Book Review 11: "Martin Luther" Martin Marty 2006 Penguin Books

“Martin Luther”
by Martin Marty
2004
198 Pages
Penguin Press



Sooooo...I am a Lutheran. Born a Lutheran, raised a Lutheran, educated in Lutheran institutions for 14 1/2 years. Lutherans are a considerable minority in this country. nothing wrong with that but like any religious minority you better know what you believe. Christianity is not the easiest or most logical thing at best (not much different then any other “faith”) and when Hitler occasionally quoted your founder you can really be on the defensive quick.

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod raised me with film strips on Luther showing him as a dynamic reformer. Nothing I learned growing up veered too far from that including the recent Ralph Fiennes movie which portrayed Luther as at least very good looking and earnest. All that having been said there are plenty of Luther biographies but most of them are through Church publishing houses which are sometimes less then reliable in reviewing their icons.

Marty's book is a nice concise effort. It hits all the high spots and I think gives a really nice sense of the man. It goes right to the heart of a guy raised as a righteous Catholic (capital C) who had a gigantic intellect and ego. He started to attack what was at that time a very sick Church and in some ways a very lost Church. He rebelled against the papacy and what he viewed as the churches leaving the basic tenets of the Gospel and keeping people distant from the essential empowering message of God’s Grace and even worse profiting of dispensation of that Grace.

He blamed the church hierarchy and one of his huge tenets was that through baptism we all became priests. He shook the order and started the reformation and then rode the wave while being almost paralyzed by the chaos which ensued. He benefitted from the politics of the time and Germany’s general dissatisfaction with Rome and the papacy and under their protection took even more advantage of the internet of the time which was the printing press.

He wrote and wrote and wrote, using this new technology to inundate the intellectual population of the time and even more to put his thoughts and the Gospels into the language of the people instead of Latin. The book does not dwell too much on his personal life. He left the monastic life and married the un-hot Katie and sired a nice family before he died. the book makes clear that he suffered from what we would call depression but what he referred to as “anfechungen”. These dark moods colored a lot of his writings and his life.

Of almost as great a fascination is all the people who are his contemporaries. Henry The VIII, Holy Roman Emperor Charles, Pope Leo X, Erasmus, Zwingli...so many great leaders and thinkers hastening in the age of enlightenment. He battles with them all with the help of his faithful Philip Melancthon who helped ease Luther’s personality difficulties, smooth over things and make peace with people and even more to be his organization and energy when he was suffering his bouts.

Luther had some very closed and bigotted attitudes. He often found the politics of time gave an advantage to demonizing "the turks" who were the moslems as they encroached on europe and he played upon fears sometimes to strengthen and popularize his other positions. He often referred to the pope as "the antichrist" which although once again popular with his audience might seem to be lacking in Grace. Finally he often wrote with harsh and unforgivable language about the Jews. The biographer (and I have read this several times in other sources) claim that he expected his "new" message of Grace would be embraced by the Jews who he expected to reclaim Christianity as their faith... and that he never got over their failure to do so. This does nothing to condone his bigotted mean spirited writings which have been used to justify some of the most unforgivable crimes in history. Aside from his mean some times mean spirited writing he was often rather wrong in regard to man and wife relationships. While parading the sanctity of marriage he did not rail against some infidelities in the absence of being able to produce children, encouraging the cheating husband or wife and their spouse to hold it together and pretend that nothing was amiss.

The book paints a portrait of a brilliant man, but a man. On that is troubled, depressed and deeply fallable. That is one of the great things about the Protestant movement is that we rarely (never?) hold out our leaders and thinkers to be anything more then deeply flawed men (and sometimes women). The book pounds home is that for all his faults, God (or perhaps some would argue the Devil) used this man to change the world.