PositiveThe Financial TimesIn his new book Fatal Discord, he brilliantly chronicles how the rift between both men deepened ... Massing provides a perfectly pitched account of these fascinating parallel lives in all their tragedy, rivalry and contradictions, based on translated sources and English secondary literature. He approaches them mostly in traditional terms as a story of men and ideas generated in dialogue with past thinkers. His default strategy for cultural context is to evoke muddy streets and roaming pigs ... While chapters drive the narrative, a more ambitious analytical framing is conveyed in the introduction and epilogues, but remains messy ... He thinks of Erasmus as a forerunner of cosmopolitan ideals, and a temperate, undogmatic man, but acknowledges his elitism and anti-Semitic zeal. American evangelicals are Luther’s heirs ... Yet this ignores Luther’s emphasis on continued spiritual struggle, the reality of demons, and the importance of community, comfort, song, sex, children and marital life. Luther was at his greatest when he built a faith on the ideas of perpetual failure and an acceptance of everyday life. Self-reliance belongs to a different world.
