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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Reformation
Martin Luther
1483–1546German
The Wittenberg monk who could not get clean, found in Romans that God's righteousness is a gift, and would not take back a word of it.
Summary
- Lived 1483–1546, German.
- Stood in The Reformation (1500–1600).
- Hangs on The Reformers and The Hymn Writers.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived6 moments · 1500–1600
- 1516Erasmus prints the Greek New TestamentThe Dutch scholar Erasmus published the New Testament in its original Greek, with his own fresh Latin beside it, at Basel. For the first time a parish priest could check the church's Latin Bible against the words the apostles wrote. Luther and Tyndale both worked from it.
- 1521–1522The Wartburg: a New Testament in GermanFriends staged a kidnapping and hid Luther in the Wartburg castle, where he grew a beard, called himself Knight George, and translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek in about eleven weeks. It was printed in September 1522 and sold out almost at once. He wrote that he wanted the mother in the house and the common man in the market to hear it in their own speech.
- 1525–1526Tyndale's English New TestamentRefused permission to translate in England, William Tyndale printed abroad. The Cologne run was raided mid-printing in 1525; he escaped upriver with the sheets and finished the job at Worms, and copies reached England in 1526 hidden in bales of cloth and sacks of flour. By the account Edward Hall's chronicle and then Foxe preserved, bishops bought up the stock to burn it, and the money the bishops paid financed the next edition.
- Oct 1529Marburg: the reformers fail to agreePhilip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the movement. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and broke on the fifteenth, what happens in the Lord's Supper. Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table and would not be moved; Zwingli reportedly offered his hand in fellowship and Luther declined it. The Protestant world stayed divided.
- 1534Luther's complete German BibleWith a team of Hebrew and Greek scholars, Luther finished the whole Bible in German, printed at Wittenberg by Hans Lufft. He hunted words in butcher shops and marketplaces to get the sound right. His Bible carried the Saxon chancery German he wrote in into every corner of the language, one of the strongest single forces in the making of standard written German, though not its sole origin.
- March 1536Calvin's *Institutes*, first editionA twenty-six-year-old French exile published a small six-chapter handbook at Basel explaining the faith to a hostile king. He kept enlarging it for the next twenty-three years; the 1559 edition runs to four books and eighty chapters. That same year he was pressed into staying in Geneva against his own wishes.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Martin Luther at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Sent ninety-five theses against indulgences to his archbishop, and later, before the emperor, would not take back a word of what he had written.
Hangs on The Reformers: The men who put the Bible back into the people's hands and the church back under it. Hangs on The Hymn Writers: The poets who taught the church to sing what it believes.
Standing beside himThe Reformation · 19 on this stretch of wall
Argued that Scripture belonged to the people in their own tongue, and set in motion the English Bible that carries his name, made by his Oxford circle a century and a half before Tyndale. They burned his bones, and the river carried the ashes to the sea.
Preached Christ as head of the church in Prague's own language, and sang at the stake in 1415.
Finished what Tyndale could not and printed the first complete English Bible from a press, and four years later put the Great Bible in every parish church.
Put the church's prayers into plain English, then took back his own recantation and burned for it.
Translated the New Testament from the Greek so a plough-boy could read it, and paid for it at a stake in 1536.
Left a safe parish to shepherd hunted believers, and taught them to follow Christ without ever picking up a sword.