Who is Martin Luther?
German clergyman, theologian, author, hymn writer, lecturer, and former Augustinian friar Martin Luther OSA lived from 10 November 1483 to 18 February 1546. Luther was a key player in the Protestant Reformation, and Lutheranism is based on his theological convictions. He is considered by many to be among the most important people in Christian and Western history.
Martin Luther was ordained as a priest in 1507 after being born in Eisleben. He eventually grew to disagree with a number of the doctrines and practices of the modern Roman Catholic Church, especially those pertaining to indulgences and the power of the pope. With writings like as his 1517 Ninety-five Theses, Luther sparked a global discussion on these topics. Luther was excommunicated in January 1521 after Pope Leo X requested in 1520 that he relinquish all of his publications. At the Diet of Worms later that year, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V denounced Luther as an outlaw. Luther’s excommunication by Leo X was still in force when he passed away in 1546.
He argued that justification is only obtained as a free gift of God’s grace by a believer’s faith in Jesus Christ and cannot be won by any human deeds, intentions, or merit. He believed that as part of the sanctification process, good deeds were an essential byproduct of a live faith. By arguing that the Bible is the only source of divinely given truth about the gospel and opposing sacerdotalism by viewing all baptized Christians as holy priesthoods, Luther’s theology questioned the authority and position of the pope and bishops. Luther believed that the only labels that were appropriate for anyone who professed Christ were Christian or Evangelical, but those who identify with these, as well as Luther’s broader ideas, are termed Lutherans.
The Bible became much more accessible to the laypeople thanks to Luther’s translation into German, which had a profound effect on German culture and the church. It contributed a number of concepts to the art of translation, encouraged the creation of a standard version of German, and impacted the Tyndale Bible, an English translation. The evolution of singing in Protestant churches was impacted by his hymns. His union with a former nun named Katharina von Bora established a precedent for clerical marriage, which permitted Protestant clerics to get married.
Martin Luther voiced strong antisemitic opinions in two of his later writings, including On the Jews and Their Lies, where he called for the expulsion of Jews and the destruction of synagogues. Additionally, nontrinitarian Christians, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics were the targets of these publications. Though some historians argue that Luther’s rhetoric fostered antisemitism in Germany and the rise of the Nazi Party centuries later, he did not explicitly call for the murder of Jews.
Martin Luther Biography
Hans Luder (or Ludher, later Luther) and his wife Margarethe (née Lindemann) welcomed Martin Luther into the world on November 10, 1483, in Eisleben, County of Mansfeld, in the Holy Roman Empire. On the feast day of Martin of Tours, Luther was baptized the following morning.
His father was one of four citizen representatives on the local council and a leaseholder of copper mines and smelters when his family relocated to Mansfeld in 1484. He was elected a town councilor in 1492. Despite Luther’s enemies calling her a whore and bath attendant, Martin Marty, a religious researcher, depicts Luther’s mother as a hardworking woman of “trading-class stock and middling means.”
Martin Luther is reported to have had a close relationship with Jacob, one of his siblings.
Education
Martin’s father, Hans Luther, was adamant that his oldest son pursue a career in law. He sent Martin to Latin schools in Eisenach in 1498, followed by Magdeburg in 1497, when he attended the Brethren of the Common Life, a lay-run school, and Mansfeld. The so-called “trivium”—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—was the main concentration of the three schools. Later, Luther likened his schooling there to hell and purgatory.
At the age of 17, Martin Luther enrolled in the University of Erfurt in 1501, which he subsequently characterized as a whorehouse and beerhouse. He had to get up at four in the morning for “a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercises.” In 1505, he earned his master’s degree.
Martin Luther followed his father’s desires and enrolled in law school, but he left nearly quickly because he thought the field was unpredictable. Instead, he looked for answers about life and became interested in philosophy and religion, including Aristotle, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel. Two tutors, Jodocus Trutfetter and Bartholomaeus Arnoldi von Usingen, had a profound impact on him. They taught him to evaluate everything for oneself via experience and to be wary of even the best philosophers.
