Heiko Oberman, expert on the Reformation, dies at 70

by Wolfgang Saxon, New York Times, 4 May 2001


   Heiko Oberman, a Luther biographer and scholar of the Reformation, the Renaissance and the late Middle Ages, died on April 22 in Tucson, where he had been Regents' professor of history at the University of Arizona since 1984.  He was 70.
   The cause was melanoma, said the university's division for late-medieval and Reformation studies, which he directed.  He previously held a similar position and a professorship in church history at the University of Tübingen, in Germany.
   Professor Oberman, a native of the Netherlands, wrote prolifically in Dutch, German and English.  An ordained minister, he was considered the pre-eminent Dutch Calvinist authority on late-medieval theology.
   On his 70th birthday, last October, scholars from across Europe and North America convened at a Tucson resort for a symposium marking the occasion.  And in 1996 the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences honored him with its A.H. Heineken Prize in history, calling him "a true pioneer in the field of historical science, particularly due to the new light he has shed on the study of history of the Middle Ages and Modern Age."
   Professor Oberman was the author of the acclaimed 1982 biography "Luther: Man Between God and the Devil."  It remains in print, as so several English editions of his other books, among them the three-volume "Dawn of the Reformation," "The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought," "The Impact of the Reformation: Essays," and "The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications."
   He also wrote "The Roots of Anti-Semitism: In the Age of Renaissance and Reformation" and "The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Theology," and edited a volume on the German peasant revolt of 1525.  In his personal library was a collection of Reformation literature that he and his family bequeathed to the studies division he headed, making the Tucson campus a prominent center for research in that field.
   Heiko Augustinus Oberman was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands.  Among his boyhood memories were those of Jewish refugees passing through the family home in his Nazi-occupied country, given a way station in their search for safe haven.  His father, Gerrit, was imprisoned as a result.
   The son graduated from the University of Utrecht and undertook further studies in Indonesia and at Oxford University.  He was ordained in 1958, the year he started his career as an instructor at the Harvard Divinity School.  There he rose to full professor by 1963, when he was barely in his 30's, and was named Winn professor of ecclesiastical history in 1964.  Two years later he accepted a professorship in the same discipline at Tübingen, where he remained until his move to Tucson in 1984.
   His survivors include his wife of 45 years, Geertruida Reesink Oberman;  two sons, Gerrit-Willem, of Bernhausen, Germany, and Raoul, of Wassenaar, the Netherlands;  two daughters, Ida Oberman of Alameda, Calif., and Hester Oberman of Tucson;  and seven grandchildren.
   Professor Oberman's biography of Martin Luther appeared first in Germany, in 1982, just before the 500th anniversary of Luther's birth.  It was an immediate success.
   The author's intention was to render Luther in all his complexity and to show German readers that his message had been abused in the past, particularly by the Nazis, who had used it to promote anti-Semitism.  The biography presented Luther as the earthy Augustinian friar he was when he posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
   "The pious American Lutherans and the high scholarly wizards in Germany come together to make Luther a pillar of moral society who has nothing to say to immoral man," Professor Oberman once told The New York Times.  "There is a Protestant hunger for saints which Luther would be furious about.
   "Luther said, 'Seek for community, play cards, drink good wine and eat.' Luther has things to say about sexuality that have just been cut out."

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