The Making of Martin Luther by Richard Rex (review)

I am not quite sure what to make of this book. The pedigree of the author, Richard Rex, is exemplary. He is a professor of Reformation history at the University of Cambridge and a well-known authority on the English Reformation. He seems to work with ease in the original languages of the texts he cites. He rightly locates justification by faith alone as key to understanding Luther (ix). And yet the text limps along, for several reasons, as explained below.

Rex's intention, stated in the preface, is a work of intellectual history because". . . all of our stories about Luther must be predicated first and foremost on his ideas, on his theology" (x). This appears to be a solid place to start and a refreshing change from the insistence in many quarters that history must begin from "below" with the result that ideas become merely a reflection of material conditions and therefore are not taken seriously. But the way Rex understands Luther's key idea gives one pause.

As he traces Luther's theological transformation in the middle and late 1510s, Rex notes the Reformer's difficulty with Ockham's facere quod in se est, or the idea that God would give grace to those who "did what was in them." This notion is pastorally problematic because of the burden it places on people to do something to qualify for grace. For Rex, the key to understanding Luther's protest is his insistence on a sense of certainty in contrast to the uncertainty bred by Ockham's teaching: "What Luther showed was simply how much importance he now attached to attaining a sense of certainty about being in a state of grace. For him, any doctrine that did not produce such certainty was worse than useless" (82).

Rex returns to the theme of certainty again and again throughout the book. He says at one point "that justification by faith alone is itself spiritual certainty" (94). It seems as if Rex knows the words but not the tune. The issue regarding justification was pastoral. And Luther did prize a sense of certainty or better, confidence, that came with faith. But Rex never makes clear that faith itself is not "certain" for Luther. The human heart is a storm-tossed vessel, prone to darkness, doubt, and temptation. What is certain for Luther are the promises of God. The pro me of the gospel is what anchors belief, and it is why Luther could even refer to faith itself as "butter in the sunshine" (LW 40:251). Perhaps Rex could have spent more time with Luther's sacramental theology, especially some of the later writings on baptism. There he would have discovered the Reformer's emphasis on the external element was but the flip side of a view that saw faith itself as uncertain, wavering, and prone to change. Justification by faith involves real people, that is, sinners who doubt and equivocate. In other words, Rex's central thesis needs much more nuance.

Another problem with the book is its pedantry. The tone at times is patronizing, as we are walked through complicated issues in Luther scholarship. (Were the 95 Theses posted? When did the Reformation breakthrough occur?) The reader is assured beyond all doubt that Rex knows the answers to these questions that have bedeviled generations of scholars. His arguments are somewhat persuasive but certainly not beyond the shadow of a doubt as he seems to suggest.

In the end, I suspect that Rex lacks respect for his subject. There is very little in this work that humanizes Luther and virtually nothing about his sense of humor, which was just as large as his ego. The irony is that Rex's exclusive focus on Luther's ideas to the exclusion of who he was as a messy, breathing, and living human being results in an odd interpretation of the chief article, justification by faith.