"A WORLD ABLAZE: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation," by Craig Harline, Oxford University Press, 312 pages (nf)
In the parlance of early modern Europe, a “diet” was a formal gathering of the various powers in the Holy Roman Empire, a motley collection of states and principalities that covered central Europe and was governed by an elected emperor.
At a diet, the emperor gathered with the various noblemen of his empire to hash out policy. The January 1521 diet at the city of Worms is, as you may vaguely recall from your European history courses, most famous because it was there that the friar Martin Luther refused to recant his various writings about the pope and the sacraments and selected policies of the Roman Catholic church he found objectionable, even while standing in the presence of Emperor Charles V.
“So help me God,” said Luther, and though the emperor had promised the friar safe passage back to his home in Wittenberg, it was soon widely known that Charles would like to have Luther safely under arrest. Luther fled and went into hiding, and thus, it may be said, the Reformation began.
The Diet of Worms is the climax of Craig Harline’s new book, "A World Ablaze," a rollicking account of the first few years of Luther’s career as a dissenter from the Roman Catholic Church. Most Protestants (and Americans living in a largely Protestant culture) share a common narrative presenting Luther as a hero consciously abandoning an institutional church drowning in its own corruption, and Harline wants us to think again about how much of this may be myth. But Harline, a lively stylist and professor of history at Brigham Young University, goes about this deconstruction in such a graceful way readers will hardly notice.
For instance, despite the Diet of Worms being remembered today for Luther’s defiance, Harline takes time to point out that the friar was something of an afterthought there. Rather, Charles, a brand-new emperor, dominated the conference with an expansive political agenda.
This focus is appropriate because Harline wants us to understand the complicated reasons Luther, unlike earlier religious reformers, managed somewhat inadvertently to spark the fragmentation of Western European religious unity, and the political disputes of Worms were at the heart of it. Luther gained safe passage to and from Worms because of pressure on Charles from a prince whose rivalry with Charles gave him reason to support the petulant friar and who hid Luther from Charles' men afterward.
In addition to politics, throughout the book Harline emphasizes Luther's lack of appetite for — or possibly inability to conceive of — founding a new Christian faith. When he first issued his famous 95 Theses in 1517, a series of disputations denouncing the theological rationale behind certain Catholic fundraising practices, Luther conceived of himself as a reformer, not a revolutionary.
Even after he began butting heads with church authorities and publishing tract after tract critiquing various aspects of conventional Catholic belief and practice, Luther insisted he did not want schism. In 1520, when Pope Leo X issued a declaration demanding that Luther recant his writings or be excommunicated, Luther still did not call for the elimination of the papacy but merely for “a different kind of pope … he should mostly study the Bible and mediate disputes and give up his temporal power.”
This hesitation was because Luther remained deeply rooted in Roman Catholicism. Indeed, for much of his early career, Luther perceived his primary dispute to be not with Roman Catholicism per se, but rather with a school of Catholic thinkers called the “scholastics,” whom Luther was convinced had drifted away from scripture into obscure theological debates about what scripture meant and eventually into even more obscure debates about those debates.
Luther, however, believed himself deeply rooted in other Catholic traditions, particularly in the monastic mystical tradition that maintained Christianity was not about parsing logic but instead experiencing salvation.
A Luther who perceived himself as part of the Catholic monastic tradition, who found himself caught up in political disputes that drove forward his reformation as surely as any doctrinal convictions — this may not be the Luther many readers are familiar with. All the more reason, then, to revisit him in this sparkling narrative history.
Content advisory: "A World Ablaze" contains no violence, sexual content or strong language.
If you go …
What: Craig Harline book signing and reading
When: Thursday, Oct. 5, 7 p.m.
Where: The King's English Bookshop, 1511 S. 1500 East
Website: www.kingsenglish.com