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Overwhelmingly, though, Joseph Fiennes as Luther far exceeds the limitations of the script, brilliantly moving from battles with the Devil to keen classroom wit to humble protests before the emperor. (The Fiennes version, we may hope, will finally lay to rest the anemic Luther of the 1953 black-and-white film which has been inflicted on countless confirmation students over the past half century.) If only we had a bit more of Luther the husband; Katharina von Bora's role is so limited that the strong and saucy Katie of Lutheran memory is little more than a forward nun with no subtlety of character.
But there could hardly be more room for Katie, given the ambitious scope of this project. The movie begins in 1505 with Luther's thunderstorm vow to become a monk and ends two and a half decades later in 1530 with the Augsburg Confession at the emperor's behest. In between we have Luther's struggles with God, the Devil, and himself in the monastery, and his fearful first celebration of the mass; his trip to Rome and teaching post at Wittenberg; his challenge of Tetzel's hellfire-and-damnation preaching for the sale of indulgences; his growing fame through the printing press and the patronage of Frederick the Wise (delightfully portrayed by Sir Peter Ustinov); the election of Leo X as Pope; discipline from Rome resulting in the Diet of Worms, culminating in the famous, and fittingly modest declaration of "Here I stand"; the capture in the forest and hiding at the Wartburg Castle; Carlstadt's iconoclastic misunderstanding of Luther's teaching and the outbreak of the peasant rebellion; and the beginning of the end of a united Western Christendom. (For new Luther enthusiasts and for old ones who can never get enough—not to mention all those left bewildered by the parade of historical personages—James A. Nestingen's short biography Martin Luther: A Life, complete with movie stills, is a lovely treatment of the reformer.)
It almost would have made more sense as a miniseries than a single film: there is too much here to cram into two hours. But alongside this vice is also found the movie's virtue (a proposition which Luther himself, who coined the theological expression "simultaneously sinner and saint," would surely have approved): this roller-coaster view of the man and his time gives a sense of the sweeping tide of events and the enormous cast of characters that precise book accounts simply cannot match.
Yet Luther's own self-image, we'd best not forget, was of a maggot, a beggar, a snow-covered heap of dung, one whose name was unworthy to be applied to those baptized into Christ. (European heirs of his Reformation, for instance in Germany, aptly call themselves Evangelische, of the gospel, while the English-speaking have done the very thing their reformer hated in calling themselves Lutherans.)
The story of Luther is in fact unfaithful to Luther if Luther is the object of glory—however glorious and inspiring his story may be. For Luther, it was always and only sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus. His conscience was captive to the Word of God, and on that he stood. His doctrine of justification meant a blessed abandonment of sin, death, and the Devil in a joyful exchange with Jesus Christ, whose life, love, and forgiveness became the sinner's own. His theology of the Cross was a death to all the glories of this world, rising to a new life in which a Christian becomes a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
And remarkably, for all its flaws and foolish dazzle, Luther the movie bears the same witness as its hero. That is only fitting. If God is at work while we drink beer, as Luther said, then certainly he can also be at work while we watch (and make) movies.
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, recently married, is a doctoral student in systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. She owns red socks that say "Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders."
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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