Martin E. Marty passed away today, just a couple of weeks after his 97th birthday, of what his family termed simply “old age.” Their characteristically crisp and yet affectionate obituary can be found here.
I first came across Martin Marty in the bathroom.
I was in my early 20s, attending Wheaton Graduate School for my M.A., and visiting my former parents-in-law back in Ontario. Scanning the copy of Reader’s Digest my former mother-in-law kept there, I happened upon a brief article about contemporary religion in America. I don’t recall the article, just the odd name of the author: “Martin E. Marty.” Who in the world would call their kid “MartE Marty”?
I was on the hunt for a Ph.D. program. But the one thing I had learned at Wheaton (in the Chicago suburbs) about the prestigious school just downtown was that it was a graveyard for doctoral students: costly to enter, and impossible to leave. People took 10 years or more to get their degrees.
Still, the name stuck. And not long afterward (in a chain of events I'll relate another time), I was enrolled at The University of Chicago under his tutelage. (For the record: He got me out in fewer than five years.)
I called him Mr. Marty while a student, since everyone at Chicago was called “Mr.” or “Ms.,” a pleasant egalitarian custom going back to the legendary president Robert M. Hutchins. I was always “Mr. Stackhouse” and my professors were likewise title + surname.
(Only the MDs insisted on being called “Dr.,” anxious for their professional status the way only MDs are, God bless ‘em. Since Marty not only had earned a Ph.D.—also at Chicago—but been awarded dozens of honorary doctorates, it was amusing to think of a physician at a university committee meeting requiring he be addressed as “Doctor” while across the table sat “Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. … n” Martin Marty.)
Once I had graduated, he cheerily chirped one day, “Call me ‘Marty,’” which even his wife did, so I knew I had finally come into my professional majority.
Once I was identified as his student (and his influence helped me get my first two full-time jobs), people invariably asked, “How does he do it?” He was, after all, extremely well known in American religious studies, arguably the “go-to guy” for the mainstream press from 1959’s publication of The New Shape of American Religion until his retirement forty years later—and beyond. That’s an astonishingly long time to hold prominence in the academy, but everyone who knew about his gift for incisive analysis rendered in memorable phrases knew he deserved it.
He was also legendary for his productivity: a book every year he was a professor (plus every year in the first decade of his retirement), dozens of edited books, thousands of columns and articles, and speeches around the world.
A common joke has a reporter calling the Divinity School for a quote.
The secretary replies that “Mr. Marty is unavailable at the moment: he’s writing his next book.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” says the knowledgeable reporter. “I’ll hold.”
Marty’s input was as amazing as his output. Student rumour had it that he read a book every evening.
A few weeks before I was to graduate, with my dissertation safely approved and submitted, I dared to ask—not him, but his wife, Harriet—whether the rumour was true. “Surely,” I said, “they just mean that he scans a book every evening to see whether he wants to read or review it. He doesn’t actually read an entire book every night?”
Harriet’s terse answer: “Ask him what’s in chapter four.”
Beat.
“Um, no, I don’t think I will…!”
Scholars older than I would ask me for his secrets. I would tell them he didn’t sleep more than six hours per night, and had “power naps” twice a day. I would tell them that he was marvelously disciplined and had no interest in movies or TV.
Of course, that hardly accounted for it. After a few years of these attempts at helping other academic egos feel better—“Ah! If I just slept less and worked a little harder…”—I gave a different answer.
“Think about how much better Michael Jordan is than a very good NCAA Final Four player. Now consider that Martin Marty is as much smarter than you and I are than Jordan is better than that player.”
No one liked that answer. But I think it was the right one. I have known only a few people to whom I would attribute the title “genius,” and MEM is one of them.
He did so much speaking and so much writing that he made up little games to add a little excitement to the process. I saw him give no fewer than six speeches to six different audiences in which he conspicuously set the alarm on his wristwatch at the start of the talk and picked it up as he concluded . . . and the alarm went off.
He once wrote a book with the private requirement that it have exactly the same number of pages per chapter. He managed to do so—and it won the National Book Award.
Marty probably had ADHD, and he took neurodivergence to a whole new level. Like some ADHDers, he played music while he wrote: in his case, often one of the “B’s,” although his included Bartók, as I recall.
He didn’t have much in the way of private devotional time, he once told me. His mind raced too much. So he prayed every morning as he drove the almost-empty Stevenson Expressway from his home in Riverside, Illinois, to the U of C campus at 5:30 a.m. or so. And he said he depended strongly on churchgoing for his spiritual life. “I need church!” he said, just as directly as that.
Marty’s family were originally Swiss Reformed, and he showed some of the discipline of that heritage, but not its austerity. “He really believes he is forgiven!” his wife once told me, in good Lutheran fashion. And his bathroom was decorated with Luther paraphernalia: as he called it, “the tower room”—after Luther’s own celebrated experience. (Look it up. You won't believe me if I tell you.)
