mer can only be understood as a late medieval man for whom Satan is as real as God and mammon; and, second, that the relevancy so sought after is not found by purging the record and hence submitting to post-Enlightenment standards of modernity, but rather by challenging our condescending sense of having outgrown the dark myths of the past (Oberman xvii).
Over the course of the book Oberman describes Luther's persona, not as a detached observer of the problems in the Roman church, his solution to them ready to hand. To be sure, he did offer solutions, but he was far from dispassionate about them. He appears to have been compelled to engage Rome and its myriad corruptions with a view toward obliging it to see itself in whole and transform itself and its faithful toward reform accordingly. In the process, he came to a new understanding of the universe. But he never interrogated whether it mattered to give an account of himself in full consciousness that faith and evil were in tension and that an affirmative embrace of and adherence to faith was the only mechanism for pushing evil away and rejecting the Devil's overtures to the soul.
Another way of putting it suggests the kind of understanding of Luther that Oberman wants to convey. For if Martin Luther is filtered through an appreciation of the historical and cultural contexts in which he functioned, of which he was a part, and which he was determined to put right, his behavior and thought can the more readily be comprehended. Equally, the reader will have had access to a sharper sense of the reality of the culture on which Luther made such an impact.
It is on this basis that Oberman explains the content of the known facts of Luther's life and analyzes the content of his actions as well as theology and exegesis--inevitable areas of concern to a man who came to see Scripture as the ground of religious being. Oberman's portrait of the young man Luther, though evidently an unassuming...