An "authentic" Luther but a very patchy one

In a previous blog post, I did an extended version of my Goodreads review of Lyndal Roper's Luther bio while saying I was looking for something better.

And, I thought I had eventually found it.

And ... I sort of did. And, this is a longer take on it than I've offered before.

Luther: Man Between God and the Devil by Heiko A. Oberman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How I missed this when it came out, I don’t know. It’s a shame to it that my conservative Lutheran college didn’t discuss this in any religion classes I took there. Given that it was still just six years old when I entered my conservative Lutheran seminary, it’s even more a discredit to Concordia Seminary to not have this book discussed in any classes there.

I know that Oberman was likely Dutch Reformed, not Lutheran, but, he clearly takes Luther at face value, including his man being like a mule ridden by either god or devil, and takes seriously what Luther intended by that.

And, he’s got the theological chops to know Luther’s history.

Even without him making connections, I now see that his reading Hutton’s edition of Valla exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery may well have upped not “just” Luther’s general antipathy to the papacy, but his seeing it as Antichrist. In turn, that meant to him that the end times were here.

I need to digress there for a moment. The “antichrist,” or actually “antichrists” of I John are not the same as I Thessalonians’ “man of lawlessness,” but the term has become ascribed to that being. Rather, writing at least 40 years after Paul, and maybe 60, the author of I John seems to be referring to a king-sized “alligator” in a church or something like that, not a quasi-metaphysical entity. Digression done.

(If you want to continue the digression, I've addressed the difference between both these two critters and Revelation's "beast" and its "mark" in this longish blogpost. That said, to smash Luther in the mouth, anybody looking at the "plain sense of Scripture" in either his German or my English needs no Greek to tell these are different entities, as long as one takes the three books as is, rather than crammed through a meatgrinder called "THE theology of the New Testament." Paging Dr. Luther for a self-inflicted slip and fall.)

At the same time, Oberman’s book falls short in some ways, and to again go beyond Goodreads, is directly anticipated by that parenthetical paragraph above.

Here’s one. If Luther wasn’t nearly as literalistic about “sola Scriptura” as the Scofield reference bible, then on what grounds was he right and the Schwärmerei wrong? On what basis were the Reformed wrong (and Karlstadt) and him right on the Eucharist, since Karlstadt had proven him wrong on the “this is” per Greek grammar?

None other than Luther being a cantankerous stubborn mule. That said, Oberman leaves it that way. He doesn't try to defend Luther being right, he simply, to me, indicates he believes Luther WAS right and that's that.

For that matter, since Master Melanchthon was the professor of Greek at Wittenberg, why didn’t HE challenge Luther like Karlstasdt did? (Roper could have done some psychoanalysis with THAT in her book.)

Also, Oberman reports Luther myth as fact even as religious historians and theological scholars were challenging it by the time he wrote this book. I talk specifically of the nailing of the 95 Theses and the “here I stand” at Worms as fact, when almost certainly neither are.

(I've tackled all of this in MUCH depth. And, will add more as needed as the Luther 500th celebration wends its way toward Worms.)

Does it matter? In the second case, it’s more something of pietistic hagiography. But, Oberman cuts through that on other things.

On the Theses? Yes it matters. Goes to motive, or similar. If they were never nailed to a door, how did they become public so quickly, and what hand did Luther have in that?

(The answer is — his hand was surely fairly large on getting them made public. Exactly what he hoped to achieve with that, I'm not sure.)

Otherwise, the book is spot on about aspects of Luther’s life Oberman covers. He is indeed an existentialist, but not Kierkegaard, let alone Sartre. He does have one foot in the medieval world and literalistic beliefs not even Kierkegaard did.

BUT … per the above, Oberman covers very little about Luther’s interactions with others. Much less than Roper on Karlstadt or the Reformed. Nothing on the Peasants Revolts or Muntzer et al. And, given that the Peasant's Revolt led to the permanent loss of Anabaptist types, to the cuius regio, ejus religio of the Thirty Years War, and to tie this back to Hitlerian Germany, a German sort of caesaropapism that led to the established Evangelical state church rolling over and playing dead for Hitler, this is another major oversight by Oberman.

So, five stars for what he covers. Three stars for what he doesn’t and for repeating Luther legend. We’re at a disappointing four stars. And, yes, disappointing. I'm almost ready to move my review down to three, after these additions.


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