Martin Luther

Martin Luther was born on November 10, 1483, at Eisleben in Saxony, the son of a copper miner who worked his way up to leasing smelters. His father wanted a lawyer, and Luther enrolled in law at Erfurt in 1505. That July he was caught in a thunderstorm on the road near Stotternheim, thrown down by a lightning strike close by, and cried out, "Help me, Saint Anne, and I will become a monk." Two weeks later he entered the Augustinian friary at Erfurt. His father did not forgive him for years. He was a ferocious monk — fasting, confessing for hours at a stretch, punishing his body — and it did not help. He said afterward that he did not love God but hated him, because he knew God only as the righteous judge who punishes sinners, and he could not get clean. His superior Johann von Staupitz pushed him into study and then into the chair of biblical theology at the new University of Wittenberg, where he lectured on the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians. Somewhere in those lectures a sentence broke open. Romans 1:17 — "the righteous shall live by faith." Luther came to see that the righteousness of God in that verse is not the standard by which God condemns but the gift by which he saves, received by faith. He wrote that he felt himself born again and to have gone through open doors into paradise. On October 31, 1517, he sent ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences to his archbishop, and by long tradition posted them on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, which served the university as a notice board. They were an invitation to academic debate. Printers turned them into a European event within weeks. Rome moved slowly and then hard. Debate with Cajetan at Augsburg in 1518; with Johann Eck at Leipzig in 1519, where Luther admitted that church councils could err; three explosive books in 1520; a papal bull threatening excommunication, which Luther burned publicly; excommunication in January 1521. In April 1521 he stood before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms and was shown a table of his books. Asked to recant, he requested a day to think, then answered that unless he were convicted by Scripture and plain reason, his conscience was captive to the Word of God, and he could not and would not recant, because to act against conscience is neither safe nor right. Declared an outlaw, he was kidnapped for his own safety by his prince's men and hidden in the Wartburg castle. There, in about eleven weeks, he translated the New Testament into German from Erasmus's Greek text. The complete Bible followed in 1534. It did for German what the King James Version later did for English. In 1525 he married Katharina von Bora, a runaway nun, and made the parsonage a Protestant institution. They had six children. He wrote catechisms for parents to teach at home, a German order of service, and hymns — "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" among them. He was also capable of terrible things. He urged the princes to crush the peasants' revolt of 1525 without mercy, and late in life he wrote savagely against the Jews — writings later regimes seized on, and which Lutheran churches have since publicly repudiated. He died at Eisleben, the town where he was born, on February 18, 1546, having travelled there to settle a quarrel between two counts. Sources: Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther; Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian and the 1545 preface to his Latin writings; Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7.