Martin Luther by Eric Metaxas.

Martin Luther did not single-handedly redefine western Christianity. His friends and confidants, and later agents of “civil” governments, promulgated and expounded the central keys of Luther’s theology in a variety of ways and for multiple purposes and interpretations, such that baptism no longer meant the same things across individual and communal consciences by the time of his death. By the same token, his opponents and enemies chose to interpret his body of work in the narrowest of constraints as devoid of any relevance to the pastoral condition of the Catholic Church, in a monumental effort to protect and preserve the historical structure of belief and practice.
 
Whether one admires Luther or not, he did enjoy exquisite timing. In his excellent history of the medieval era, the historian Kevin Madigan [Medieval Christianity, 2015] concludes by summarizing the mood of Catholics on the eve of Luther as torn between frantic efforts to be saved [e.g., indulgences], and massive depression and despair of the very possibility of salvation. Luther, if I remember all the details of this work, never resorted to the rush to efficacious relics for salvific guarantees, even if his protector, Frederick the Wise, owned over 19,000 of them. Luther’s desperation was the “perfect sacramental confession,” which sometimes stretched to six hours. Scrupulosity was his idol in his early years, but Luther at least came to gradual insight to know he was living a sick variant of a religious life.
 
This unbearable tension on the question of salvation played out in the flesh and bones of Martin Luther. Eric Metaxas understands his subject, Luther, and his times equally well. But the author stays thoroughly with Luther throughout his work. To be sure, there are engaging figures passing through the German landscape in the religious upheavals of the times. The anguish of the tormented Augustinian monk, his scrupulosity and fear of damnation, summarizes the catch-22 of thoughtful Christians throughout the medieval era. Luther’s unique position in history is his eventual understanding that the malaise of religion was not simply a matter of reforming it. Wycliff and Hus had trod that road before, to their peril, and even Francis of Assisi and Innocent III did not dare pose a redefinition of the road to salvation; until Luther, the stock solution toward reform was repaving the road, not dismantling it.
 
Luther came to understand that the psycho-religious crisis of his time required a new hermeneutic or interpretive key: a turn to the Bible and an interpretation of the Word in which God’s mercy, manifested in the crucifixion of Jesus, became a highly personal encounter. Luther does for religion what Rene Descartes would do for philosophy a century later with the Frenchman’s “I think, therefore I am.” For Luther, it was belief in the God within him by which the Christian can state, “I am.” Metaxas carries forth the narrative of Luther’s insight and conversion with precision and detail, in a way that the reader can sense the psychological peace that Luther found in his discovery of God’s personal affection and the very real possibility of divine communion, heart to heart.
 
Luther was not an intentional iconoclast, though it might seem so from the distance of time. His theological reflections led him to disengage his followers from traditional church practices that, in his view, interfered or obstructed the believer’s access to a personal communion with the Word of God. For example, his reduction of Church sacraments from seven to two is based not just on the premise that Christ, in his view, never explicitly instituted five of the sacraments, but also on his reservations whether all the sacraments do what they are purported to do. Consider Holy Orders. Luther was a priest himself, and he certainly witnessed other priests of weak faith and immoral conduct. In the theology of the time, and even today in Roman Catholic practice, the integrity of the rite superseded the disposition of the priest. A “bad priest” can bring saving grace, so to speak, a premise Luther found erroneous. [Of course, the reader is free to respond with the question of whether any priest is truly holy enough to affect the consecration of the bread and wine or other miracles of God contained in the sacraments.]
 
At the same time, the author does not whitewash the sufferings of an aging man who is of sound enough mind to realize, as his influence spread, that his theology of the Bible and personal salvation was as divisive as it was freeing. At some point, community was necessary to set boundaries of behavior and belief, one reason being the very integrity of the Scriptures themselves. Luther and his friend Erasmus, among others, realized that the official Church translation, St. Jerome’s fifth century Latin Bible, the Vulgate, was plagued with translational errors. Luther devoted enormous amounts of time to a German translation of the Bible, corrected and accessible to all members of the church in his region.
 
As Metaxas points out, Luther came to realize that reformed churches needed structure. But he was not pleased with many of the new forms of church bodies erupting throughout Europe—which seemed eager to police congregations. By the time of his death the Calvinist movement and the anabaptists were energetic and attainable, depending upon where one lived. As he grew older, married, and raised a family, Luther was no longer the directing prophet of change in this religious era of reinvention. As a husband he was bachelor-like, and his wife complained that he was too wrapped up in his work. He seemed, however, to enjoy the atmosphere of familial living.
 
This work is a splendid introduction to Luther and his special position in religious history. It occurs to me that in 2025, when one of the largest denominations is “Nones,” we may be seeing a resurgence of the religious divide that Luther faced: the frantic on one hand, and the depressed on the other who have given up religious hope.