeling contributes two biographical studies that are themselves a significant scholarly contribution, untangling a century of confusion between the three David Hollazes — Elder, son, and grandson — and recovering the human stories behind the theological legacies. Both men lived and ministered in the often-overlooked ecclesiastical world of Prussian Pomerania, navigating Calvinist rulers, the contested reception of the Formula of Concord, and the competing pulls of Pietism and Moravianism.
At the heart of the volume are two primary texts, each appearing in English for the first time:
Matthew Carver’s translation of De Officio Christi Mediatorio (“The Mediatorial Office of Christ”) presents David Hollaz the Elder at the height of his powers. Working from the definitive 1750 Teller edition, Carver renders into clear, readable English the Elder’s treatment of Christ’s threefold office as prophet, priest, and king — his defense of penal substitution against the Socinians, his engagement with medieval atonement theology from Anselm to Aquinas, and his careful articulation of why the God-Man alone could bear the infinite weight of human sin.
T. R. Halvorson’s translation of Die Verherrlichung Christi in seinem Blute (“The Glorification of Christ in His Blood”) introduces English readers to a very different Hollaz — the Elder’s grandson, writing in the devotional idiom of his Pietist age, yet turning that idiom decisively against Pietism’s subjectivist tendencies. The Younger Hollaz writes with warmth, pastoral urgency, and a richness of biblical imagery that makes this one of the most distinctive Lutheran devotional texts of the eighteenth century. His central argument is as simple as it is profound: not only justification, but sanctification, perseverance, and final glory — all of it flows from the blood of Christ alone.
The volume concludes with a second essay by Kilcrease placing the Hollatzes in conversation with modern Lutheran and Protestant theology, from Schleiermacher and Ritschl through Karl Barth to contemporary debates about the atonement. The Hollatzes, he argues, have things to say to the present moment that more recent voices have largely forgotten.
Who This Book Is For
The Hollaz Legacy will reward pastors looking to deepen their understanding of Lutheran atonement theology, theologians and seminarians working in the fields of historical dogmatics or Lutheran confessionalism, and serious lay readers who want to encounter the tradition at its most rigorous and most devotional — often on the same page.
Order your copy of The Hollaz Legacy here
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