Martin E. Marty died on February 25, 2005. He was ninety-seven years old.
Marty Marty, as he always introduced himself, was an ordained Lutheran minister, an editor and columnist for The Christian Century, and a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he taught for thirty-five years, until his retirement in 1998. Marty was one of the most influential interpreters of American religion in the twentieth century, the author or co-author of sixty books and more than five thousand shorter works. He won the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as the president of the American Society of Church History, the American Academy of Religion, and the American Catholic Historical Association.
These are only a few of Marty’s accomplishments. I could fill many pages listing all his achievements, but here I’d like to reflect on what he meant to me personally. Marty was a legend. He was also my colleague and friend for more than thirty years.
The first thing to say about Marty is that he was wired differently than the rest of us. He seems to have come into the world with a brain designed for speed. Everything that he did was fast: he talked fast, walked fast, and wrote books fast. Once, when reminiscing about his childhood in Nebraska, he told me that he had attended a two-room schoolhouse with students of all ages, and when he finished his assignments, he coped with his boredom by doing theirs as well. His faculty colleagues joked that Marty was a super-computer while the rest of us were first-generation Macintoshes with floppy drives; or, changing the metaphor, Marty was a 100-watt bulb while the rest of us were 25s. Clark Gilpin, our former dean, once speculated that Marty might actually be an alien receiving intelligence through his bow ties.
Marty’s razor-sharp mind was on display the first time that I met him in 1992, when I visited the University of Chicago Divinity School for a preliminary job interview. The visit had been described to me as an informal opportunity to meet some faculty members and to learn more about the school. That evening, however, I found myself seated next to Marty at a dinner at the Faculty Club, where I watched with mounting alarm as he pulled a blank piece of paper out of his pocket, placed it on the table, and carefully numbered it from one to ten. “What,” he asked cheerfully, “are the ten most important books published about American religion in the past ten years? And for the sake of our colleagues who aren’t Americanists, please explain the arguments and significance of each book.” He followed up with a flurry of questions about each title. He was clearly having a marvelous time. What archival sources was the book based on? Did I think that the author had paid enough attention to change over time? What were my main criticisms? How would I compare the book to others about the same topic? After I reached number eight, Susan Schreiner finally rescued me by demanding, “for God’s sake,” that Marty let me eat my dinner, which had sat untouched while everyone else’s plates had been cleared away.
Marty affably tucked the list back into his pocket, but the night was not over. He mentioned that his wife Harriet was picking him up, and they would be delighted to drive me back to my downtown hotel. As I sat in the backseat, I realized that Marty had married his spiritual twin. Now the questions were doubled. What kind of music did I like? Did I have a favorite composer? What about Bach—did I like Bach? Had I ever been to the Art Institute? Grant Park? Who were my favorite artists? Did I like Chagall? I should definitely visit the Chagall windows….
Our former dean once speculated that Marty might actually be an alien receiving intelligence through his bow ties.
After I was hired as Marty’s junior colleague at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1993, he always introduced me as his “successor.” This, to say the least, was alarming. When a group of his friends commented that I had “inherited the throne,” I hastily responded, “No, the footstool.” But Chris Gamwell, our colleague, assured me that “Marty is to be admired, not emulated,” and eventually I realized that Marty did not expect me to be like him. On the contrary, he was intrigued by my interest in women’s history and social and cultural history, and he wanted to know how my work might change some of his own interpretations. I was puzzled—and then amused—to discover that he had helped many of his doctoral students to argue against his own work. He was always in search of the new. Marty has had no successors, but indeed, many admirers.