He found philosophy frustrating since it provided assurance regarding the application of reason but not about loving God, which Martin Luther felt was more significant. He believed that reason could not bring people to God, and as a result, he formed a love-hate relationship with Aristotle because of his reliance on reason. Martin Luther believed that reason may be used to criticize institutions and people, but not God. He felt that the only way for humans to know about God was through divine revelation, which made him value scripture more and more.
Monk and Academics
A lightning bolt struck near Luther during a thunderstorm on July 2, 1505, while he was riding back to university after a trip home. Later, he told his father that he was afraid of death and divine judgment, and he cried out, “Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!” He came to view his cry for help as a vow that he could never break. This is one of two stories regarding Luther’s abrupt decision to become a monk. Melancthon’s account states that Luther was shocked by the unexpected death of a university friend, Hieronimus Buntz.
On July 17, 1505, he left the university, sold his books, and went to St. Augustine’s Monastery in Erfurt. Luther’s grief over the deaths of two friends was cited by one buddy as the reason for the choice. The move appeared to have saddened Luther himself. He was escorted to the Black Cloister’s entrance by those who attended a goodbye dinner. “This day you see me, and then, not ever again,” he stated. What he perceived as a waste of Luther’s education infuriated his father.
Augustinian friar
Martin Luther committed himself to the Augustinian order, which included frequent confessions, pilgrimages, extensive prayer sessions, and fasting.
He characterized this time in his life as a time of intense spiritual hopelessness. He stated, “I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul.” His boss and irritated confessor, Johann von Staupitz, decided Luther needed more work to keep him from dwelling too much on himself and gave him the order to become an academic.
Martin Luther was ordained by Brandenburg Bishop Jerome Schultz in the Cathedral of Erfurt on April 3, 1507.
Martin Luther’s Theology
Martin Luther started teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg the next year, in 1508. On March 9, 1508, he earned a bachelor’s degree in biblical studies, and in 1509, he earned another in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. He received his Doctor of Theology degree on October 19, 1512.
He succeeded von Staupitz as chair of theology at the University of Wittenberg when he was admitted to the senate of the theological faculty on October 21, 1512. At the University of Wittenberg, he held this role for the remainder of his career.
He visited and oversaw eleven monasteries in his jurisdiction after being appointed provincial vicar of Saxony and Thuringia in 1515.
Martin Luther gave lectures on the Psalms, Hebrew, Romans, and Galatians between 1510 and 1520. He developed new perspectives on the Catholic Church’s use of concepts like penance and righteousness as he examined these Bible passages, in part thanks to Desiderius Erasmus’ recently published annotated translation. He started to believe that the church was corrupt and had forgotten some of the most important Christian principles.
The idea of justification—God’s act of deeming a sinner righteous—by faith alone via God’s favor was the most significant to Martin Luther. He started preaching that the only way to get salvation or redemption—a gift of God’s grace—is to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. “This one and firm rock, which we call the doctrine of justification” , he states, “is the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of all godliness.” Some have referred to Luther’s use of justification by faith as his “macro-hermeneutical presupposition for biblical interpretation and theological construction.”
Martin Luther came to believe that God alone was responsible for justification. Luther made this point very evident in his 1525 work On the Bondage of the Will, which he wrote in response to Erasmus’s (1524) On Free Will. Erasmus thought Luther’s early teaching on the necessity of evil was not supported by the Bible. Martin Luther stated that Christians get such righteousness wholly from outside themselves (monergism), which is in opposition to the Catholic and Orthodox teaching that believers’ good deeds are carried out in partnership with God’s prior grace (synergism). He went beyond Erasmus’ previous Latin translation decision by teaching that righteousness is not only derived from Christ but is, in fact, the righteousness of Christ, which is ascribed to Christians via faith rather than infused into them.
“That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law,” he states. “Faith is that which brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ.” Luther believed that God gave people faith, and that being justified by faith was “as though I had been born again.” He discovered “the righteousness of God”—that is, that “the just person” of whom the Bible talks (as in Romans 1:17) lives by faith—and that was the reason he entered Paradise, no less. His definition of “justification” in the Smalcald Articles is as follows:
The first and chief article is this: Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification (Romans 3:24–25). He alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us … Nothing of this article can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth and everything else falls (Mark 13:31).
