Martin Marty, renowned religious scholar and University of Chicago professor emeritus, dies at 97

CBS News

03-03-2025

University of Chicago professor emeritus the Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty, once described by Time Magazine as "the most influential interpreter of religion in the U.S.," died last week.
Marty died Tuesday, Feb. 25 at the Minneapolis care community where he had most recently lived. He was 97.
Marty earned his Ph.D. from UChicago, and was on the faculty at the university's Divinity School for 35 years, UChicago noted. The U of C said Marty's understanding of Protestant Christianity and fundamentalism "still frame the view of modern American religion."
The U of C added that historian L. Benjamin Rolsky called Marty "arguably the public intellectual of the 1980s," while biographer Grant Wacker suggested Marty belonged with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham, and 18th-century revivalist and preacher Jonathan Edwards on the "Mount Rushmore of American religious history."
A native of West Point, Nebraska, Marty attended Concordia Seminary and Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary before he earned his Ph.D. from the U of C Divinity School in 1956, the university said.
Marty became the founding pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in the northwest Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village in 1958, the U of C said.
Marty joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1963, and wrote more than 450 books, and 5,000 articles, essays, and other documents in that role, the U of C noted.
He was also editor of the newsletter Context, and served as an editor for The Christian Century magazine for 50 years.
As a practicing pastor, Marty also marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, with Dr. King in 1965, and served as a Protestant observer during the Second Vatican Council the year before, the U of C noted.
A published obituary noted that Marty also traveled extensively to deliver thousands of lectures, sermons, and commencement speeches.
UChicago cited the six-year "Fundamentalism Project" — a scholarly effort that spanned from 1988 until 1994 — as one of Marty's "most significant Scholarly achievements." The project, which Marty directed with his onetime advisee R. Scott Appleby, examined the role of conservative religious movements in societies around the world, the U of C said.
The result was five volumes of case studies and analysis that the U of C said "quickly became the standard works in comparative political religion."
Marty was also the founding president and later the scholar-in-residence at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics.
The published obituary said Marty may be known best for the study of "public theology," a phrase Marty himself coined "to describe the critical engagement of religious and cultural issues that can foster the common good."
"His rich interest in pluralism allowed him to be conversant in different genres and among diverse audiences," Marty's obit read.
Marty retired from the Divinity School faculty on his 70th birthday in 1998.
Marty married Elsa E. Schumacher in 1952, and they had four sons along with two permanent foster children, his obit read. After Elsa died of cancer in 1981, Marty reconnected with Harriet Meyer, the widow of a seminary classmate, and married her in 1982, his obit noted.
Marty's son, Peter W. Marty, is now editor and publisher of The Christian Century and also served as a Lutheran pastor. The junior Marty wrote about his father in the magazine last week.
"He encouraged those he met to love God from the top of their head and the bottom of their heart. Grace gave him the conviction that nobody was beneath him, just as the music of Bach reminded him that angels hovered just above him," Peter Marty wrote of his father. "In between was his own confident place in the lap of God. Forever grounded in the life of the church and anchored in hope, he took the happy simplicity of his childhood on the Nebraska prairie as his road map for life."
A memorial service will be held at Central Lutheran Church in Minneapolis on Saturday, March 29, and will be live-streamed via the church's website.
The U of C said a campus memorial service for Marty will be held at a later time.