2017 09 The Light September 2017

September 2017 The
Light 4
occupy him in his later years. After a dreary
childhood in Mansfeld, the young Luther set off
to attend school in Magdeburg in 1497. He went
on to study at the University at Erfurt and entered
law school uneasily at his father’s behest.
form of Christianity he had initiated, illuminating
in moving detail the relationships that
crumbled around him as he became less the reform-minded
intellectual friar he once was and
more the influential defender of earthly princes.
It did not last. Luther instead was drawn to
the church and took vows as an Augustinian
monk in 1505. He was particularly attracted to
the order’s learned friary and intellectual tradition,
and Augustine’s political theology -at least
its rhetorical shape - would go on to form an important
dimension of Luther’s own. In 1512, he
Reformation changed the ideological
contours of Europe by
toppling the traditional sources
of authority - indeed, the stability
of any worldly authority
whatsoever.
received his doctorate in theology. Now a thoroughly
educated and opinionated man of God,
Luther began teaching theology at the University
of Wittenberg, giving sermons in the local
church, and tallying the errors of his peers and
superiors.
By 1517, Luther had established himself as
an accomplished, if quarrelsome, preacher. He
was known to have a particular (and entirely
reasonable) animus toward indulgences, the
means by which certain church authorities
parted faithful Catholics from their money with
theologically specious promises of salvation
and other favors. It was during one such dispute
over the sale of indulgences that Luther finally
met his destiny, on the last day of October 1517,
at the doors of a Wittenberg church. There, he
posted his 95 theses disputing established
Catholic teaching—and launched a revolution
that would transform the Christian world.
Roper’s narrative adds rich detail to the
story of Luther’s youth and its impact on his
later theological focus, and it teases out the anxieties
and doubts that plagued him even as he
pressed forward with the challenge that would
become the Protestant Reformation. Roper also
diligently follows the ways in which Luther frequently
found himself at odds with the new
I Shall Love All Mankind.
Ryrie’s Protestants also tells us about Luther’s
life, as well as about many of the early
Protestants who helped spread the Reformation
throughout Western Europe. But Ryrie
also wants to tell the story of how the Reformation
transformed not just the religious and
political world but also our social and economic
one. A practicing pastor, Ryrie already knows
well that it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak
of a single Protestantism, and so he centers his
book instead not on the religion itself, but on its
adherents and their shared, often contentious
history. This influence is hard to overstate, especially
for those of us in the United States, the
even more stridently Protestant offspring of
Protestant England.
Ryrie’s central contention is that the Reformation
changed the ideological contours of Europe
by toppling the traditional sources of authority
- indeed, the stability of any worldly authority
whatsoever. By so doing, it hastened (in
some cases) or precipitated (in others) the rise
of modernity, a condition that in Ryrie’s view is
marked by a chronological era as well as the
spread of liberalism, secularism, democracy,
and capitalism. Ryrie’s approach is historical
and detailed; in his survey, he moves from Luther’s
beloved Germany to England and the
Americas, then to Asia and beyond. He devotes
as much time to the denominations of South Korea
and China and the Pentecostal sweep in
Latin America as he does to Western mainline
churches. He is emphatic that Protestantism is
more a family of widely varied tendencies than
a single, unified religion. Above all else, Protestantism
is, for Ryrie, a love affair with God, unmediated
by institutions.
Of course, love can find any number of expressions,
and it’s the particular shape of Luther’s
love that helped define the personality of
Protestantism for centuries. As Roper tells us,
Luther’s “unbearable revulsion” - at his own
sins, mainly, but also those of others - was his