Protestant reformers found the prophet and biblical prophecy to be exceptionally effective for framing their reforming work under the authority of Scripture-for the true prophet speaks the Word of God alone and calls the people, their worship, and their beliefs and practices back to the Word of God. uses the prophet and biblical prophecy as a powerful lens through which to view many aspects of the reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. G. Sujin Pak argues that these prophetic concepts served the substantial purposes of articulating a theology of the priesthood of all believers, a biblical model of the pastoral office, a biblical vision of the reform of worship, and biblical processes for discerning right interpretation of Scripture. Pak demonstrates the ways in which understandings of the prophet and biblical prophecy contributed to the formation of distinct confessional identities. She goes on to demonstrate the waning of explicit prophetic terminology, particularly among the next generation of Protestant leadership. Eventually, she shows, the Protestant reformers concluded that the figure of the prophet carried with it as many problems as it did benefits, though they continued to give much time and attention to the exegesis of biblical prophetic writings.

Above all else that the sixteenth-century German Reformer was known for, Martin Luther was a Doctor of the Holy Scriptures. One of the most characteristic features of Luther's approach to Scripture was his resolved christological interpretation of the Bible. Many of the Reformer's interpreters have looked back upon Luther's "Christ-centered" exposition of the Scriptures with sentimentality but have often labeled it as "Christianization," particularly in regards to Luther's approach of the Old Testament, dismissing his relevance for today's faithful readers of God's Word. This study revisits this assessment of Luther's christological interpretation of Scripture by way of critical analysis of the Reformer's "prefaces to the Bible" that he wrote for his translation of the Scriptures into the German vernacular. This work contends that Luther foremost believes Jesus Christ to be the sensus literalis of Scripture on the basis of the Bible's messianic promise, not enforcing a dogmatic principle onto the scriptural text and its biblical authors that would be otherwise foreign to them. This study asserts that Luther's exegesis of the Bible's "letter" (i.e., his engagement with the biblical text) is primarily responsible for his conviction that Christ is Holy Scripture's literal sense.