Luther Martin - Martin Luther: a Penguin life

Table of Contents

Extraordinary Praise for Martin Martys Martin Luther

This is the best... biography of Luther ever penned.

Inspired... An excellent popular introduction to Luthers life.

A thoughtful portrait of a complex, controversial figure.

Splendid... a classic, definitive work.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

An incredible feat... a gem... enormously worth the price of admission. Thursday Theology

Fascinating... a rounded and revealing portrait of the controversial religious reformer. Spirituality & Health

Authoritative. Christianity Today

A welcome... addition to the Luther bibliography.

Superior. First Things

This elegant investigation is one of the best short Luther biographies in English. The Toronto Star

PENGUIN BOOKS

MARTIN LUTHER

Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history for more than thirty-five years. The author of more than fifty books, his Righteous Empire won the National Book Award. Among many other honors, he holds the National Humanities Medal.

To Mark U. Edwards Jr.
on whose presidential office wall at St. Olaf College,
where we worked together and where I learned so much,
was posted this from Luther:

... All works, Great Men, Societies are bad. The Just shall live by Faith... he cried in dread.

And men and women of the world were glad,
Whod never cared or trembled in their lives.

W. H. Auden, 1940

Preface

MARTIN LUTHER is the story of Martin Luther, not a history of the Protestant Reformation, though its subject was the most prominent figure in the combined religious and political stirrings of sixteenth-century Europe. While his name appeared near the top in the inevitable rankings of most influential people of the millennium past, not until a brief afterword does this book include a measure of his influence, examine his legacy, or visit the twenty-first century.

Curiously, for all the academic and popular attention long given him, at the time of this writing only three or four biographies of Luther are in print in English. Librarians report that few historical figures have received more monographic scholarly attention than he. Such scholarship has informed its author, but this Penguin Life is not and cannot be an extended entry into the debates that it inspires. There are suggestions for further reading in the final pages.

Nor is this the work of either a hanging judge or a flack. The flaws that blighted Luthers reputation, such as in his relation to peasants in 1524-25 or to Jews late in his life, are gross, obvious, and, in the latter case, even revolting. While it is tempting for us contemporary scholars to parade our moral credentials by competing to see who can most extravagantly condemn historical figures such as Luther, in this story wherever denunciation would be in order his words and actions will show him condemning himself without much help from this biographer interfering as a righteous scold.

Conversely, as for possible efforts at biographical public relations on Luthers behalf: For his positive contributions to the development of human liberty, the free expression of conscience, support of music, development of literary style, and his role in reshaping religious life, he needs no advertiser, and readers will not find one here.

This portrait of Martin Luther will not depict a modern person, because he was not one. Those devoted to periodizing in history might call him a late-medieval contributor to the early modern scene. He left tantalizing and often unsubtle clues that credibly evoke deep psychological assessments, and touching on them here will contribute to but cannot begin to exhaust efforts at accounting for some dimensions of his personality.

He makes most sense as a wrestler with God, indeed, as a God-obsessed seeker of certainty and assurance in a time of social trauma and of personal anxiety, beginning with his own. Those who bring passion to what is a universal search for meaning in life may well identify with such a search, though of course by no means all will find Luthers resolution attractive or even accessible, because it appears in a Christian framework. People of other faiths or of no explicit religious commitment may find his specific solutions alien, but they can grasp what he was about by analogy to approaches that they already find familiar from other studies of literature and history or from their own experiences.

This account consistently connects the story of Luthers inner experiences with that of his relations to the external surroundings. Biographers of controversial, spiritually profound figures regularly receive warnings that in a changed world, often described as secular, publics cannot identify with or find relevant inner struggles that reflect remote times and places. Yet moderns who cannot picture receiving direct messages from God, like those Joan of Arc claimed, have little difficulty discerning how her response to such messages changed French and English history and why it is urgent to pay attention to her own accounting. Few people have mystical experiences like those of Bernard of Clairvaux, but awareness of his informs the understanding of his preaching to support crusades. Stories of Francis of Assisis stigmata, which looked like replications of the wounds of Christ on his body, sound incredible to most of us, but dealing with them is crucial for anyone who would come to terms with his impact on medieval life.

In the present case, perhaps most contemporaries cannot identify with Luthers sense of guilt and dread in the face of an angry God, yet what he made of his struggles is integral to the story of modern Europeindeed, the modern world. If it is true that fewer people today struggle with guilt before God while more have difficulty facing anomaly and absurdity, finding meaning in life in the face of an apparently indifferent universe, or embracing firm faith of any sort, many of them may find in Luther a classic case of one facing such difficulties, seeking meaning, often doubting, and even falling into despair until he grasped faith, or it grasped him.

As for genre: A century ago historians of theology held a near monopoly among scholars dealing with religious figures like Luther. In his case, during the past half century social historians have impressively chronicled and analyzed the cultural context, though often at the expense of attention to his ideas and beliefs. Today, in a world where personal spiritual quests and global religious conflicts alike are familiar, we can expect that many readers will welcome the kind of cultural history or biography that pays attention both to those theological themes and to their settings in monastery, home, church, university, and empire.