Martin E. Marty was an ordained Lutheran pastor, seminary professor and highly influential voice on religion who through more than 60 books and thousands of lectures, sermons and commencement addresses helped shape 20th century Christian thought.
Marty taught for 35 years at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where he helped shape two generations of religious scholars and church leaders. He also was a columnist and senior editor at the Chicago-based magazine The Christian Century for 50 years, and he frequently commented on major religious issues in interviews, lectures and articles he wrote.
“He served as kind of a bridge between mainline Christianity denominations like the Lutheran and the United Methodist churches, and he was an outstanding representative of that mainline and sometimes liturgical faith and at the same time, he had the complete respect of and appreciation from evangelical (Christians),” said Philip Yancey, an author who writes about Christian issues.
“There aren’t many people who could pull that off and he did. I think he did so just because he got his facts right, he was fair, he was just and his integrity and the seriousness of his faith were without question,” Yancey said.
Marty, 97, died of natural causes on Feb. 25 at a retirement community in Minneapolis, where he had lived since 2022. He previously lived in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood and before that in west suburban Riverside.
Martin Emil Marty was born in West Point, Nebraska. His father was a church organist who taught in Lutheran elementary schools, and Marty attended a Lutheran prep school. In 1952, he received what then was called a bachelor of divinity degree from Concordia Seminary near St. Louis.
At the start of 1952, shortly before he was set to graduate and be ordained so he could take a dream job pastoring at a Lutheran church in London, the seminary’s dean discovered that Marty and a classmate had concocted a campus hoax involving a fictitious and pompous German theologian named Franz Bibfeldt. Aimed at parodying self-important academics, the hoax included Marty writing a satirical review in a Concordia publication of a nonexistent book allegedly written by Bibfeldt, “The Relieved Paradox.” A professor then tried to get hold of the book but couldn’t find it, and Concordia’s administration demanded an explanation.
Concordia’s dean revoked Marty’s pastoral posting in London, instead sending him to serve as assistant to the pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest. He was ordained as a pastor in July 1952, and his boss at the River Forest church recommended he pursue a doctoral degree.
Marty received a master’s degree in sacred theology from Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary in Maywood in 1954, followed by a doctoral degree from the U. of C. in American religious and intellectual history in 1956.
In 1956, Marty founded what became the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in Elk Grove Village. He spent seven years at the Elk Grove Village church as it grew from 180 members to a congregation of 1,700.
In 1963, the U. of C. hired Marty as an associate professor of modern Christian history in its Divinity School. Later promoted to full professor, Marty wrote widely, including books that were not scholarly in nature but aimed at the broader public.
“Dad had this amazing capacity to take abstract theological concepts or complex historical realities and reduce them to edible morsels that not only satisfied sophisticates and scholars present at a lecture, but that also delighted everyday people in the room who were just curious to learn about faith and culture,” said Marty’s son Peter, who is the editor and publisher of The Christian Century.
Retired University of Notre Dame professor Mark Noll, an expert on the history of Christianity, said Marty’s background in the Lutheran church’s Missouri synod gave him an understanding of conservative religion, while his membership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America affirmed his own place as a moderate-to-progressive Christian. But “he could never be rigidly typecast,” Noll said.
“He remained able to understand, appreciate and explain religious expression of all types and to do so charitably,” Noll said.
Marty had a keen interest in church history, and was widely sought after to contextualize changes in the American church during the post-World War II years.
“The parish was perfectly designed for the preindustrial, pre-ecumenical, frontier situation,” Marty told the Tribune in 1970. “When America passed over the hump of transition to urban, industrial, mass communicative, ecumenical society, it carried with it the modern congregational system as if it were predestined to be the exhaustive form of church life. Part of the attendance boom of the ‘50s was a quest for security after a war, coupled with a move to suburbia, a resurgence of town feeling and a sinking-in of roots.”
In a 1966 essay in the Tribune, Marty examined the role of the theologian during that decade.
