LUTHER, Martin (1483–1546), German Reformer, stands at the headwaters of that vast movement of ecclesial and spiritual renewal known as the Reformation. He was born on 10 November 1483 in the Thuringian village of Eisleben. He was the son of Hans Luder, a copper miner, and his respectable wife, Margaret Ziegler. He was named Martin because he was baptized on 11 November, the feast day of St Martin of Tours.
Although Luther later complained of the harsh discipline he received as a young boy, his parents recognized that he was a precocious child and provided for his early education at Latin schools in Magdeburg and Eisenach. In 1501 Luther matriculated at the University of Erfurt, where he received his baccalaureate (1502) and master’s (1505) degrees. He then took up the study of law in accordance with his father’s wishes.
In the summer of 1505, however, Luther’s career underwent a dramatic change when, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, he cried out in panic, ‘Saint Ann, help me, I will become a monk.’ To the chagrin of his friends and parents, Luther insisted on fulfilling his vow. He joined the monastery of the Observant Augustinian friars, a strict religious order in Erfurt. By all accounts, Luther was a conscientious monk and kept the rule of his order scrupulously. But his many prayers, vigils and fastings only made him more uncertain of his own salvation. At every turn he was frustrated in his quest to find a gracious God.
Luther was overwhelmed by his sense of God’s sovereign power and holiness. After being ordained priest in 1507, Luther nearly fainted at the altar while presiding at his first mass. The idea that a finite creature could hold in its hands the very body of Christ terrified him. But Luther was troubled even more by his fallenness and falling short of God’s standard. Could he be sure that he had remembered every single sin in the confessional? On one occasion Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s confessor, admonished him to forget his scruples and simply love God. ‘Love God?’ retorted Luther, ‘I hate him.’ Luther experienced the dark night of the soul, when he seemed to tremble on the verge of the abyss, when the rustling of a mere leaf was enough to produce in him the terrors of hell. Luther later described these bouts of dread as Anfechtungen, times of testing and fierce assault from the devil.
Luther found relief only through his ‘discovery of the Gospel’, which he made after a long, arduous study of the Scriptures. In the preface to the collection of his Latin writings in 1545, Luther recalled this process: ‘I did not learn my theology all at once, but I had to search deeper for it where my trials and temptations took me ... living, nay rather dying and being damned make a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculation.’ Luther wrestled with the Bible, especially the Psalms and Paul’s letter to the Romans. He stumbled over the phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ in Romans 1:17. This verse brought him no comfort so long as he interpreted the righteousness of God as the exacting justice by which God condemned sinners. By focusing on the atoning work of Christ on the cross, Luther came to believe that the righteousness of God to which Paul referred was the righteousness secured by Christ alone. On the basis of the righteousness secured by Christ, God declared unworthy sinners acceptable in his sight. On the basis of this insight, Luther developed his doctrine of justification by faith alone (per solam fidem).
Luther claimed to have made this major exegetical breakthrough while studying the Bible in the tower of the monastery. His insight into the gracious character of God, he said, was like being born again. Scholars debate the exact date of Luther’s famous ‘Turmerlebnis’ (tower experience), with suggested dates ranging from 1512 to 1519. They were probably two separate developments: an initial breakthrough and conviction of God’s gracious mercy and salvation in Christ, and the later formulation of a mature doctrine of justification, a new standing with God based on the imputation of Christ’s alien righteousness by faith alone. This teaching became the guiding principle of Luther’s thought and the cornerstone of Reformation theology.
As early as 1509, Luther had begun to lecture on Peter Lombard’s Books of Sentences, the standard medieval textbook in theology. At the behest of Staupitz, he completed the requirements for his doctorate in theology in 1512 and was appointed Lectura in Biblia at the University of Wittenberg, succeeding Staupitz himself. Luther was influenced by the prevailing nominalism of the day as well as by the German mystical tradition and currents of humanistic thought. However, it was his regular study of the Bible that led him to question the theology and practices of the medieval Catholic church. In the winter of 1512, Luther began preparation for his lectures on the Psalms (1513–1515), which were followed in turn by those on Romans (1515–1516), Galatians (1516–1517), Hebrews (1517) and Psalms again (1518–1519). He later remarked: ‘In the course of this teaching the papacy slipped away from me.’
