Penguin Lives are not books that particularly invite analysis or critical engagement. They tend to strive toward neutral recapitulation of broadly accepted interpretations, and to present little that is novel or thought-provoking. Martin Marty’s life of Martin Luther is no exception to this generalization. Nor is this due merely the nature of the Penguin series; Marty himself has been criticized for being a “consensus historian” and for refraining from arguing for “controversial theses”.[1] Still, no telling of history can be entirely neutral, and like any historian Marty has a perspective, is selective in the construction of his narrative, and makes interpretive choices. As a Lutheran, Marty is well-positioned to write a sympathetic account of Luther’s life. But as a historian, he is also well aware of the need to paint a balanced and nuanced portrait. Beyond his effort to juggle these concerns, there may also be traces in the book of some of Marty’s own personal wrestlings with the many, sometimes contradictory, and often unpleasant faces of Martin Luther and the tradition he birthed.
Marty’s is a good old Swiss Lutheran family from Nebraska. His parents’ faith was simple and unquestioning.[2] His own is undoubtedly more nuanced, but he has nevertheless served as a Lutheran minister for decades and has a deep awareness of the transcendent at work in history. As a Lutheran, Marty undoubtedly feels greater-than-average pressure from Lutherans to write glowingly of Luther and from academics to write fairly. The reader finds him striking this balance in the prologue. “The flaws that blighted Luther’s reputation,” Marty writes, “are gross, obvious, and…even revolting” (xi), but at the same time he is critical of scholars who want to “parade our moral credentials by competing to see who can most extravagantly condemn historical figures such as Luther.” Luther’s own “words and actions will show him condemning himself without much help from this biographer” (xii). And while Marty briefly acknowledges Luther’s extensive cultural and religious contributions, he also says that Luther “needs no advertiser, and readers will not find one here” (xii). These actually are remarkably politic statements. He manages to demur from making either positive or negative judgments while throwing a bone to partisans of both sides. Luther’s faults will not be emphasized because he was thoroughly willing to concede them, and his influence will not be explored because it is so vast and extraordinary as to be self evident.
At the same time, however, Marty’s portrait is shaped as much by his own convictions as it is by the expectations of his readers. As a Lutheran, he has a real appreciation for Luther’s theology, especially in its “sense of power that comes from weakness.”[3] But as a historian, he also seems to have come face to face with unpleasant facts about the founder of his tradition. It is not only in his biography that he strives to balance his appreciation of Luther with an awareness of his faults. This is evident also in his comment to a Christian Century reporter to the effect that despite his many virtues, “Luther did a lot of terrible things.”[4] It is clear that Marty is outraged, for example, by Luther’s behavior during the Peasant’s War. When Marty explains that from the perspective of poor abused peasants Luther should have sympathized with their “justifiable grievances”, it is clear that this is a perspective with which Marty agrees (95). He feels that Luther “turned his back” on the peasants, which was rendered especially hypocritical by the fact that Luther “was a theological rebel himself” (95-6). And when Luther says that “preachers are the greatest of slayers” and takes responsibility for the blood of the peasants, Marty lists a series of horrific atrocities committed by government troops during the war that he feels Luther is implicitly and “cavalierly” crediting to himself (98). It is also evidently with real sadness that Marty speaks of Luther’s decline in his old age, which left him “ill humored” and cold-hearted, not to mention anti-papal, anti-Turkish, and anti-Semitic. In Marty’s account of Luther’s unrequited hostility toward a “tearful [Martin] Bucer,” one senses that Bucer’s tears are Marty’s own, bleeding through the dispassionate surface of his narrative (147). The same could be said of Philip Melanchthon’s illness, induced by the stress and guilt of having assented in Luther’s promotion of secret bigamy (161). That Luther’s anti-Semitism makes Marty feel ill is evident when on pages 173-5 his indignation bubbles over into the kind of moral critique he earlier disavowed. Still, Marty explains that Luther spent the last years of his life in great pain, and his telling of the reformer’s passing is revealingly tender (180-9).
It is an important theme in Martin Luther that the Reformer “makes most sense as a wrestler with God, indeed as a God-obsessed seeker of assurance and certainty” (xii). Marty frames the entire narrative with the language of wrestling, which he draws from Luther’s commentary on the patriarch Jacob’s late-night wrestling match with God in Genesis 32 (25). Not only did Luther, like Jacob, take on a new name when he began his vocation as a reformer (32), but he also used the language of spiritual conflict—Anfechtungen—throughout his life to frame his struggle for certainty. Indeed, Luther’s life was an emotional rollercoaster that took him to the heights of absolute certainty (111,186) and to the depths of doubt and despair about the promises of God (24,71,112,183). Luther is quoted as having said of the Apostle Paul, “I don’t think he believed as firmly as he talks. I cannot believe as firmly either, as I can write and talk about it” (181). Mark Noll has observed that, as “both a modern academic and a Lutheran minister,” Marty is something of a paradox.[5] It may be that Marty sees something of himself in Luther, that pastoral humanist whose faith was simultaneously certain and torn by doubt. Marty’s fixation upon Luther’s interpretation of the Jacob story allows him to highlight another thread in Luther’s thought that probably is not important in terms of his theological legacy but that has special appeal for a historian living in this age of modern skepticism. Luther writes of the wrestling match with Jacob that God “at times is accustomed to play with his saints” in “quite childish ways” (25). Elsewhere Marty highlights Luther’s sense of the inexplicable hiddenness of God in revelation (22,130-2) and of the capriciousness inherent in God’s choice to save few and damn many (23). It is here that Luther questions God’s very existence (24). Luther himself did not often recapitulate these disturbing thoughts, at least aloud or in print, and his successors did not internalize them. But they connect with deep-seated insecurities that reverberate in the hollows of the modern soul, and as such Marty cannot and does not overlook them.
The most significant statement of Marty’s paradoxical relationship with Luther may be found in the Afterword. Here Marty explores Luther’s legacy, which is a curious collection of opposites. Luther tore down some boundaries and reinforced others. He affirmed sexuality but left women subjected. He was a peasant hero and a peasant slayer. His views on church and state, faith and reason, the interpretation of the Bible, and the dignity of Jews all reveal similar ambiguities. And although Luther’s polemics left the impression that the Roman and Lutheran churches were irreconcilable, Luther also “left ecumenical openings” that have made possible the recent joint declarations that represent a “long but not complete step toward healing breaches on the basic point at issue, as inherited from the sixteenth century” (194). In the final paragraph Marty explains that Luther was both a conservative and a radical, and that “many have chosen to seek a safe middle between the ambiguous and often contradictory options available to them in his legacy. Whether many can or will choose to share his boldness in the new millennium will help determine how his influence will find expression in the centuries ahead” (194). Is Marty calling us to be boldly moderate? Or is he repudiating the “safe” path in favor of radicalism? Apparently the latter, though this seems an unusual conclusion for someone who, like Marty, has been criticized for being a “consensus historian” and for taking no clear stand on issues like abortion and gay marriage. Perhaps, in the final analysis, there is some paradox in us all.
[1] Wendy Murray Zoba, "A Sense of Place: The Many Horizons of Martin E. Marty," Christian Century, Oct 22-Nov 5 2002, 20,5.
[2] Ibid., 20-1.
[3] Ibid., 26.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
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