Martin Luther shattered Christendom and transformed the West, making the modern world possible and inevitable. This is the consensus among historians, whether they see this sixteenth-century monk as an epochal hero, bringer of enlightenment and tolerance, or as the pre-eminent agent of our spiritual and cultural ruin. In other words, Luther is at the center of a long and contentious dispute about the origins and nature of the modern world.

Granting Luther’s courage and his gifts, which were great enough to make his legend almost plausible, almost able to stand up to informed and critical appraisal, I will propose that, to put the matter plainly, this is not the way history works. The opposing sides in the debate about Luther are both deeply invested in his legend, which has given it seemingly unquestioned authority. This matters because what might be called the legitimacy of the modern era, which emerged in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is a question that often takes as its point of departure that gaunt monk nailing his theses to a church door. It is strange to speak of the “legitimacy” of an era. But it is appropriate in this case because many writers have for a long time believed that the modern ought not to have happened, that the world before Luther was a worthy human habitation, and that after him it was a desolate place, oppressive to the human spirit despite its material brilliance and success. They interpret the transformation of the European world as the fall of an ancient religious order and, depending who tells the tale, as the rise of a soulless individualist materialism, or something of the kind. A recent book announces that Luther “rediscovered God,” clearly an overstatement. More typically the modernity he is supposed to have initiated is treated as essentially secular. This is also an overstatement.

There were people of very great consequence active in Luther’s world—the Grand Turk, Charles V of Spain, Francis I of France, Michelangelo. Among Luther’s other important contemporaries, Copernicus surely deserves a mention, and Magellan and Columbus. And there was the Henrician Brexit, the withdrawal of England from papal and Roman authority by Henry VIII that would make Britain, for the purposes of European power alignments, Protestant, a matter of great historical consequence. Henry VIII did not owe any debt to Luther or reform his church along Lutheran lines. There had been near-breaches between Rome and various English kings over the centuries, preparing this final one. Yet great political alliances, and new conceptions of the earth and the heavens, are not assumed to have a part in the emergence of the modern whenever Luther is put at the center of the frame.

In historical terms, Luther is singular in the fact that his place is secure, even despite the whole power and weight of papal opprobrium, of outlawry and condemnation for heresy, that were brought down upon him. He had important precursors whom he names, who have effectively disappeared from history under this same weight, notable among them the fourteenth-century theologians John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. For generations the followers of these precursors were suppressed, they and also their books publicly burned. Though the influence of their movements persisted for centuries, and though they may indeed share with Luther some credit or blame for the making of the modern world, they have slipped into obscurity. It seems that the word “heresy” impresses historians deeply, that it carries the suggestion of an irrational, possibly sinister zeal, marginalizing all those who are stigmatized by it. Luther’s giantism is in part an effect of an isolation from his context that is deeply misleading, however well it serves hagiographers and demonizers.

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