As Clark Gilpin noted in an essay in The Christian Century, Marty loved to be in conversation: “He entered a room with a quick step and, just as quickly, entered the flow of your life, your questions, and your ideas. He honored the time and space of the conversation.” During my decades as Marty’s colleague, we were in constant conversation about books and ideas. He not only wanted to talk about issues in the field—how to narrate the history of American religion, or how to do justice to the agency of ordinary people—but also about the way the past had shaped the present. We taught several courses together, including a course on “The American Religious Historical Canon” that I continue to teach (in revised form) to this day, and a course on “Research in American Religious History” that we co-taught with Clark Gilpin. Marty often commented that he became a historian because he found the world a very strange place, and he wondered how it got that way.
Marty’s initial plan for his life had not included a doctorate. He went to Concordia Seminary to become a Lutheran pastor, but while there, his irrepressible sense of humor got him into trouble. After his roommate included a footnote to “Franz Bibfeldt,” a non-existent theologian, in one of his term papers, Marty expanded the fabrication. He published a review of Bibfeldt’s supposedly influential book, The Relieved Paradox—a send-up of Lutheran theology—in the Concordian Seminarian. The library participated in the joke by listing the book in the catalogue but noting that it was constantly on loan. Many of Concordia’s administrators, fooled into believing that “Bibfeldt” was real, were not amused when they finally discovered, to their humiliation, that they had been debating the work of a non-existent German theologian. Deeming Marty too “immature and irresponsible” to be given a pulpit in the United Kingdom as planned, they assigned him to a church in Chicago instead. (Marty wrote about this in his essay, “Half a Life in Religious Studies: Confessions of an ‘Historical Historian.’”) The church required that he get a doctorate, and so, as he wrote later, he entered the world of religious studies as “punishment.”
Bibfeldt, however, endured, and he was honored at a yearly lunch at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Without Bibfeldt, after all, Marty’s career would have taken a different turn. “Bibfeldt had more influence on me than any other theologian,” Marty joked, even though Bibfeldt’s thinking was slippery, at best:
His is known as the theology of the Both/And, based on the suggestion that it possible for the contemporary theologian to be relevant to everything and adapt to anything. Something of this thinker’s position is evident from the title of his best-known pamphlet: within a decade after Karl Barth had written one called Nein!—No!— Bibfeldt responded with Vielleicht?—Perhaps?
As Marty explained, Bibfeldt had responded to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or by publishing Either/Or and/or Both/And. In 1994, The Wittenberg Door continued Marty’s prank by naming Bibfeldt theologian of the year.
Marty approached life with a spirit of playfulness. I once heard him give a lecture about children at a local church, and he emphasized that childhood is a state of mind as much as a stage of life. His pure joy at learning new things, his easy laughter, his energy—these were the marks of someone who had never lost the wonder of childhood. Once on a beautiful Friday evening, as we walked around his neighborhood in Riverside, Marty stopped to greet a boy who was bouncing on a pogo stick. “May I take a turn?” he asked. He managed several bounces before a distraught Harriet made him stop. “Really, Marty,” she protested, shaking her head. But she knew the man whom she had married. He was almost seventy at the time, but this kind of light-heartedness was hard-wired in him. He told me that sometimes while using his rowing machine in the morning, he watched the children’s program Arthur—a PBS show aimed at four- to six-year olds. I ribbed him for spending his time with Arthur, a genial aardvark, and his cartoon friends Binky, Muffy, D.W., Buster, and Mr. Ratburn, but it made perfect sense that Marty would like this show. Arthur was a comedy about the trials of growing up, but it was “Martyesque” in its emphasis on respect, kindness, and forgiveness. And Marty certainly must have noticed that Arthur shared his sartorial taste in bow ties.
In his two-room schoolhouse, when he finished his assignments, he coped with his boredom by doing his classmates’ as well.
