Luther, Conflict, and Christendom

Christopher Ocker is Professor of History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and Chair of the Department of Cultural and Historical Studies of Religions at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. He is the author of Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1524–1574 (2006), Johannes Klenkok: A Friar's Life, c.1310–1374 (1993), and many articles on religious conflict, biblical interpretation, theology, and religious politics in late medieval and early modern Europe. He is co-editor of Politics and Reformations: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr (2007), has been a managing editor of The Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, and is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions.

• Introduction; 1. The birth of an unconcluded controversy; 2. Calming the rebel masses; 3. The political anatomy of the Luther affair; 4. Rebel princes and religious wars; 5. Discriminations; 6. Three orthodoxies; 7. Many Martins; Epilogue. The global-historical Luther; Appendix: a table chronicling four processes that mark the parameters of the religious controversy over Luther to 1564.

'This is no partisan book. Readers will find themselves surprised by, and disabused of, common assumptions about the Reformation being primarily theological or populist.' P. E. Blosser, Choice