Review of Martin Luther: A Very Short Introduction, by Scott H. Hendrix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

It was years ago that I first noticed Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series, seduced by their cute format and slim size, no doubt according to the marketing team’s dearest hopes. I bought the volume on Literary Theory, which was really more like Suspicion about Everything, Not Just Literature, Disguised as Intellectual Responsibility, but that didn’t sway me from affectionate feelings toward the series. There are now more than 200 titles with another prospective 100 on the way, ranging from The Blues to Choice Theory to Fossils to The Reagan Revolution to Wittgenstein. And now, of course, to Martin Luther.

Of the writing of books about Luther there is no end. There are short ones (James A. Nestingen’s Martin Luther: A Life) and middle-sized ones (Heiko A. Oberman’s Luther: Man between God and the Devil) and very long ones (Martin Brecht’s three volumes). And if you are a Luther enthusiast—a category that most readers of this website probably fall into—then you probably already have your shelves full of books by and about Luther. So why consider another?

I wondered this myself as I read through Hendrix’s book, though for all my familiarity with the subject matter I was kept engaged and had no difficulty speeding through to the end. It’s true, there is not a whole lot in there that you haven’t heard before. But learning what isn’t familiar is part of the pleasure. Hendrix’s choices of what to include in such a very short introduction to the reformer are thoughtful and rewarding. He lays a great deal of emphasis on Luther’s reforming predecessors—Peter Waldo, John Wyclif, John Hus, and Savonarola—in the first chapter. Later chapters draw repeated attention to Luther’s reforming colleagues, among them Melanchthon, Amsdorf, Bugenhagen, and Jonas (relaying an incident about Luther’s reluctance to leave Jonas suffering an attack of kidney stones despite the elector’s summons). Against the temptation to think of Luther as a mighty figure standing alone against the system, Hendrix makes it happily clear how much Luther was embedded in a circle of trusted friends and co-reformers. The chapter on “Luther’s Bible” in fact shows how it was really “Luther and Friends’ Bible”: again, not a solo work, but a profoundly collaborative one, continually revised as scholarship improved. We hear more about Luther’s children and their eventual careers, too, and Katharina’s wrenching sorrow at his death (though I have to admit, I found the delay of discussion about his married life till chapter 7 out of 8 a bit awkward, since previous chapters dealt with events well after the marriage took place). There is even a story of a pleasant visit from and “friendly banter” with a papal nuncio named Vergerio in 1535—not at all what you’d expect at this point in Luther’s career.

But the audience for this book is really not those who already have the Luther timeline firmly embedded in their minds, and that’s finally what makes Hendrix’s presentation interesting. Lutherans have an unfortunate tendency to keep their Luther under a bushel, writing for other Lutherans and paying far too much respect to denominational boundaries. Hendrix, it would seem, has written precisely for those who don’t know much of anything about Luther and are perhaps rightly suspicious of the reformer’s enthusiastic namesakes.

I have often found, to my mixed sadness and irritation, that the average non-Lutheran knows two things about Martin Luther, assuming of course that said person has distinguished the sixteenth-century reformer from the twentieth-century civil rights activist (who, Hendrix notes, deliberately changed his name from “Michael” to “Martin” in adulthood). Such a person knows 1) that Luther forever freed humankind from the tyranny of every authority by placing private conscience above every other law and 2) that Luther hated the Jews and was an instrumental cause in the Holocaust. Non-Lutheran Christians might add 3) that Luther hated the book of James and was prepared to chuck it out of the canon. I gather that Hendrix has had a similar experience and has accumulated a list of other common errors about Luther as well, so his text is written as a gentle corrective to popular misperceptions. Conscience is properly placed alongside rational arguments and Scripture in the trial at Worms. Luther’s hideous invective against the Jews is set within the general, unfounded Christian paranoia about Judaism and his own illness and trauma at the explosions he’d sparked across Europe. Hendrix further notes the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism in its own deliberately pagan racial ideology to which Luther’s writings were adduced as further evidence. And Hendrix points out that Luther did not, in fact, chuck James out, but valued it as Law. Throughout, Hendrix considers what Luther could or could not contribute to contemporary discussions of the value of religion in public life, interreligious dialogue and coexistence, marriage (though equating his criticism of couples that don’t want children with “patriarchal culture” strikes me as a cheap shot), fundamentalism, and social and political reform.

Of course, at some level what this amounts to is a 21st-century apology for a 16th-century man. It’s an unavoidable exercise, and all of us do it all the time whenever we invoke a figure of the past, whether figures as recent as C. S. Lewis and Abraham Lincoln or figures as far away as Jesus, Moses, or Abraham. But this practice always amounts to an exposure of who we are and what we value, too: those things we think need explaining and those things we think are obvious in their usefulness reveal as much about us as about the figure at hand. Hendrix has introduced Luther to a general audience with a gentle apology and implicit critique of 16th-century values. We may hope that, in so doing, the 16th century will have a chance to critique 21st-century values as well. For the Luther-innocents and Luther-skeptics of your acquaintance, this book could be an excellent way to start the conversation.