Luther: Out of the Storm (review)

This book, in the weaving together of Martin Luther’s story with its context, is told in fresh, appealing form. It announces its goal: replacing Roland Bainton’s widely readable account, Here I Stand (New York, 1950), with one designed for a post-Christian audience. The author, Derek Wilson, even follows Bainton’s example in reproducing sixteenth-century woodcuts, effectively selected to offer glimpses into Luther’s age.

The opening, which Wilson labels “a fanciful reconstruction” (p. 1), is not typical of his modus operandi, which relates the story in lively fashion but with fairly consistent faithfulness to the original sources. It is just that such occasional “reconstructions” do not enable strangers to his subject to sort out reliably when he is using this kind of alternative narrative. Indeed, the footnotes are very sparse and indicate little engagement with the two generations of scholarship since Bainton’s book appeared. Wilson’s sense of historical context arouses interest throughout and is thick with the detailed flavor of the societal and religious context at points, but is superficial in this regard at others.

Wilson largely sticks to his biographical focus, but with a figure like Luther, some attention to his thought belongs to the story of his life. The author often shows sensitivity to Luther’s way of thinking, as, for instance, in his interpretation of the reformer’s doctrine of justification that is imparted not as a legal fiction but as a re-creative Word of God. Wilson would have enhanced this section by unfolding Luther’s anthropology of the two kinds or dimensions of human righteousness, active and passive; failure to do so passes over an important piece of Luther’s view of both God and the human creature. It would have been preferable to read an exploration of the fundamental hermeneutical statement of Luther’s “theology of the cross” at the Heidelberg meeting of his Augustinian order in 1518, where he laid down the underlying foundation of his new way of practicing theology, rather than encounter an altogether too facile and simplistic comparison of his Dominican opponents with the KGB (p. 103). But such silliness should not discourage those who know the landscape from reading the book, for, in general, those who know the story can experience this retelling as a fresh vista, which deserves and rewards a critical reading.

It is not clear why Luther’s biography must be enlisted in the author’s wrestling with the twentieth-century “German problem” when tracing it to several strands of the Enlightenment would have been more helpful. But this is a common instinct among Westerners. Much more justified is Wilson’s placing of Luther’s thought within the context of the twenty-first-century religious scene, which he largely accomplishes with sympathy and sensitivity.

This is not the book that should be assigned to students new to Luther, but it can serve as a review or expansion of view for those who know something of his life or thought and is a delightful encounter with Luther’s person.