Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther

In this year 2017 in which Christians the world over celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Roland Bainton's very readable and insightful work about its founder should be required reading for all Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, who seek greater unity among the Christian faiths. Martin Luther was both a saint and a sinner and this book brings out both sides of him. While he brought about the needed reforms in the Roman Church, he could also be brutal in his writings against the oppressed peasant class and Jews who chose to remain loyal to their faith. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this informative and well documented work and will keep it in my permanent collection.

This, the Abington Press book is the edition of this book you should buy. The book is generally accepted as the definitive biography of Martin Luther, the one you should read first. And I don't mean that it is better written than the other offerings of this book by Bainton. IT IS BETTER PRINTED! I borrowed a copy of Bainton's classic book from my local library. After only a few pages I realized that it was a book I wanted to buy and also that I couldn't read my library's copy of the book. The text and the illustrations were not sharp. My old eyes were hurting and couldn't keep reading. Was it bad "plates", poor printing or low grade paper? Doesn't matter. The type looks fuzzy and is hard to read. Bainton deserves better and so do we, his readers. Luckily another comment mentioned this so I ordered this edition. It cost no more than the blurry not-Abington edition.

I have a fascination with Martin Luther and have been studying his works (and their impact) quite a bit over the last few years. This is not the newest biography of Luther, but it is one which has been a standard for several decades and it does a solid job giving a good overview of the man and much of his life. One of the greatest benefits of a biography of such a prolific and influential writer is how it can help situate their works within the context which birthed them, and Bainton does a decent job of that with some of Luther's most influential works. This book definitely had a more religious reader in mind, and it does delve decently into Luther's theology. While Bainton does an excellent job highlighting major themes and even quoting Luther throughout the book, he does not provide adequate citation (at least for scholarly purposes, as several times I wanted to look up quotes or excerpts in their broader context). But for the purposes of introducing one to an overview of Luther's life, helping situate his works within the context of that life, and assisting in grasping the overarching man that Luther was, it does a solid job. The reading was not always easy, though there were sections which I found myself reading more quickly through than others...there were times I struggled not to doze off as I read. A solid biography and does a good job with its subject, albeit a bit of a slog at times.

Very good mix between telling the story in a way that moves it along, while also including a respectable amount of historical details. However, as an older work, there are a fair number of words not in common use today. That did not diminish my enjoyment of this book.

The book was outstanding. Exactly what I wanted in a biography of Luther. It was indeed a biography, but it also went into his theology and why he had raised such a ruckus. Very well written. I can see why so many others have enjoyed it. The publisher gets one star though... By the time I was done all of the writing on the outside cover had been worn off. Very disappointing.

At 414 pages not a small book! Arrived in perfect condition.

