This research examines Heiko A. Oberman's biography of Martin Luther, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. The research will set forth an overview of the pattern of ideas contained in the work and then discuss the means by which its thesis, assumptions, and evidence are articulated, with a view toward locating the scope and limit of its import in the literature of the Protestant Reformation.
The perspective from which Oberman writes about Martin Luther determines the way the biography is structured, and the care with which Oberman explains that perspective does much to clarify the thesis of the book. Oberman takes the view that Luther was very much a man of his time--the close of what has been called the age of belief--and that his career as churchman, earnest reformer, radical shaker of the foundations (to use Paul Tillich's term), and ecclesiastical and theological theoretician cannot be understood without reference to his psychological makeup, which was typical of that age. This does not mean that Oberman presents a psychohistory of Luther. But he does take the view that Luther was typical of the late-medieval actor in that he held to a dualistic cosmology, such that God and the Devil were not metaphors for shaping spiritual conscious. Instead, they were each present to the reality of human experience.
This is why the subtitle of the book is so important. The text repeatedly comes back to Luther's personal preoccupation with the peril or health of his immortal soul as a fundamental article of his religious discourse. According to Oberman, other biographers have erred in dismissing or ignoring as inconvenient or irrelevant this feature of Luther's life. It is around that challenge to previous presentations of Luther that the book is organized. Oberman specifically and straightforwardly articulates his approach to constructing the text in this way:
This book has been written with the double assumption that, first, the Refor...