on Here I Stand

In a thoroughly engaging biography of Luther, Bainton plants the reformer firmly in his own political and theological landscape: the final decades of the medieval age, and the age of the Renaissance and of nationalism.¹ He traces Luther’s thought by way of the man’s own writings and those of his allies, his observers, and his enemies. Ample discussion of the personal and theological contemporaries supplements without distracting too much from Luther himself. The picture is complex; the man is variously polemic and deferential, sometimes unreservedly jocular, so much that occasional glimpses at his tenderness are startling. It is one of a titan of church history: a passionate theologian and a pastor, a musician and a prolific scholar, a father; above all, an intensely and painfully devotional Christian.