MARTIN LUTHER: THE CHRISTIAN BETWEEN GOD AND DEATH.(Review) (book reviews)

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, October, 1999

MARTIN LUTHER: THE CHRISTIAN BETWEEN GOD AND DEATH. By RICHARD MARIUS. Harvard University Press. 542 pp. $35.

This is an odd book to be published by a prestige university press, since it is less a scholarly study than a largely imaginative account of Luther in the service of Marius' belief that the modern world has made obsolete the fundamentalisms of the past. As with Marius' first Luther book in 1974 and his 1984 book on Thomas More, Erasmus, portrayed as a modern secularist, is the hero. In the present book, Luther is a fundamentalist who has lost his faith and, as a consequence, lashes out in fury against his opponents. Marius has written elsewhere about his liberation from his own fundamentalist background. His subsequent writings would seem to reflect...

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