Protestant Reformation
The Roman Catholic Church dispatched Dominican friar Johann Tetzel to Germany in 1516 to sell indulgences and earn funds for the reconstruction of Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica. Tetzel’s experiences as an indulgence preacher, particularly from 1503 to 1510, led to his appointment as general commissioner by Albrecht von Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, who had to contribute the sizeable sum of ten thousand ducats to the basilica’s reconstruction because he was already heavily indebted to pay for a substantial accumulation of benefices. Pope Leo X gave Albrecht permission to sell a special plenary indulgence, which is the remission of the temporal punishment of sin. Albrecht was to claim half of the revenues to cover his benefices’ costs.
95 Theses
Martin Luther protested the sale of indulgences in a letter to his bishop, Albrecht von Brandenburg, dated October 31, 1517. A copy of his “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” which became known as the Ninety-five Theses, was attached with his letter. According to Hans Hillerbrand, he did not want to challenge the church; rather, he viewed his disagreement as a scholarly critique of church doctrine, and as such, the tone of the work is “searching, rather than doctrinaire.” A number of the theses, including Thesis 86, which poses the question, “Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?” nevertheless have an undercurrent of challenge, according to Hillerbrand.
Tetzel is credited with saying, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory (also attested as ‘into heaven’) springs.” Martin Luther took issue with this statement. He maintained that those who asserted that indulgences provided customers salvation and released them from all punishments were mistaken, as forgiveness was the exclusive domain of God. He asserted that Christians shouldn’t let such deceptive promises cause them to waver in their commitment to Christ.
On October 31, 1517, he is said to have nailed his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. Although the story of the posting on the door has become one of the cornerstones of history, scholars Gerhard Ritter, Gerhard Prause, Götz Trenkler, and Walter Krämer argue that it has little basis in reality. Though it is believed that Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s partner, was not in Wittenberg at the time, the story is based on his remarks. Roland Bainton, however, asserts that it is accurate.
In 1517, the Latin Theses were printed in a number of German locales. Luther’s friends transcribed the 95 Theses into German in January of 1518. Copies of the theses circulated across Germany in less than two weeks. As early as 1519, Luther’s writings made their way to France, England, and Italy.
To hear Martin Luther speak, students flocked to Wittenberg. He released his work on the Psalms and a brief commentary on Galatians. One of Luther’s most innovative and fruitful periods of his career was this early period. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian are three of his most well-known essays that were published in 1520.
Violating the Papacy
Archbishop Albrecht did not reply to Luther’s letter containing the Ninety-five Theses. After having the theses examined for heresy, he sent them to Rome in December of 1517. In order to pay off a papal permission for holding many bishoprics, he need the indulgence earnings. According to Luther, “the pope had a finger in the pie as well, because one half was to go to the building of St. Peter’s Church in Rome”.
Karl von Miltitz, the papal nuncio, took a more accommodative stance in January 1519 while in Altenburg, Saxony. Martin Luther vowed to keep quiet if his opponents did, and he made some concessions to the Saxon, who was related to the Elector. But the theologian Johann Eck was adamant about publicly exposing Luther’s beliefs. He invited Luther to participate in a debate he sponsored at Leipzig in June and July of 1519 with Luther’s colleague Andreas Karlstadt. Luther’s most audacious claim throughout the discussion was that neither popes nor church councils were infallible because they did not have the sole authority to interpret the Bible. Eck called Luther a new Jan Hus for this, alluding to the heretic and reformer from Czechoslovakia who was executed by stake in 1415. He committed himself to defeating Luther after that.
Marriage
In April 1523, Martin Luther arranged for 12 nuns to be smuggled out of the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in herring barrels, and one of them, Katharina von Bora, was his bride. He wrote Wenceslaus Link, “The Lord has plunged me into marriage Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts.” Luther was forty-one and Katharina was twenty-six when they were married.
Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Johannes Apel, Philipp Melanchthon, and Lucas Cranach the Elder and his spouse were witnesses to the couple’s engagement on June 13, 1525. Bugenhagen married the couple that same day in the evening. The wedding feast and the traditional procession to the church were omitted and reenacted on June 27, two weeks later.
