Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death. By Richard Marius. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. xvii, 542. $35.00.) In a book that takes Luther's life and thought down to the time of the Bondage of the Will (1525), the late Professor Marius makes three claims. First, citing the works of Alberto Tenenti and others, contends that the fear of death was widespread in Luther's era not because European men and women dreaded appearing before God in judgment, but because they dreaded that, contrary to the teachings of religion, death might really mean annihilation, extinction of consciousness. Second, Luther's dogmatic assertions can best be understood as an anodyne (p. 28) a dread of death-as-annihilation that was, Luther-scholars to the contrary, his deepest and darkest fear. Third, the Ref ormation that sprang from Luther's dogma was a catastrophe in the history of western civilization: for more than a century after Luther's death, Europe was strewn with corpses of people who would have lived normal if had never lived at all (pp. xii, 485). The book's chief claim to originality the idea that deeply feared death-as-annihilation, but Marius offers little in the way of textual evidence. He does have in his favor the emphasis of Luther's own explanation of how decided to become a monk when passing through a storm near Erfurt in 1505: Suddenly surrounded by terror and the agony of death, I felt constrained to make my vow (p. 44). But other arguments presented here are less convincing. In Luther's comment on the discussion of Christ's victory over death and sin in chapter 6 of the Epistle to the Romans, in the 1515 Lectures on Romans, Marius finds it significant that does not use the word hell in describing eternal death-but neither did St. Paul in the passage to which refers. Elsewhere suggests that Luther's idea that sin lives and remains forever in the death of the damned is akin to the Augustinian idea that sin itself deprivation, that it nonbeing. If sin nonbeing, the penalty sin also be nonbeing, that is, (p. 107). The key phrase here could also be.' The same sleight of hand applied to Luther's comment, on hearing of Erasmus' death, that Erasmus had lived and died as an Epicurean, and that he went into hell. Since Epicurus taught that death dissolves the soul altogether, one may conclude that Luther saw annihilation not as a promise of peace but as the truest hell, a hopelessness reaching back from the final state of the damned to be present in this world always in the consciousness of the living (pp. …