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This book struggles. It leaves out a couple of children and, in the end, seems to jump back and forth in the timeline a bit. However, it is one of the most thoughtful and researched bios I've read on Luther (Not that I'm super well-versed in Lutherism. It's only the 3rd one, to be exact). And it does a good job of painting a picture of the times, including the relevant names of the day: Tyndale, Henry VIII, Erasmus (whom I love), More, Cromwell.

It definitely presents the subject in all of his sheer effrontery and lack of tact. I don't think I would have liked him as a person. Probably wouldn't have liked him as a neighbor. In fact, his resemblance to a certain head of state is not comforting. But, given the fact that he didn't marry 3 times, wasn't racist... hang on.... :) Yet I still admire the man and the effrontery.

It was a very uncomfortable portrait that exposed a lot of my preconceived notions and biases. Does it change my political stance? No. But, Luther, like me, had his notions and biases and I'm just gonna have to live with those, cause what I know of him isn't going to change for a while. ( )

My fascination with Martin Luther extends back to my days in seminary in Dr. John Riggs’ Church History class. It was 2003, the year that Eric Till’s “Luther,” starring Joseph Fiennes had first hit theaters, just about the time that we began to cover the Reformation Era. In class one day, one student asked Dr. Riggs if he planned to go watch the new movie. He vehemently swore he would not nor would he EVER see any movie about Luther’s life unless they allowed actor John Goodman to play the role! By all the accounts we have of Luther’s appearance and personality, Riggs pointed out, he was a large man (nearly 300 pounds), blond-haired and blue-eyed, with a big voice and a razor-sharp wit. He felt that Fiennes’ Luther represented just another unfortunate “Hollywoodization” of historical fact. Later on in the course, we were assigned to read a (hilarious) sampling of Luther’s sermons, and I could not help but hear them in Goodman’s deep, gravelly voice.

It is no secret, as Dr. Riggs emphasized, that Luther is one historical figure that truly defines the phrase “larger-than-life.” The enormity of his influence, not just on Christian theology but on the whole of Western society, is still felt and has yet to be fully articulated. Coupled with the rise of the Renaissance, Luther’s Reformation stands as the historical birth of the “modern world.”

Given this long-standing fascination, it may come as a surprise that Metaxas’ quincentennial biography of Martin Luther is the first I have read in full, but I would say one would be hard-pressed to find a better contemporary introduction to this startling figure. Metaxas is a simply superb storyteller who has a real gift for compressing a lengthy and convoluted history into a readable narrative. All the key figures make their appropriate appearances but I never felt like I was swimming in a “sea of names and dates,” as can happen so often with biographies of important personages. He achieves a kind of economy here that serves beginner readers well.

Having said that, I don’t know that I would go so far as to say that Metaxas’ work will join the ranks of classic Luther biographies (e.g., Roland Bainton’s “Here I Stand”). It never feels like Metaxas really has all that much new to say about Luther or that he is addressing any of the crucial debates surrounding Luther in any sort of sustained manner. He is definitely writing in the spirit of a “summary overview.” (Perhaps here Metaxas’ training and experience as a journalist has overtaken his theological sensibilities.)

This may be most evident in Metaxas’ dealing with Luther’s egregiously anti-Semitic “On the Jews & Their Lies” (1543). The treatment here is decidedly (annoyingly) brief, presenting it as the single sour footnote to an otherwise glorious life. Perhaps that is true, but it still sounds a touch dismissive, especially given the wicked use to which those words were put by 20th-century Nazi ideology. Granted, explaining the roots and effects of that work are probably worthy of a book or two in their own right, so Metaxas may have been right to gloss the issue.

One of the things that I found most helpful in Metaxas’ work is how he grounds his reading of Luther’s life in his experiences (in early and later life) of Anfechtungen, those experiences of deep existential despair. Andrew Pettegree calls it simply “depression,” and though that may the closest contemporary equivalent, Metaxas demonstrates that it is a very inadequate understanding. For Luther, these bouts of melancholy were direct attacks of demonic forces, even of Satan himself (Metaxas goes to great lengths to show the seriousness with which Luther took the idea of “spiritual warfare”).

This strikes me as the right interpretive move because it is only when one understands the depths of Luther’s despair/guilt/shame that one can truly understand the release he found in the discovery of justification by faith alone. And it also goes some way to explain the ever-growing harshness of his attacks against the Roman Catholic Church and those wings of the Reformation that seemed to him to smack of a return to salvation-by-works.

As the subtitle of the book indicates, Metaxas here is after much more than a biography of a great theologian; he wants to present Luther as the “catalyst” of Modernity, the one who introduced such taken-for-granted ideas as the priority of conscience, the value of reasoned argument as the only reliable path to truth, and the value of pluralistic society. What Luther unleashed was so much more than just a correction of a corrupted Church…it was a veritable Copernican revolution of our worldview. For good AND ill, the work of Martin Luther transformed the Western worldview.

I suppose this may strike some of the more devout readers as a kind of “secular” reading of Luther, but it is difficult to argue with the case Metaxas makes for these claims. It seems that perhaps there might be a subtle subtext here of a case for the role of private faith in the public domain. Or, at least, an irrefutable illustration of how such “private” concerns as religious beliefs cannot help but impact an individual’s “public” roles.

Being more dilettante than connoisseur in Luther studies, I would dare not give the final word on the value of Metaxas’ contribution compared to other past giants in the field. I would only say that Metaxas has provided a work that has ENCOURAGED my fascination with Martin Luther, inspiring me to read further. Perhaps, in the end, that is the best recommendation any biography could receive. ( )

I love biographies, and as biographies go, this one is a home run. Metaxas did thorough research and the detail and information about Luther, his friends, his enemies and his wife are all full of interesting tidbits. He takes you back into history and explains many things about daily life, illness, government and religion as they apply to Luther. Extremely well done and highly recommended. ( )

Luther was indisputably one of the heavy-hitters of history. He blew apart Western Christendom with the printing press, the right man at the right time, and in some aspects a "great bad man" à la Cromwell. A good, solid, and very engaging biography.