Martin Luther

Title: Martin Luther – Visionary Reformer

Author: Scott H. Hendrix

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2016 (First published 2015)

ISBN: 9780300166699

Pages: 341

Most people associate the name ‘Martin Luther’ to the well-known leader of American civil rights movement – Martin Luther King Jr, who had made the memorable ‘I have a dream’ speech that awakened blacks in America. The American owes his name to another reformer who had lived in sixteenth century Germany. It was a dangerous period to propose reforms, especially to confront papal authority, as Giordano Bruno learned with his brutal death at the stake fifty years before and Galileo did fifty years later, but with less remarkable consequences. Martin Luther stood up against the degeneration and corruption in ecclesiastical circles and held the papacy responsible for the rout. He preached reforms of a kind the society was looking for. It was the so-called idea whose time had come. Luther’s theories withstood tribulations and his devoted followers stuck to their beliefs in the face of great privations. Unknown to Luther, the schism he produced in Roman Catholicism was long-lasting and turned out to be a milestone in world history. It engendered the Protestant faction of Christianity that went on to conquer Britain and America. This book is a biography of the great German reformer. Scott H. Hendrix is a James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation history and Doctrine at Princeton Theological Seminary and an ordained minister. He has authored another book on similar topics and serves on the editorial committees of religious journals.

Hendrix takes enough pains to explain the significance of Luther and his ideology. The man is to be best understood not as a reformer of the church, but as a reformer of religion who strove to replace bad religion with a faith that valued freedom and justice instead of narrow orthodoxy and moralism. Luther came at a time when faith was giving way to mechanical action to placate the divinity. Instead of taking their sins earnestly, being contrite and then receiving forgiveness, people were ordered to perform routine rounds of penance, alms-giving, fasting, saying the rosary, or making a pilgrimage. It was the sixth century Rule of St. Benedict that made good works tools of the spiritual craft. By Luther’s day, it had become well entrenched. The church found a new way of amassing wealth by selling indulgences for a price. Indulgence is not remission of sin; that is guaranteed by belief in Christ’s sacrifice. This was only a relaxation of the penalty. In 1506, the cornerstone of St. Peter’s Basilica was laid in Vatican. Pope Julius II authorized an indulgence to finance its construction. In exchange for a contribution to the building fund, the papal indulgence offered forgiveness of future sins and release of loved ones from purgatory. Luther firmly believed that salvation came by faith alone and not by works.

Propagating an idea was easy enough even in the sixteenth century, but standing up to it in the face of violent persecution is quite another thing. The book introduces the novel ways in which the reformer made his voice heard. Luther compiled a list of points called ‘Ninety-five Theses’ questioning the power and efficacy of indulgences and sent them to Archbishop Albert of Mainz. Some historians say he pinned them on the door of the church in Wittenberg. The printing press with movable type was an invention that was put to good use. Many copies were made and circulated in the popular movement that neither the church nor civil authorities were able to stop. Luther justified his actions before Emperor Charles V, but was overruled and outlawed as heretic by the Edict of Worms in 1521. He was saved from arrest by the skin of his teeth, when the ruler of Wittenberg, Elector Frederick of Saxony, implored Charles not to publish the edict in Wittenberg where Luther was residing. Martin Luther was a scholar in the Latin language, but widely used German, his mother tongue, for disseminating his ideas. This was immensely popular and contributed to the mass appeal of his ideology. “I find my God in the German language”, he thundered and published devotional and instructional tracts. At the same time, he continued to use Latin for correspondence with other scholars and church authorities.

We are familiar with the coercive measures forced on Galileo Galilei for his belief that the earth moved around the sun. This was contrary to a theological dogma that postulated the exact opposite. Galileo was forced to recant upon threat of excommunication and probable death by torture. This happened almost a century after Luther’s successful defying of the pope. How did Luther manage to wriggle out of the papal net? Unfortunately for us, Hendrix is silent on this point and does not make it a topic of observation. It is left for the readers to make their own conclusions from the hints thrown here and there in the narrative. First of all, Galileo happened to live in Pisa, Italy, which was very close to Rome where papal writ was law. But his long tentacles reached Germany as well in the past. John Hus and his followers, who were known as the ‘Bohemian heretics’, denied the divine origin of papal authority and was burned to death in 1415 through a decision taken at the Council of Constance. By Luther’s time, German city states had earned much power through trade and a strong wind of nationalism was blowing over them which shook papal authority to the core. Martin Luther was a torch-bearer of German nationalism. The Holy Roman Empire was also reluctant to invite the wrath of German states by going against Luther, who was emboldened by the wavering of the imperial administration. He openly defied the pope, burnt papal Bulls and called him antichrist with impunity. The pope gritted his teeth, but let matters rest at that. The Ottoman Muslim invasions of Hungary and Austria in the 1520s also played a part. The Christian forces could not have afforded to alienate German military power in their united fight against the Turkish sultan. The Peace of Nuremberg of 1532 was announced as a ceasefire between the Christian factions.

The reforms put forward by Luther lasted long and deep. Not only on the birth of Protestantism, its impact had caused renovation to gradually embrace the Catholic Church too. The Reformation prompted priests, monks, nuns and bishops to renounce their vow of celibacy. Marriage was not simply allowed, but in fact encouraged for all those not having the mental stamina for abstention. Even in their case, abstention was not touted as a virtue. On the side of religious practices, it did away with private masses, withholding wine from the laity during communion, praying to saints, venerating their relics and visiting their shrines and monastic vows. Luther himself married a former nun and had many children with her. He was a prolific writer and polemicist who knew where to bridle up ideology and let loose pragmatism. When the ruler Philip of Hesse contracted a second marriage while the first wife was still alive, he requested Luther, who was also his spiritual preceptor, to condone the bigamy. Luther quietly acquiesced to this strange request, observing, no doubt, that the ruler was quite free to take the woman as a concubine in case marriage was not permitted. He also asked his consent to be kept confidential. Luther’s works are also fed from a powerful source of anti-Semitism which was successfully employed four centuries later by the Nazis for their sectarian propaganda.

This book assumes prior familiarity with Martin Luther, Protestantism, and European history of the sixteenth century. It is not for those who want to know, for the first time, who Luther was or what he has done. It points out the flows in some established concepts on Reformation rather than explaining it to novices. It sports a diary-like appearance with precise dates given even for trivial incidents. This hinders smooth reading of the book as does its extremely small print. A good point to note is that it has turned its back to unnecessary discourses on the finer points of religious fundamentals on which the two sides differed.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star