Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death

US: Belknap Press, 2000. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Lu ther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a figure as truly as t his robust and eloquent life of Luther. A highly regarded historian and bio grapher and a gifted novelist and playwright, Richard Marius gives us a daz zling portrait of the German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writin gs yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the grea t questions that came to define the Reformation. Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his flight to an Augustini an monastery and ordination to the outbreak of his revolt against Rome in 1 517, the Wittenberg years, his progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg , and his triumphant return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acq uaint us with pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, th e theology of penance, the timing of Luther's "Reformation breakthrough," t he German peasantry in 1525, Müntzer's revolutionaries, the whys and hows o f Luther's attack on Erasmus. In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism and whose titanic wrestl.