Customer Reviews

Luther and His Times: The Reformation from a New Perspective

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E. G. Schwiebert's Luther and His Times is a monster of a book with historical cultural, and religious backgrounds well developed; although it's over 50 years old, the book still stands up with anything current for the serious lay scholar or professional theologian.

The heft of this single volume may scare some people off, but Schwiebert's style makes it easy to grasp his substance. The book is well-organized and, unlike many Luther biographies, not only gives background information about the Reformer but also enlightens the reader about the church, the universities, and the general society of the 1500s.

Schwiebert is lengthy and technical, written for serious students of the Reformation. We used it as one of seminary texts for Reformation. Omits untranslated German and Latin, etc. which predominates much scholarly work so that laypeople can't begin to use.

Organized into five parts, beginning with cultural, theological context, then moves to various phases of Luther's life.

Useful Reformation work, especially good section on Worms.

Dr. Ernest Schwiebert, who died on March 10, 2000 at the age of 104, described this book as his greatest accomplishment (Deshler, OH Flag, March 23, 2000). Researched and written on location in Germany in 1950, the book analyzes conditions surrounding the Lutheran Reformation according to history, politics, the church, and academia - a daunting task for one book. But the author organizes his material well and one of his specialties, the analysis of the Reformation as a university movement, comes through clearly and cleanly in this work. Both those familiar with Luther's life and those exploring it for the first time will appreciate how Dr. Schwiebert brought scholarly research on the topic into the reach of many people.

This book has a complete history in detail that I was able to appreciate for the first time with out being bogged down. It presents facts in a truly interesting read.