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As this excerpt suggests, Marty's strategy is to locate Luther in the relevant "settings"—home, monastery, church, university, empire—where his wrestling with God took place. But he does not always take Luther at his word. To wit:
[Luther] came to admire his teachers at Eisenach, so that the Latin schools cannot have been the purgatories and hells as a scornful Luther later deemed them. So neither was his chosen university at Erfurt in Thuringia simply the whorehouse and beerhouse he would one day recall.
Of all of Luther's settings that Marty explores, the university is the one that, for this reader at least, provides the freshest angle on his character. No question that Luther was disputatious—and no wonder, since disputation was both the method and the structure for pursuing truth in theology or any other intellectual discipline in medieval universities. As Marty points out, Luther's posting of his famous 95 theses—literally by post to the Bishop of Mainz and perhaps also by nailing them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg—was as much an academic reflex as it was a polemical challenge to the Catholic church. In Rome's eyes, not to mention the eyes of his students, he was not Father Martin but Doctor Luther.
"Agonistic"—as in given to "contestation" but also in the sense of "agony" or suffering under combat—is another "mot" that seems "juste" when Luther is the subject, though it is not a word that Marty uses. Surely Luther the monk suffered in his contestations with God, convinced as he was of his own unworthiness of salvation and obsessive as he also was in seeking certainty of his own salvation. But, as Marty observes, Luther's theological resolution of his spiritual agon was not enough to dispel his lifelong bouts of Anfechtungen, a word which Marty translates as "the spiritual assaults that he said kept people from finding certainty in a loving God," assaults that for Luther were "rooted in profound doubt" as regarding his own standing before God. Luther came to think of Anfechtungen as leading sinners to "delicious despair" because, as Marty puts it, "These assaults robbed them of all certainty, until they found no place to go except to the God of mercy and grace."
Here Marty is wading into deep waters, as anyone must who would explain Luther to a general and contemporary audience—especially anyone, like myself, who is sunny enough in disposition or graced enough in life not to suffer from such spiritual torment. Although Luther came to rely on the promises of God, he could not say to himself, as the late Abraham Joshua Heschel once put it, "I trust the God who made me what I am to do with me what He will." To demand certainty from a lover, be it God or one's spouse, puts a strain on any intimate relationship, which may be why, as Marty notes, Luther never rested long in the heaven that he called certainty, even after he found blessed assurance in his interpretation of certain Scriptures. How could he, believing as he did that grace justifies the sinner but does not change his sinful nature?
If the format of the Penguin Lives allowed for indexes, the reader could verify by count just how rarely Marty employs the key theological term "justification"—the one Smalcald Article Luther said that Christians of the Augsberg Confession should not allow to be "given up, even if heaven and earth or whatever is transitory passed away." As good a theologian as he is historian, Marty nonetheless recognizes that his job as biographer is to show what justification meant to Luther. One thing it meant, writes Marty, is "Let God Be God"; in turn, this meant that in the mystery of God his dark and "hostile" side was always present alongside the bright and comforting side. Along with a very real Devil, this God kept Luther always on edge. Having dismissed Purgatory in the next life, he endured many of them in this one.
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