Protestants: Obedient Rebel

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So large is Luther that every age has been able to find in him a religious hero to its own liking. To the Enlightenment he was above all an individualist and rationalist who sneered at superstition and fought totalitarianism. The Romantic era saw Luther as a German nationalist, the rebel against Roman imperialism. Turn-of-the-century Christian liberals pictured him as a primitive reductionist who tried to return the church to its apostolic simplicity. Since Luther's f ears,, foibles and physical ailments are amply documented—notably in his own writings, which fill some 100 volumes in the authoritative Weimar Edition—he has provided a wide target for psychoanalysts and playwrights. A successful case in point is John Osborne's Luther, in which the reformer came across as a manic-depressive lout, whose rebellion against the church was motivated by a father fixation and a bad case of constipation.

Human Saint. Luther defies easy characterization, however, since his life and work add up to a complex of paradoxes. An authentic spiritual revolutionary, he was at the same time a social and political conservative, wedded to the ideals of feudal society. A limpid preacher of God's majesty and transcendence, he was capable of a four-letter grossness of language. He was the archetype of individual Christian assertion; yet he could be brutally intolerant of dissent, and acquiesced in the suppression of those he considered heretics. Prayerful and beer-loving, sensual and austere, he was the least saintly, but most human, of saints.

Beyond personality, interest in Luther focuses on his efforts to solve the most fundamental of Christian problems: man's relationship to God. The answer that he found—that man is saved by God's grace through faith alone—is as old as Paul, but Luther's particular framing of it came precisely at the right moment. A few decades earlier, suggests Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the Lutheran Church in America, Luther the rebel might have gone the way of Jan Hus or Savonarola, who were burned at the stake before their ideas could gain momentum. And by the end of the 16th century, spiritual renewal of the church might have been achieved from within, perhaps by that charismatic figure of Rome's Counter Reformation, Ignatius Loyola.

No more than Loyola did Luther want to divide Christianity; for at least half of his life he was an unquestioningly loyal, devout Catholic, remarkable for his devotion in an age better known by its sinners than its saints. Born in 1483, the son of a Saxon miner, Luther had every intention of becoming a lawyer until, one day in 1505, he was caught in a sudden storm while walking toward the village of Stotternheim. A bolt of lightning knocked him to the ground, and Luther, terrified, called out to the church's patroness of miners: "St. Anne, help me! I will become a monk."

Sheer Monkery. Much to his parents' dismay, Luther kept the vow, two weeks later entered the Augustinian priory at Erfurt. Luther was a pious cleric. "I kept the rule so strictly," he recalled years later, "that I may say that if ever a monk got to Heaven by his sheer monkery it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work."