Marty had a gift for creative circumlocution. I once found out that he wrote a recommendation letter for me that said, quite accurately, “John Stackhouse prefers to make history rather than have history happen to him.” That’s been more true than ever these days….
Marty was not flawless in my eyes. He let a couple of loudmouths dominate my first year of doctoral seminars with him—mediocrities who clearly had peaked earlier in their careers and hadn’t yet gotten the news.
But he also expected much of doctoral students, and as gentle and solicitous as he was when students (or alumni) were distressed—then we saw “Pastor Marty” at work—he wouldn’t otherwise hold our hands.
In my course with him on teaching, he made each of us offer a presentation and then required that we listen to the critiques of every other student in the class without saying a word in reply. He knew that if he let us talk, and we knew we could talk, we’d just spend the whole time listening to our classmates merely constructing clever defenses of our shortcomings. We had to sit and take it. It was a brutal, excellent experience.
One of my favourite Marty experiences was attending a conference of the much-missed Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College when I was now launched as a professor in my own right. It was splendid to come back to Wheaton (as I mentioned, I had earned my M.A. there—under Mark Noll) and to take Marty to dinner before he was to give the plenary address that evening.
As we were driving back to campus at about 6:45, for a session scheduled to start at 7:30, Marty asked me if I knew of a place he could grab a quick nap. Familiar with his unusual custom, I told him that the wings of the stage of the Barrow Auditorium, in which he would be speaking, were capacious and dark.
“Splendid!” he said. “I’ll just lie down on a tabletop there. And if it gets to 7:20 and you don’t see me, please come fetch me.”
We arrived, I dropped him off out front, and I parked the car. I went in, greeted a few old friends, and took my seat. At 7:15, a harried Edith Blumhofer, director of the ISAE, ran up the aisle to my seat.
“Have you seen Marty?” she gasped. “I thought he was with you!”
“He was. He’s sleeping up there off stage.”
“Oh, you!” she said, with evident exasperation at what she clearly took to be unhelpful joking.
Three minutes later she was back, eyes wide. “You weren’t kidding!”
“No, I wasn’t.”
And now we both had a Martin Marty story, one of hundreds that will be told this week and in many weeks to come.
Marty liked to josh that he wrote his column on the back page of The Christian Century to balance his friend and editor James Wall. I always was grateful that the most orthodox member of the Divinity School was my mentor—he balanced them, too—glad as I was to be taught by the likes of Langdon Gilkey, Brian Gerrish, and Bernard McGinn.
He was courteous and collegial—perhaps to a fault: many people wished he had used his bully pulpit to criticize and chide much more than he did. But Marty preferred to explain—and let people sort themselves out from there.
Except once. He wrote a scathingly satirical article sending up the typical liberal homily emphasizing justice-seeking and fellowship-building and niceness-encouraging. He concluded with this mock-humorous anvil, which I remember now only in paraphrase (he would have said it better):
“You’re welcome to use this sermon if you’re caught short of time this week. But one word of warning: There is not one word of the gospel in it. Not one.”
His namesake, another Martin, would have stoutly agreed.
Finally, I was deeply encouraged when, after a year of celebrating the centenary of Karl Barth’s birth (1986) in journal after journal and conference after conference, the late, lamented Reformed Journal opened 1987 with the cheeky cover well: “The Party Is Over: Was Barth Really That Good?”
Marty had been asked to write for it, and his position exactly mirrored my own. Where Barth served the Church by reminding it of great truths of the gospel, the tenets of orthodoxy undermined by liberalism, he did it well: eloquently, boldly, and edifyingly. Where Barth innovated, however—that’s when Marty left the party. As, it remains true to this day, do I.
Marty inspired his students to write for audiences academic and popular—combining, if we could, serious research with illuminating wit.
He taught us, as do all my good history teachers, to strive conscientiously to understand first before attempting any evaluation.
He inspired us to work hard, but also to love our families well, serve our schools with loyalty and dignity, and to do all we could to advance the Kingdom of God in both church and society.
And he loved us: as a kind mentor, a steady and reliable encourager, and an intimidating example—one who, as a previous Chicago dean once remarked to a campus visitor, “should certainly be admired, but never emulated,” since none of us ever could possibly keep up with him.
One more story. (This is a problem with Marty students: the stories are endless.)
While still taking doctoral coursework at Chicago, I attended a fundraising dinner for the missionary society about to send out a friend of mine. At the table sat a professor at a well-known evangelical divinity school in the area.
As we exchanged pleasantries, he learned with whom I was studying. Prepared for the usual gush—"You're studying with MARTIN MARTY?"—I received instead a bitter warning: "Don't let him turn you around."
My friend looked at me across the table and rolled his eyes. I uncharacteristically said nothing. I returned to my Hyde Park apartment that night, pretty sure that Martin Marty wouldn't turn me around—but that he would help me move forward. And he did—in countless ways.
The world has seen no one quite like Martin Emil Marty. It is duller, in every way, without him now.
