An Unmerited Unity

I began my current exploration of the life and theology of Martin Luther by reading Richard Marius' Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. I am glad I did. Marius doesn't idealize Luther in the least. His meticulously reed biography raises a raft of doubts about Luther's place in history. Marius interprets Luther more as a schismatic than a reformer. Luther comes off as a character-disordered individual. While creative, brilliant and earnest, Luther nonetheless displayed a boorish and pugnacious attitude toward all who disagreed with him, a fawning dependency on political 'father-substitutes', and a life-long morbid fear of death

Read This Archive

Honouring What Once Was

This morning I began reading Berhard Lohse's Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development. Lohse introduced me to an early version of Luther as a theology student studying a standard medieval curriculum. Peter Lombard's Sentences emphasized Augustine, whom Luther regarded highly, but did so in a very scholastic philosophical manner, with which Luther felt at odds. Luther's assignment as a young student was to write marginal notes on this benchmark text. On the margins of Lombard's book Luther railed against scholasticism, especially that which was influenced by Aristotle. He complained that philosophic theology was not true theology but mere

Read This Archive