The Making of Martin Luther

In honor of the quincentenary of Martin Luther’s unfathomably influential “Ninety-Five Theses,” the “pointed and often witty barbs” that kick-started the Reformation, Cambridge fellow Richard Rex delivers a slim little volume aiming to explain and distill Luther’s ideas. Rather than delivering a straightforward biography, Rex attempts to dissect and elucidate Luther’s theology.

According to Rex, the “explicit focus and priority of [Luther’s] interpretation of the Christian Gospel” is certainty. Thus the famous dictum “justification by faith alone.” The interesting thing here is that Rex argues that this line of reasoning places Luther in the position of a sort of intellectual forefather to “masters of suspicion” like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.

A quick read packed with lots of good information, The Making of Martin Luther is a nice jumping-off point for Luther scholarship, whether you’re a believer/theologian or a secularist/agnostic/atheist.