Martin & Marty

I'm reading Martin Marty's biography of Martin Luther (part of the Viking biography series) and learning a great deal about the 16th Century Reformer, not all of it savory. As the be speckled Marty (a famed Lutheran scholar himself) points out, Luther was a man of his time, and we have tendency to judge people through the lenses of our modern sensibilities.

But Marty does a decent job of holding up Luther's strengths and weaknesses to the light, examining these from all angles, and doesn't hold back from offering his own biographer's insights along the way. Luther, in many ways, was an enigma, and like John Wesley's thought and movement in England two centuries later, Luther was neither a systematic theologian or a man without his own weirdnesses and hangups, particularly with the ladies.

It has been many a year since I'd studied or read Luther with any depth, but this thin biography has served to resurrect some latent memories from my church history seminary courses which were led by none other than Dr. David Steinmetz, himself a famed Lutheran and good German to boot. Being a Methodist, I have always found the early Methodist leaders too rigorous and humorless for my sensibilities, but Luther puts these persimmon-sucking circuit riders to shame. Talk about a depressing figure, and constipated in more ways than one.

Luther's theological reformation, however, did reshape the church . . . and his insistence upon salvation by grace alone cannot be overstressed in its categorical shift away from the practices and beliefs of the church in his era. We might say that Luther saved the church . . . including the catholic church, but that's another story and opinion perhaps.

Considering Luther and how he worked out his own salvation and theology, it is difficult to shake the figure of this priest sitting on a latrine for hours, struggling against hemorrhoids and constipation, railing against God and the pope, and hoping against hope that he might some day bed a nun and write erotic poetry. His dreams came true.

God help me . . . I live a boring life, and the black licorice keeps me regular.