Abstract
The seemingly unusual theme of this article has to do with the new "Finnish Luther research" that initiated a new way of looking at Luther. This research dates back to the mid-1970s and originated at the Department of Systematic Theology of the University of Helsinki.
The impetus for the new "Finnish school" came from the ecumenical dialogue between the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and the Russian Orthodox Church. As a starting point for the Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue, a group of Finnish scholars under the leadership of Tuomo Mannermaa proposed a new understanding of Luther's teaching on justification and suggested a way of converging it with the Orthodox view of salvation as theosis (also known as deification, or participation in God).
In what follows, I will first attempt to recount the main arguments of the Finnish Luther research with a special emphasis on its methodology of describing the idea of participation in Luther. In doing so I will use a collection of published papers that provide a summary of four specific dissertations and form the basis for the Finnish Luther research in Carl E.
Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds.), Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998).
I will then proceed by pointing out that the Finnish methodology of describing participation in Luther-guided by the philosophical (critical) and theological (constructive) concerns - presses them to use two different (if not contradictory) ways of depicting participation in Luther.