Marty was an enthusiast who loved many things—not only American religious history, bow ties, and the history of Christianity, but doodling; the comic strip Pearls before Swine; coffee (in shockingly large quantities); Swiss punctuality (the classroom door was firmly closed at precisely one p.m.); the city of Chicago and its beautiful parks and museums; churches of all kinds; pink dress shirts; seven-minute naps; Lutheran theology; berets; Harriet’s piano playing; books, books, and more books; and the Psalms. He could recite many of the Psalms by heart. He treasured the intricacies of the English language, and the mention of a single word—pilgrim, for example—could lead to a detailed conversation about its Latin root, “peregrinus,” and its various meanings according to the Oxford English Dictionary. His favorite novel was Willa Cather’s My Antonia, especially its haunting last lines about “the precious, the incommunicable past.” He introduced me to Virginia Hamilton Adair’s poetry, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s perfect steel and metal stairway inside the Arts Club of Chicago, and J.S. Bach’s chorus in Saint John’s Passion, “Ruht Wohl,” which I tearfully listened to on repeat after hearing the news of Marty’s death. Saint John’s Passion was much more than a piece of music for him. Marty meditated on it as a distillation of his Lutheran faith, a testimony to his hope in Christ.
Most of all, Marty loved his family and his friends: his parents, Anna and Emil, whose photograph was prominently displayed in his office; his brother Myron (Mike), a professor at Drake University, whom he always described as the “real” historian in the family; his sister, Mildred; his four children, Joel, John, Peter, and Micah; his two lifetime foster children, Fran Garcia Carlson and Jeff Garcia; his step-daughter Ursula Meyer; and his nine grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren. Once, when I asked him how he was, he paused and said, “I’m as happy as my least happy child.” His first wife, Elsa Schumacher, died from breast cancer in 1981 at the age of only fifty-three, a loss that led him to write A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart. He was too private to write about Elsa directly, but his description of the “wintry season” of grief, a “season of abandonment,” testifies to the profundity of his grief. By the time I met Marty, Elsa had been dead for more than a decade, but he never spoke about her without something soft coming into his voice. In one of our email exchanges, he referred to her as “Elsa, dear Elsa.”
Marty’s great fortune was to find love a second time with musician Harriet Meyer, the widow of one of his former seminary roommates and the sister of the other. (She often joked that she liked her brother’s roommates so much that she married both of them.) Harriet had lost her husband many years earlier, leaving her alone as a young mother, but like Marty, her experience of grief had eventually led her to a deeper faith in the enduring presence of God. Marty and Harriet built a joyful life together, filled with evenings at the symphony, dinners with friends, and visits with their blended family. They hosted many happy gatherings at their house in Riverside and then at their condominium on the eighty-fifth floor of the John Hancock Center, with an extraordinary view over Lake Michigan.
Marty was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, but to his credit, he wore his brilliance lightly. He had served as a Lutheran pastor for ten years, and his teaching was marked by a deep compassion for the vulnerability of others. I often heard him say, “God give me the grace to flunk my best friend,” but his words were a tacit admission of his own forbearance. In practice, there was very little flunking of anyone. He met students at their own intellectual level, pushing some to frame their ideas more ambitiously while coaxing others to find their voices. More than once, I saw him comfort a weeping student during a qualifying exam or progress meeting with the gentle reminder, “It’s okay—everyone cries.” He was proud of his doctoral advisees, all 115 of them, and during his years in Swift Hall he always kept a list of them in his jacket pocket, literally next to his heart. Never once did I see him use his intelligence as a weapon to make someone else feel small. Given the frequency of his public lectures, he encountered more than his share of grandstanding and half-baked ideas, but he made it a practice to respond to the absurdities of life with good-natured laughter. “Humor is the prelude to faith, and laughter the beginning of prayer,” he liked to say, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr.
