Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

Today, on the eve of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Germany is a unified democratic republic with a powerful Lutheran church that in some ways still disdains the Vatican and any whiff of ornament. Conceivably, Luther’s assault on Catholic Europe in 1517 helped to usher in modern secularism in the west. His frank attitude to human sexuality, too, was quite forward-looking and certainly a break from late medieval Christian asceticism. Roper’s biography, distinguished by the excellence of its writing and research, is the beginning of wisdom in all things Reformation, anti-Roman and, alas, proto-Hitlerite. Rarely has a church reformer presented such a dubious side.