The unmodern Luther
Christine Helmer threatens to dash to pieces the pieties of modern Luther scholarship.
In Review
How Luther Became the Reformer
A flood of publications accompanied the 500th anniversary in 2017 of Martin Luther’s 95 theses. In many respects, this new literature only perpetuated the existing tropes of the so-called Luther Renaissance of the early 20th century. These tropes are the starting point for Christine Helmer’s analysis.
Whether viewed as hero or villain, the iconic Luther has been the lonely and brave (or foolhardy) existentialist who battled deep doubts about God’s existence and lethal threats from pope and emperor for the sake of his people’s emancipation. Facing death, he sacrificed himself to the call of conscience and a religious experience of strangely severe and inscrutable grace. This biographical event constituted a breakthrough: Luther reformed not merely or even chiefly medieval Catholicism, but religion itself.
In this way, “Luther the reformer” emerged for postwar Germans in the 1920s as the origin of a new way of being religious: resisting rationalization and institutionalization, confined no longer to dogma or church, and providing a personal paradigm for religion in the iron cage of the modern world.
