Guest: Professor Volker Leppin, Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale Divinity School. He is a native of Germany, and a Reformation scholar

Show Notes

In the interview, Volker suggests people read Martin Luther’s Treatise on Christian Liberty also called the Freedom of a Christian. You can find many translations. Here is one for free online, though I prefer the version in Timothy Lull’s collection of Martin Luther’s Writing.

Volker Leppin Bio

Educated at the University of Marburg Heidelberg University, and the Theological Academic Year in Jerusalem program, Volker Leppin received a chair in Church History at the University of Jena (Thuringia, Germany) in 2000. Ten years later, he moved to the University of Tübingen in Southern Germany, where he held the chair in Church History and directed the Institute for Late Middle Ages and Reformation from 2010 to 2021. He is a member of the Academies of Sciences at Heidelberg, the Saxonian Academy of Sciences, and as well the European Academy of Arts and Sciences, Salzburg, Austria, three distinguished scholarly societies in Europe.

His biography of Martin Luther, Martin Luther. A Late Medieval Life, (Baker Academic, 2017) is also available in English. He has provided several critical text editions, e.g. William of Ockham, Dialogus. Part 2. Part 3, Tract 1, ed. with John Kilcullen, John Scott and Jan Ballweg (Oxford, 2011). In addition, he is the editor or co-editor of 53 books, and the author of more than 300 scholarly articles and chapters, altogether covering a broad range of interests from antiquity to the modern area.

Professor Leppin’s scholarship is particularly interested in medieval and Reformation studies. He argues that the Reformation should be understood as transforming the medieval world rather than a stark rupture. His work also focuses on the history of spirituality, mainly in mysticism. Accordingly, his most recent book is a history of Christian mysticism from the Bible to the 20th century: Ruhen in Gott (Rest in God).

https://divinity.yale.edu/faculty-and-research/yds-faculty/volker-leppin