Book: Luther - Man Between God and the Devil

A long term project of mine is to understand more about the history of religion. I found Luther: Man Between God and the Devil at our favorite used bookstore in A2 (just a couple of doors down from the People's Co-op). It is a revisionist biography of Luther. As such, it is probably not what you should read as a first biography of Luther. It focuses on bits where the author feels revisionism is necessary and leaves other aspects of Luther less examined. And while you can get a sense of the literature to which Oberman is responding it would have been helpful to have read some of the literature myself before reading this. In any event, I enjoyed the book a great deal despite having realized in the midst of it that I should have read another biography first.

The book engages on many levels. The time in which Luther lived was a fascinating one - so close to our own in some ways and so different in others. It is interesting to learn about how the university, a relatively new institution at that time, functioned when Luther was working as a professor. Two particular lines of discussion have stayed with me since I finished the book a few weeks ago. The first, which is foreshadowed in the title, is Luther's strong and direct sense of battling with the devil. Oberman argues that most recent Luther historiography leaves out much about Luther's thoughts on the devil so as to make him more relevant to current Lutheran readers, whose theology has, like most mainstream protestant theology, largely become universalist and free of satan. I think he makes a very strong case here. The second is Luther's anti-semitism, something I was not even aware of until I read The Holy Reich by Richard Steigman-Gall. As it turns out, Luther's anti-semitic writings were used by the Nazis as part of their own disinformation campaigns. Oberman feels that Luther historiography should not bury this aspect of his life either, but he also offers up a context and interpretation of these views that does not excuse them but also shows them to have a somewhat different motivation than that of the Nazis. His argument is both strained - he too wants to admire Luther - but also useful in providing context to what seem to modern eyes truly horrific views on Luther's part. In this regard, I think it is worth noting a general point, which is that it is futile and even a bit silly to expect historical figures that we admire for one reason or another to have been perfect on all dimensions, as with Jefferson and his slaves. Admiration and realism are not inconsistent and admiriation with realism is surely preferred to admiration without it.

The final thing I took away from this book is the amazing extent to which movements which bear a label that remains constant over time, in this case Lutheranism, can change in content over time. While I am no expert on modern Lutheran theology, it is clear even to the casual observer that it differs quite substantially in many aspects from what Luther himself thought (though it retains his fundamental point about the primacy of faith). The same is true, of course, of other religions like Catholicism, and of political movements such as liberalism or progressiveism and political parties like the Democrats and Republicans in the US and the social democrats in Europe. Why it is that we preserve the labels and change the meaning, rather than changing the labels along with the meaning, is a topic for another day.