Luther’s conflict with the church of Rome was the result of both his biblical studies and his pastoral labours in Wittenberg. Within the space of five years, Luther was catapulted onto the stage of European history. The obscure monk became a famous theologian at the centre of an international movement that would leave the church in the West permanently divided.
On 31 October 1517 Luther posted on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg ninety-five theses protesting against the selling of indulgences and calling for a public debate on this issue. Luther was incensed because members of his own church had purchased indulgences from the Dominican Johann Tetzel. Luther attacked the assumption that forgiveness of sins or release from purgatory could be bought by such a monetary exchange. The sale of indulgences, Luther argued, undermined the sacrament of penance and reinforced a theology of cheap grace.
Using Erasmus’ Greek New Testament of 1516, Luther interpreted poenitentiam agite (‘do penance’) in the original biblical sense of metanoiete, ‘change you mind and heart; be converted’. Thus, in the first of his ninety-five theses, Luther declared: ‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said ‘‘Repent’’, he meant for the entire life to be one of repentance.’ Other theses called into question the treasury of merits, the invocation of the saints, and the power of the papacy. Luther’s call for an academic debate became an ecclesiastical cause célèbre as his ninety-five theses were disseminated far and wide.
The pope sent Cardinal Cajetan to Germany to persuade Luther to recant his teachings, but to no avail. In April 1518 Luther further clarified his views in the Heidelberg Disputation, at which time he also won over Martin Bucer, later the Reformer of Strasbourg. On this occasion Luther challenged certain fundamental assumptions of medieval theology, which he called the theology of glory, in favour of a more Christocentric ‘theology of the cross’.
In July 1519 Luther confronted John Eck at the Leipzig Debate. In this famous exchange Luther set forth the Reformation principle sola scriptura. He aligned himself with certain statements made by John Hus, who had been condemned (unfairly, Luther thought) as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. In the course of the debate, Luther denied both the infallibility of church councils and the primacy of the pope. Only the Holy Scriptures, Luther asserted, could be trusted as the normative rule for Christian belief and church policy.
At first the papacy was slow to react to Luther’s challenge, thinking that the matter was just another quarrel among monks. By 1520, however, Luther’s campaign had become a serious crisis. Luther set forth his ideas with passion and clarity in three famous treatises (1520). In An Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation Luther exploited the rising national sentiment in Germany to demolish the ‘three walls’ that he believed the partisans of the pope had erected against true church reform: first, the claim that church officials were exempt from the authority of civil magistrates; secondly, the elevation of church tradition over Scripture; and, not least, the assertion that papal decrees took precedence over church councils.
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church was published in October 1520. This treatise was a frontal assault on the medieval sacramental system. Luther found two, not seven, sacraments in the Bible. He denounced the mass as an abomination. And, finally, he redefined sacraments as visible signs of God’s holy promises.
On the Freedom of the Christian, Luther’s third great work of the year, further challenged the claims of the papal church system by emphasizing Christian liberty, the priesthood of all believers, the sufficiency of Scripture and the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This treatise also contained the basis of Luther’s ethics: good works are to flow from faith as its fruit. God’s grace is a radically free gift and cannot be earned by any merits of our own.
Luther was excommunicated in the papal bull Exsurge Domine, which he burned publicly along with the corpus of canon law in December 1520. He was then summoned to appear before the Diet of Worms, where he was asked to retract his writings. He refused to do so, claiming that his conscience was captive to the Word of God. Unless he was persuaded by reason and conscience, he said, he would not recant. His famous words, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’, became the watchword of the Reformation.