“Perhaps ours will be an epoch in which man finally pulls it off and goes it alone, moved once and for all beyond God and religion,” he wrote. “The race may disappear altogether. But wherever there is despair, as well as signs of life and hope for the future, people seek meaning. At their side are Christian thinkers who realize the precariousness of human experience, the fragility of religious language and forms. Knowing of the silence of God, they have chosen to wait. God may speak; men may experience and hear Him. What theologians in the meantime come up with may not make all men comfortable. We should hardly be surprised at that.”
By 1982, Marty was deemed one of the most influential figures in American religion, alongside evangelists Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, in a poll published in The Christian Century that surveyed the editors of religious magazines.
In 1985, Marty was the founding president of the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith and Ethics, and from 1987 until 1995, he co-directed the Fundamentalism Project, a survey of global religious fundamentalism that was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Launched from a modest third-floor office in Swift Hall on the U. of C. campus, the project wound up producing five encyclopedic volumes on the subject.
“He was a peacemaker. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ and that includes addressing parts of faith that are negative and not positive,” Yancey said. “Very few people could pull that off with the grace, integrity and authenticity that Martin Marty did.”
Marty marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and spoke out in favor of fair housing initiatives in 1967. And in 1974, he took aim at President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, particularly as Ford invoked God in his pardon action. Marty called the pardon little more than “cheap grace.”
In 1986, Marty’s name was floated as candidate to be the presiding bishop of a new national Lutheran church group that would be formed in 1988 via a merger of three separate Lutheran groups. The following year, he sent a letter informing his church superiors that he felt “no call to the office of bishop.”
In 1996, after Pope John Paul II stated that evolution is compatible with Christian faith, Marty told the Tribune that most mainstream Christian denominations take similar positions on the subject.
“The important thing for all theists is that humans are related to nature,” Marty said. “That’s why I think this (statement) has a lot more weight to it: You can keep the distinctiveness of the human as the image of God, and still see the human as part of this billions-years-long process.”
After Marty retired from the U. of C. Divinity School in 1998, the university founded the Martin Marty Center, whose mission is the public understanding of religion. Marty also spent time on the Public Religion Project, a program he created to delineate the importance of faith in a pluralistic society. He led that initiative from 1996 until 1999.
Marty also was an associate editor at The Christian Century for 50 years, beginning in 1956. He wrote some 40 columns a year for the magazine. Upon The Christian Century’s centennial in 1984, Marty told the Tribune that the magazine had been “the morale-builder, rallying point and representative for the mainline Protestant world.”
Marty also edited Context, the biweekly newsletter of religious and cultural commentary, for 41 years. However, even Marty had his limits on topics he would speak about publicly.
“I avoid abortion, homosexuality and anything else where there is so much polarization that nobody will do any fresh thinking,” he told the Tribune in an interview upon his retirement in 1998, clad in his trademark bow tie and vest. “I’ve always seen the role (of scholars) as being teachers to the nation.”
In 2000, Marty served as interim president of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, whose board he had chaired.
“Any one of his activities would have been enough for a single busy individual — author of award-winning books, supervisor of more than 100 doctoral dissertations at the University of Chicago, columnist at The Christian Century for 50 years, much-in-demand speaker before elite and humble audiences, service on innumerable boards and committees,” Noll said. “Yet somehow he did all these things without making himself or his achievements the center of attention.”
President Bill Clinton honored Marty with a National Humanities Medal in 1997. He received a National Book Award in 1972 for his book “Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America.”
Peter Marty said that he felt that what set his father apart from so many peers “was his ability to make anybody he was conversing with feel more important than he was. That was a gift of grace that lives on because of the sheer number of lives he impacted.”
Marty’s first wife of 29 years, Elsa, died of cancer in 1981. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 42 years, Harriet; three other sons, Joel, John and Micah; a stepdaughter, Ursula Meyer; two lifetime foster children, Fran García Carlson and Jeff García; nine grandchildren; and 18 great-grandchildren.
A memorial service will take place at 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 29, at Central Lutheran Church, 333 S. 12th St. in Minneapolis.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