Marty’s ire was reserved for those who belittled or misrepresented religion. Given his prominence, he was often interviewed about public religious events, and he used his platform to defend religious freedom and a spirit of tolerance. After 9/11, he appeared on numerous news shows to urge Americans not to condemn all Muslims for the actions of a few. In his columns for The Christian Century and for Sightings, the online journal of the Martin Marty Center (a center named in his honor at the University of Chicago Divinity School), he offered frank assessments of the many “false prophets” within Christianity who were more concerned about their own power and wealth than the teachings of the Gospel. On one memorable occasion, when asked to participate in a panel discussion about a controversial book, he was so troubled by its language of religious “winners” and “losers” that he split his response into two parts. For the panel, he offered an impartial overview of the book’s main arguments, but afterward, he handed the authors a copy of his comments with a single critical footnote—a footnote that spanned twenty-one single-spaced pages. This was a classic Marty moment—forceful but with a twinkle in his eye. He wanted to make it clear that religion should not be reduced to a commodity, as if it had nothing to do with hope, beauty, or love.
He was proud of his doctoral advisees, all 115 of them, and during his years in Swift Hall he always kept a list of them in his jacket pocket, literally next to his heart.
Marty was not only a scholar of religion but an active participant in the great religious events of his day. He had initially planned to write a four-volume history of “Modern American Religion,” but he stopped after the first three volumes (The Irony of it All, 1893-1919; The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941; and Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960), because he worried that the fourth volume would read less like history than memoir. Among other things, Marty attended the Second Vatican Council in 1964 and marched at Selma in 1965 with Martin Luther King. One never knew whom he might mention casually in conversation: his circle of acquaintances included politicians, theologians, journalists, cardinals, and university presidents. Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral fame, an immensely popular mega-church preacher but a theological lightweight, had arrived at Marty’s house in Riverside one morning to ask him to become his personal teacher of theology. Schuller wanted to dignify his theatrics by borrowing Marty’s intellectual reputation. Marty refused. Once, when I stopped to look at a photo of Marty attending Vatican II, I was startled by the sight of a figure sitting several rows behind him. “Is that…?” I asked incredulously. Yes, Marty had been given a better seat than Karol Józef Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II.
Marty read widely and deeply in theology, but he was especially drawn to Reinhold Niebuhr’s prophetic realism. Like Niebuhr, Marty placed his faith in the reality of God’s grace despite the brokenness of the world. He especially loved this passage from The Irony of American History (1952):
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Forgiveness: this stood at the heart of Marty’s faith. When Scott Appleby, one of his former doctoral students, spoke at an awards ceremony in his honor, he summed up the drive behind Marty’s extraordinary career in a single sentence: “He feels forgiven.” All of Marty’s accomplishments were made possible by his belief in a God who saw his failings and yet continued to love him: in Niebuhr’s words, “a divine judge who laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.” Marty understood his advising and teaching, his preaching, his lectures, and his many, many books as his offerings to God, an expression of his gratitude for divine grace.
In 2014, after twenty-one years at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I decided to accept a position at Harvard Divinity School. Marty’s response was typically generous. In an email with the subject line, “Bittersweet,” he quoted one of his favorite lines from John Winthrop: “When God intendes a man to a work he settes a Byas on his heart so that tho’ he be tumbled this way and that yet his Byas still draws him to that side, and there he rests at last.” Marty himself had turned down an offer from Harvard many years before, but he understood that my sense of vocation—the bias of my heart—was leading me elsewhere. On a June evening shortly before our move to Massachusetts, my husband Erik and I went out to dinner with him and Harriet. Walking after dinner, Harriet and Erik got ahead of us, and Marty invited me to sit down in two theater seats, a summer art installation, along the Magnificent Mile. As we sat side by side, admiring the city lights and the stars against the night sky, he smiled at me. “Hey, kid,” he said. “You and I have never exchanged a harsh word.” He was, he said, my “forever colleague.”
In the years ahead, there would be many more visits and email exchanges with Marty. But my memory of that summer night in Chicago, when we reminisced about our years together in Swift Hall, has always been particularly dear to me. “Glad that the moon and the stars could put on a show for you at the end,” he wrote the next day. And then, after promising to keep me and my family in prayer, he made it clear that this was not a goodbye, but only the beginning of a new conversation. “What are you working on?… I’ll want to hear more before long.”
Rest well, Marty. My gratitude for your life knows no bounds.