The 1520s witnessed the consolidation of the Lutheran Reformation, culminating in the famous Augsburg Confession of 1530. Following his defiant stand at the Diet of Worms, Luther had been taken secretly to the Wartburg Castle near Eisenach, where he lived in seclusion for several months under the protection of his territorial prince, Elector Frederick III. He spent his time wisely, however, translating the New Testament into German. His Das Newe Testament Deutsche was published in 1522. His work on the Old Testament took much longer, and his complete translation of the Bible appeared only in 1534. Luther’s translation of the Bible influenced the development of the German language in the same way as the King James Version influenced English.
The year 1525 was pivotal in Luther’s life and career. One of his most substantial theological works, On the Bondage of the Will, was published as a response to Erasmus’s earlier attack on the doctrine of predestination, On the Freedom of the Will (1524). For Erasmus, humans, though fallen, remained free to respond to grace and thus to cooperate in their salvation. Luther, however, saw the human will as enslaved by sin and Satan. We think we are free, he contended, but we only reinforce our bondage by indulging in sin. Grace releases us from this enslaving illusion and leads us into ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’. God wants us to love him freely, but we can do this only when we have been freed from captivity to Satan and self. After this fierce debate, neither Luther nor Erasmus spoke or wrote to one another again. Many humanists who had earlier applauded Luther’s attack on abuses in the church now went their separate way, unable to accept Luther’s radical Augustinian theology.
Also in 1525 many of Luther’s erstwhile followers abandoned his cautious approach to reform in favour of violent revolution (the bloody Peasants’ Revolt) led by Thomas Müntzer and other radicals. One happy note in Luther’s life at this time was his marriage to Katherine von Bora, a runaway nun, who brought stability, order and great joy into Luther’s harried life. Luther and his ‘Katie’ established the tradition of the Protestant parsonage as they presided over a bustling family and numerous student boarders in the remodelled monastery that became their home in Wittenberg.
Luther continued to shape the Reformation through his sermons, letters, hymns, polemical treatises and commentaries. His sermons on Genesis and the Gospel of John circulated widely as models of good Protestant preaching. He himself regarded his 1535 commentary on Galatians (which he called ‘my Katie von Bora’) as his greatest work. It was a ringing affirmation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the ‘article that makes or breaks the church’. In 1539 he published Of the Councils and Churches, which emphasized the catholicity of the Reformation and Protestant commitment to the trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the early church. Many of Luther’s off-the-cuff remarks were recorded by his students and published in several volumes as his Tischreden (Table Talks). Among his several hymns, Ein’ Feste Burg (‘A Mighty Fortress’) is best remembered, as the anthem of the Reformation.
As Luther grew older, his health began to fail. He was beset by numerous ailments, including kidney stones, gout, constipation, urine retention and depression. Near the end of his life, his attacks against his enemies became even more extreme. He excoriated the papacy, which he equated with the Antichrist. He was never reconciled with Zwingli and his followers, whose memorialist doctrine of the Lord’s Supper Luther regarded as a betrayal of the Christian faith. Most disturbing of all in the light of recent history were Luther’s virulent attacks against the Jews, whose refusal to embrace the gospel led him to call for their banishment from Germany. Although Luther’s disdain for the Jews had little in common with Hitler’s racist policies, it is not surprising that the Nazis cited Luther as a precursor of their own antisemitism.
Luther’s legacy does not lie primarily in the saintliness of his life. His faults were many; his vices were sometimes more visible than his virtues. Yet despite his foibles and sins and blindspots, he was able to conceive with remarkable clarity his belief in the paradoxical character of the human condition and the great possibility of human redemption through Jesus Christ. Luther’s true legacy is his belief in the gracious character of God. ‘What else was Luther,’ asked Karl Barth, ‘than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?’
Bibliography
R. H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: 1990); M. Brecht, Martin Luther, trans. J. L. Shaaf, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: 1985–1992); G. Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought, trans. R. A. Wilson (Philadelphia: 1970); T. George, Theology of the Reformers (Leicester: 1990); H. A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. E. Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: 1986); D. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Bloomington: 1986).
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