Luther’s marriage established the norm for clerical marriage, although several priests and former members of monastic orders, such as Andreas Karlstadt and Justus Jonas, had already tied the knot. Despite his long-standing biblical condemnation of celibacy vows, his marriage astonished many, including Melanchthon, who referred to it as imprudent. On November 30, 1524, Martin Luther wrote to George Spalatin, “I will never marry, as I feel right now. I am neither wood nor stone, so I am not insensitive to my flesh or sex, but I am opposed to marriage because I anticipate a heretic’s death every day. Luther had been eating the simplest meals before to being married, and he acknowledged that his mildewed bed was not made correctly for months at a time.
A former monastery known as “The Black Cloister” was given to Martin Luther and his spouse as a wedding gift by Elector John the Steadfast. Despite frequently having little money, they started what seems to have been a joyful and successful marriage. In addition to helping the couple make a living through farming and border crossing, Katharina gave birth to six children: Hans in June 1526; Elisabeth on December 10, 1527, who passed away a few months later; Magdalene in 1529, who passed away in Luther’s arms in 1542; Martin in 1531; Paul in January 1533; and Margaret in 1534. On August 11, 1526, Martin Luther revealed in Michael Stiefel, “My Katie is so obliging and pleasing to me in all things that I would not exchange my poverty for the riches of Croesus.”
Translation of the Old Testament
When the entire Bible was released in 1534, Martin Luther and his associates had finished translating the Old Testament after publishing their German translation of the New Testament in 1522. Until the end of his life, he kept improving the translation. The Bible had already been translated into German by others, but Luther customized his translation to fit his own beliefs. The Koberger Bible (1484) and the Mentelin Bible were two of the first translations. Prior to Luther’s Bible, there were as many as fourteen translations in High German, four in Low German, four in Dutch, and numerous other translations in other languages.
Both northern and southern Germans could understand Luther’s translation because it employed the dialect of German spoken at the Saxon chancellery. Because “we are removing impediments and difficulties so that other people may read it without hindrance,” he meant for his forceful, straightforward language to make the Bible understandable to regular Germans. Luther’s translation of the Bible gained popularity and influence immediately after it was published, coinciding with an increase in the demand for books in German. As a result, it gave German literature and language a unique taste. It contributed significantly to the propagation of Luther’s ideas throughout Germany, furnished with Luther’s comments and prefaces as well as woodcuts by Lucas Cranach that featured anti-papal iconography.
Other vernacular translations, such the Tyndale Bible, which was an antecedent of the King James Bible, were influenced by the Luther Bible. Martin Luther rejected the Johannine Comma, the First Epistle of John, as a fraud and did not include it in his translation. After Luther’s passing, others added it to the text.
Epistemology of faith and reason
According to some academics, Martin Luther taught that religion and reason were mutually exclusive, meaning that reason could not shed light on matters of faith. He said, “All the articles of our Christian faith, which God has revealed to us in His Word, are in presence of reason sheerly impossible, absurd, and false.” and “That faith is not in any way aided by reason.” For faith’s biggest adversary is reason, which never supports spiritual matters. In the later work, he also wrote—albeit somewhat contradictorily—that human reason “strives not against faith, when enlightened, but rather furthers and advances it,” casting doubt on assertions that he was a fideist. Contemporary Lutheran scholarship, however, has identified a different reality in Luther. Luther instead aims to acknowledge the distinct fields of knowledge that religion and reason pertain to by keeping them apart.
Martin Luther Books
- Luther’s Latin exegetical works, known as Exegetica opera Latina, are included in the Erlangen Edition (Erlangener Ausgabe: “EA”).
- The acronym “WA” stands for the Weimar version (Weimarer Ausgabe), which is the comprehensive, official German version of Luther’s Latin and German works. “WA Br” Weimarer Ausgabe, Briefwechsel (correspondence), “WA Tr” Weimarer Ausgabe, Tischreden (tabletalk), and “WA DB” Weimarer Ausgabe, Deutsche Bibel (German Bible) follow.
- The acronym “LW” or “AE” indicates that the American Edition (Luther’s Works) is the most comprehensive English translation of Luther’s writings. The first 55 volumes were released between 1955 and 1986. Volumes 58, 60, and 68 of the intended twenty-volume extension (vols. 56–75) have already been released.
