Germany has been celebrating the anniversary all year, in every manner imaginable – from learned theological colloquia, publications, and music festivals (Luther was an accomplished lute-player, a dutiful composer, and an uninhibited musical enthusiast), to market fairs and tourist ‘opportunities’. America has paid its historical dues with a slew of publications. I doubt that Donald Trump has read them, or the Ninety-Five Theses, but, in the disjunctive way of US culture his country has certainly done so, beginning in late 2016, and grandly, with scholarly exhibitions in major institutions in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York’s Morgan Library, and Atlanta. The commemorative exhibitions re-animate and re-evaluate Luther and Reformation history through frank and comprehensive catalogues (so characteristic, this emphasis on ‘the word’ in America’s museums, as Patrick McCaughey once pointed out to me when he was director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut). At the same time, they have showcased a wealth of Reformation artefacts, including magnificent gold and silversmithing, so indicative of Germany’s fine traditions of craftsmanship but also of the crucial role mining and metal played in the political economy of Luther’s time, and indeed his own family.

Oxford University Press has done its part by publishing Heinz Schilling’s monumental 2013 biography, Martin Luther: Rebel in an age of upheaval, in a fine English translation by Rona Johnston. Schilling’s subtitle is no mere publisher’s padding: it is a précis of his thesis, and a deft apologia for supple contextualisation: ‘Each historical person, including Luther, has a double character, formed by his own context and formative of his own context.’ Luther, Schilling insists, was not the single motive force in the changes that we call the Reformation: there were tectonic shifts being felt throughout Europe and medieval Christendom, to which Luther was heir. But rebel he also was, by force of conviction, and, in his blazingly prophetic, uncompromising way, he generated the words that ushered in the Reformation, with all its complex consequences.

Schilling, until 2010 Professor of Early Modern History at Humboldt University, Berlin, is explicit about his purpose, and about what it is not:

This book is not about a Luther in whom we can find the spirit of our own time; this book is about a Luther who was different, a Luther whose thoughts and actions are out of kilter with the interests of later generations, no matter how often they have been employed to legitimize actions in the present, and will continue to be employed to that end.

Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach, 1526 (source: The Bridgeman Art Library, Object 41801, Wikimedia Commons)‘The uncontaminated Luther’ is what Shilling aims to present, and even granting his evident sympathy with his subject, that is what his 613 pages of dense scholarship yields: a Rembrandt-esque portrait of a challenging, rhetorically brilliant, loving, volcanic, savvy, intractable man, heaven bent on changing the world in pursuit of the truth as he understood it. Not scientific truth – Gospel truth, the evangelical truth derived from his intensive study of scripture and from an unremitting scrutiny of his own mind, experience, and conscience. Luther and Galileo (born eighteen years after the reformer’s death, and in a very different world) would never have been congenial co-searchers after truth, though Luther, gifted with a sharp sense of irony, might have found some solace in their both being declared heretics by Rome.

I used the term ‘Rembrandt-esque’ above to capture the mystery and depth of the man Schilling gives us in such unexpurgated detail (‘Shakespearean’ would also serve, to capture Luther’s tragic aspect). Luther had his own publisher–entrepreneur–painter in Lucas Cranach the Elder, a friend, fellow Wittenberger, and a man of influence whose superb artistry was matched by a formidable flair for publicity and timing. Luther’s writings, his preaching and translations of the Bible would not have had the breadth of influence they did without Cranach’s graphic genius and speed at dissemination. We know Luther’s face and his changing stature (physical and reputational) from Cranach’s depictions of him over time. But they are clear-cut, indelible images. Schilling’s Luther shifts before our eyes, never quite pin-downable, at one moment the ebullient companion, the loving husband, the next a rapier-tongued firebrand, devastating to friend and foe alike, with an excoriating power to wound. (Schilling’s detailed accounts of Luther’s friendships and sparrings, with Philip Melanchthon and Desiderius Erasmus in particular, and his interaction with his Saxon Electors, and with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, are reason enough to read the book. And if you despair of the treatment of the Humanities, or indeed of education in our ruthlessly mercantile age, then read Luther’s promotion of both and take heart.)

The man, Luther, would remain a compelling challenge to us in any age. The theologian – well, why should anyone outside the academy or theologate continue to examine the written works of a man who belonged, as Schilling says, ‘in a premodern world that is entirely alien to us, a world in which demons and angels were a constant presence and everything on earth was part of a transcendental reality’? Or heed a man whose writing on Jews and Muslims (‘Turks’ in Luther’s terminology), particularly in the latter part of his life, exhibited a ‘merciless viciousness’ (Schilling’s description).

Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door at Wittenberg Church, painting by Ferdinand Pauwels, 1872 (Wikimedia Commons)

Why? Because the man and his writings, his implacable honesty, his fallible humanity, his ‘premodern’ worldview, and his ‘apocalyptic vision of the End Times’ with all its desperate, destructive fury, are all parcelled, indivisible, in one person. History has often cherry-picked Luther for its own ends (the National Socialists most notoriously). Schilling insists on situating this tumultuous man in his own tumultuous times, criticising the various expropriations of Luther as anachronistic opportunism. He is explanatory of Luther’s extremes without being exculpatory. And because he works so closely from primary sources, his Luther is vivid, alive, his words resounding and often salutary (and justly proverbial, both in German and in translation). If the humbug of contemporary politics or the disingenuousness of church evasions about sexual abuse or the position of women disgust you (and if you are not up for the deep dive in Luther’s theology of Justification), at least read some of the ninety-five theses against the practice of selling indulgences (crudely, salvation for cash). Snake oil is snake oil in any era. Luther’s condemnation of it is sane, witty, and irrefutable.

Schilling will engage many readers (I am assuming a certain stamina) and offend others, from within and without religious congregations. I look forward to hearing my Jesuit friends’ responses to Schilling’s claim that Luther was the indispensible precursor for Ignatius of Loyola’s subsequent reforms in the Catholic Church. But mostly I hope for an expansion of understanding in anyone reading this book. Five hundred years on, we still live with complexity, in a world where apocalyptic fury persists alongside scientific rationality and what we call human rights and values. Luther’s struggles belong to another age. But they are poignantly human. And his successes – and failures – continue to mark our own times.

Martin Luther's room in the Wartburg (Wikimedia Commons)

Coda: I began reading Heinz Schilling’s biography sitting alone in the modest Evangelical Pauluskirche, in Bochum, an old mining town in northern Germany. On the church porch there were pamphlets advertising Reformation seminars throughout 2017. An organist was rehearsing a concert repertoire, works Luther could not have heard but would have appreciated: J.S. Bach, Buxtehude, even the French Louis Vierne. I thanked the organist afterwards. He was Chinese. Bombed during World War II, the Pauluskirche was faithfully rebuilt and opened again on Reformation Day, 1950. Affixed to the stone outside wall is a bronze plaque that must have survived the bombing. It reads, ‘In memory, on the 400th year anniversary of his birth, of our dear Dr Martin Luther. 10 November 1883. The evangelical community, Bochum.’

A few miles away, in a leafy residential street, another plaque records the names of the Jewish families who once lived there, close to the corner of Goethe and Schiller Strassen, before they were forced out, or murdered, during the period of Nazi rule. The plaque was erected by the evangelical community of Bochum.