Scott H. Hendrix - Martin Luther: A Very Short Introduction

This Very Short Introduction to Martin Luther's life and ideas is a step above the previous one I read on the Reformation. It is a readable, concise and surprising detailed account of Luther, in just over 100 pages. It is particularly good in understanding how Luther's work can be understood and misunderstood because of the complexity of Luther's own approach:

Luther's hermeneutical principles were flexible, a mixture of things that modern interpreters tend to keep searate: what a text could have meant in the past and what it could or should mean today. Sometimes [Luther] would apply a biblical statement literally to his 16th-century classroom or congregation, and other times he would dismiss a passage because it belonged to yesterday and had no direct relevance for today.

But, Hendrix adds, that Luther "lived in the world of the Bible". This is something that can be hard to grasp - Luther's worldview and his experience was the Bible. But Luther was also shaped by wider politicals and society. This is perhaps where the Introduction is less helpful. Here we should not fault the author too much. Hendrix does note that "like other reforms, Martin Luther failed to find in the Bibe many features of the piety practised by believers around him". Like other theologians, Luther could not find everything in the Bible he needed to respond to world events, and here he responded as a man of his class and material interests should. I think, principly of Luther's reponse to the Peasant War, which was no doubt fuelled by the Reformation, but was simultanously rejected by Luther.

This "real politik" from Luther, meant he saw in the Princes and Nobles, not threats to the people, or corrupt hypocrits, but as Hendrix suggestions, potential allies. For instance, "the consolidation and expansion of the German Reformation resulted from steadfast cooperation between evangelical rulers and theologians, because the threat of suppression, stemming from Emperor Charles and his Catholic advisers, was noth political and religious."

The danger is that we can end up seeing the Reformation (and Luther) simply as a set of ideas to be implemented and for people to be won to, rather than as a process that arises, in part, from the material circumstances of society.

So while this is an excellent introduction to Luther, read is alongside other biographies and accounts of the period to grasp Luther's full impact and place within German society.

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