This article compares the relational anthropologies of Martin Luther and Martin Buber
and suggests that both thinkers presuppose a notion of creative dialogue. This notion captures the
understanding in the Hebrew Bible of the world as created and sustained through God’s utterance
and, thus, of reality as spoken and human existence as reliant upon dialogue with God. It argues
that this common grounding led Luther and Buber to suggest anthropologies that focus on relation
rather than substance, on the role of language, and on creative dialogue as the kernel of sound
interpersonal relationships, which articulate the human relationship with God. The perception
of reality as constituted through dialogical relationships made them both question the prevailing
philosophical ontology of their time: in Luther’s case, Aristotelean substance ontology, and in Buber’s
case, Kantian subject–object dualism.