This book is more than fifty years old but still accessible and full of insight into Martin Luther’s life and times. Early on, it is evident Bainton admires Luther very much – maybe a bit too much to take an honest and well-rounded approach to Luther, the man, in toto. My first significant exposure to Martin Luther was in Will Durant’s volume, “The Reformation”, (From his magnum opus, “The Story of Civilization”) a comprehensive look into the religious and secular conflicts that occurred during Luther’s time as well as before and after. From about 1376, when John Wycliffe – The so-called ‘Morningstar of the Reformation’ – posited his 18 theses urging the church to renounce temporal dominion: Rigid control of doctrinal issues, as dictated by the Pope and his bishops, over the populace to the point of absurdity. Wycliffe went on to translate the Vulgate Bible into English. All this was happening even as the Roman Catholic Church had two popes; one in Rome and one (antipope) in Avignon (The Western Schism, 1378-1418). As in Luther’s time, Wycliffe’s complaints led to a peasant’s revolt which Wycliffe strongly opposed. This all happened more than 130 years before Luther posted his 95 theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg. Wycliffe died before he could be tried and convicted but the Roman church fathers were not happy with his work; he and his body of work were eventually condemned by the church, post-mortem. While Wycliffe was a scholar, Luther was just a smart and stubborn monk. Beginning about 1402 – nearly 20 years after Wycliffe’s death, John Hus, a Czech clergyman, began to denounce church abuses and hubris. Unlike Wycliffe, Hus was tried, convicted and burned at the stake in 1415. His followers continued the fight by way of the Hussite wars and by the time Martin Luther came onto the scene, more than one hundred years later, up to 90% of the Czech populace were already de facto Protestants. October 31, 1517 is a popular starting point for many protestant Christians as the beginning of the Reformation. Wycliffe was, arguably, the first serious threat to Roman Catholic supremacy in Europe; although the Cathars began to break away from Catholic rule in the 12th century. The Roman Catholic Church annihilated the Cathars. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by French troops at the direction of the Vatican. The Cathars weren’t really Protestants, per se, they were more of a breakaway church tending to a more Manichean-style dualist sect. Bainton does a fair job of describing Luther and his trials but he leaves a lot out – or he downplays Luther’s negatives. To be completely honest, Martin Luther hated the Jews. He despised them with such fervor that, in 1543, he wrote a book, “The Jews and Their Lies”, excoriating ALL Jews and strongly suggesting they all be deported from greater Germany and that their homes and properties be burned or otherwise destroyed – not a very forgiving kind of sentiment: “They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these ‘poisonous envenomed worms’ should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time. He also seems to advocate their murder, writing ‘[w]e are at fault in not slaying them’. A key Renaissance figure, Desiderius Erasmus (a Dutch Humanist), was an on-again, off-again admirer of Luther but the two of them argued – primarily by way of correspondence – incessantly. Their arguments led Luther to come to despise Reason. His diatribes against Reason are shocking to 21st century thinkers: “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason”. In another statement, Luther is unintentionally ironic: “This fool [Copernicus] wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth”. So, Martin Luther, the great reformer, was also a foremost denier of science – not atypical of churchmen in his time. His blind adherence to literal interpretation of scripture completely clouded his innate ability to cogitate and evaluate secular ideas and theories. He was an unflinchingly hidebound theologian. Only John Calvin, who murdered more than two dozen people during his reign in Geneva, was more brutally rigid. Most of the bios of Martin Luther (the ones I have read) seem to skip over Luther’s powerful prejudices and adherence to faith to the exclusion of anything and everything else. I think this is intentional; most of these books are written by theologians or Christian authors for Christian audiences. Yes, Luther stuck his neck out – he truly expected he would be killed by the Roman church (they didn’t do the actual killing, they farmed it out to the local authorities). He changed our world, no doubt. Any damage done by his hatred of Jews or science very likely had little impact on his world. Whether his writings impacted Nazi Germany, as Julius Streicher claimed, is arguable. And yet he was what he was. I think it’s only fair that Luther and Calvin be shown for what they are, warts and all. I don’t think it will have a deleterious effect on the faith of the Christian masses or seminarians. I rated this book 3 of 5 possible stars. The takeaways were: Too much focus on doctrinal issues and arguments and not enough focus on Luther, the man, as a loving husband and father as well as a bigoted and intolerant cleric. I am reminded of a song by “The Who”, “Won’t get fooled again”. The lyric goes like this: “Meet the new boss Same as the old boss”

Well written and very informative. This is one of the very few books that I couldn’t put down. I found this book so interesting that I couldn’t wait for the work day to end so I could go home and read some more of it which I do believe was due not only to how well it was written but to how incredibly interesting his life was. It would almost certainly have to have been interesting since he was the one who practically launched the Reformation. I’ve watched a couple of programs about Martin Luther and this book answered questions that those programs left me with. I’ve been a Christian for 30+ years and this is the first time that I’ve read a biography of ML and I now realize that I was much poorer for not doing so. My previous knowledge about ML was rather superficial and only now do I realize that there was so much more that was significant as to what he has done and how he affected his time and afterwards. Well worth the five star rating!