“Martin Luther: His Life and Work”, by Hartmann Grisar

609 pages, AMS Press, ISBN-13: 978-0404029357 

Hartmann Grisar originally published Martin Luther: His Life and Work in 1926 (the edition I inherited from my Dad was published in 1971). Grisar was a German-Austrian Jesuit and church historian who studied at the Royal Theological and Philosophical Academy of Münster from 1862 to 1863 and at the Theological Faculty of the University of Innsbruck from 1863 to 1868, when he was ordained a priest and entered Rome in the Jesuit order…hmmmmm, a biography of Luther written by a Jesuit; what could possibly go wrong?

Overall this book is a bland as bland could be, just the sort of biography a 19^th Century German Jesuit would write. Perhaps Grisar’s biggest gripe is that Luther and his movement failed to respect the authority of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, which he judges as the opening of the floodgates of subjectivism in which everyone determines for him or herself the message and implications of the Gospel. Not really a novel or noteworthy complaint that, as Luther himself insisted that a higher, earthly authority shouldn’t and couldn’t control the interpretation of the gospel; everyone can and, indeed, must interpret and understand the scripture for themselves (this is not to say that Luther or any other Christians weren’t going to take issue with those who interpreted scripture wrongly – or, perhaps, “wrongly”).

What is interesting – and, don’t forget, this is a book published in 1927 when Freudian psychobabble was still all the rage – is that Grisar identifies Luther’s desperate search for a gracious God as symptomatic of Luther’s own spiritual angst. Grisar faults Luther’s question and his Pauline conclusion – the sola fide, “faith alone”, that asserts God’s pardon for guilty sinners is granted to and received through faith alone, excluding all works or good deeds –  as a false foundation for doctrine and faith (well he would, wouldn’t he?). Grisar views this concern for the centrality of justification as peculiarly Lutheran and peculiar to Luther, not something universal for one and all. For Grisar, Luther’s breakthrough to a “new gospel”, and what Grisar regards as the founding of a “new religion”, should have remained Luther’s private struggle and not the Reformation of the whole Church. Although Grisar, at times, shows objective admiration for this historic foe of orthodox Catholicism, he also suggests that Luther’s issues were not the result of a searing intense pursuit of Christian faith, but merely the result of mental illness. A low blow, even from a Jesuit.