Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident by Peter Stanford
London: Hodder, 2017 ISBN 9781473621671
This is a good, up-to-date re-telling of the life of Martin Luther, written in a fairly easy style by a self-confessed lifelong Catholic, Peter Stanford. That fact, and the subtitle of the book, give the reader the hint that this biography is going to look closely at Luther the man, and his battle with God and the Church.
Because for Luther it was a battle. He never felt secure in the love of God, and much of his questioning was due to this insecurity. His depressive nature meant that to him God was always the unknowable, and in many ways the un-get-to-knowable being. His reading of the Bible, and the Letters of Paul in particular, led him to his doctrine of "justification by faith" which means in simple terms, that absolute faith was enough for a person to ascend into heaven. This realization (for realization it was, after much reading, thought, and discussion) led him to conclude that much of what was undertaken by the Roman Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century had little to do with Jesus, the word of the Bible, or even with the idea of faith: it was a money making scam for the princes of the Church, as well as those earthly princes who chose to be in on it.
His famous 95 theses (which Stanford shows were almost certainly not nailed to the church door in Wittenberg) were not Luther starting a new church - he never wanted that - but an invitation to debate what he saw as the excesses of the institutional church, none of which were based in scripture. For Luther, it was the Bible that was the source of instruction in worship, not the accretion of practice of the institutional church. The main point he was making was that all the practices that the Church stated to help save souls (pilgrimage, purchase of indulgences, payment for masses for the dead and so on) did nothing of the sort. Faith saved your soul, and if you didn't have faith nothing else could help.
Luther aired his objections to Church practice at an opportune time in history. These questions had been raised before, and movements quashed, but by the early sixteenth century many German princes were unhappy with the role Rome played in their principalities, and the taxes they were expected to pay to the Holy See. Elector Friedrich III of Saxony (who ruled over Wittenberg and its university, where Luther taught) was one of those princes, and a pious man who also wanted answers to the questions Luther was asking. The protection he gave Luther, and the popularity of Luther's message, which spread rapidly via the printing press, meant that soon his "reformed" church spread across much of Northern Germany.
The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles, was too busy fighting in other parts of his empire to do much about this heresy (Luther was branded a heretic and was to be burned, but Rome did not have the military power to make it so, and Charles had bigger fish to fry). By the time Charles could turn his attention to Germany, the Lutheran movement had become too big to repress, and so an accommodation had to be made with those who followed it.
Stanford writes well on Luther's personality - how he was loath to take a step backwards ("here I stand"), and was only too ready to return the scorn that Rome heaped on him (the initial response to him was to treat him as a drunken German fool, which was a huge mistake). Luther not only battled the Roman Catholic Church, but other protestant sects as well, most famously Zwingli, and others who's beliefs developed along different lines to his own.
Of course, by his stand, this activity was exactly what Luther had released on the world. By convincingly stating that each person should find God via the scriptures, he opened the world up to many differing views of what a church should and could look like on earth. The idea of an individual having a relationship with God was envisioned by him, and the result of that is to be seen today all around the world. His stance also led to changes (eventually) in the way Catholics saw religion and how they should relate to God.
Stanford writes about all of this in a way that is easily understandable to those with little history of the period, without being overly descriptive, which makes this a good book to read as an introduction to Luther and what he achieved. I would state though, that if you are a person of no religion at all, there may be a little Bible catch-up required to help you through Luther's thinking. Thankfully, the Letters of Paul and John's Gospel (which Luther recommended people read, from his own translations of the Bible, the first into German) are good reading.
As an introduction to Luther the man, and to why and how he changed Christianity forever, this book is worth picking up, and is certainly easier to read than many other biographies of him.
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