Martin Luther

1483–1546

He is one of the most influential men our world has known. His words would thrust Europe into a movement that would reshape the West, redirect Christian history, and ripple a renewed light into the uttermost parts of the world. His greatest contribution has nothing to do with him and has everything to do with Christ. He was a mere instrument in the hands of the Almighty to recover an almost forgotten light—the Gospel. His name was Martin Luther.

Luther was born of hard-working peasant stock. He was destined for the study of law, with high expectations from his demanding father. Providence redirected his course, turning him to the monastery. From childhood, he proved to be a troubled soul with an exceedingly tender conscience. Peace with God became his consuming quest of life. Striving for solace, he turned to the source known to be available in his medieval world. Rather than finding relief for his soul, his spiritual burden increased. After many struggles, Providence graciously led him to the Sacred Scripture. There, as opposed to all the religion in the world, he found satisfaction for his soul. God opened the eyes of his heart to behold the love and grace of Christ toward sinners in the Gospel. He came to an understanding of God, faith, the Gospel, and the church that had largely been lost for nearly a millennium. His newfound convictions in the old and unimproved truth soon collided with the church that he loved. Power, control, pride, and politics all conspired to oppose Luther's efforts to correct the corruptions of the church. His convictions that came from the Scripture cast him into conflict with the Pope and through dreadful circumstances eventuated in his being excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, of which he was an ordained friar and professor of theology. He was accused of heresy, subjected to magisterial trials, church-wide censorship, and even threatened with execution, yet through it all God sustained him and Luther stood firm.

His world was divided about him. One Catholic writer said that Luther was a "demon in the appearance of a man." Others saw in his efforts a true work of God. One, first questioning Luther's theology, later insisted, "He alone is right!"

Though Luther was no more than a man saved solely by God in His grace through Christ in the Gospel, we are deeply grateful to God for His gift to the world in this audacious man who loved truth and strove to make it known.

From Eisleben to the Cloister

Martin Luther was born at Eisleben in Saxony on November 10, 1483, the son of Hans Luther, a miner who later smelted ore at Mansfeld. He was schooled at Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach, and entered the University of Erfurt, where his father meant him to become a lawyer.1 Returning to Erfurt in the summer of 1505, he was caught in a violent storm. “The thunder bursts, and strikes close by his side,” writes Merle d’Aubigné, and Luther, “wrapt in agony, and in the terror of death,” vowed to give himself entirely to God.2 To his father’s fury he entered the house of the Augustinian friars at Erfurt, and in 1507 he was ordained a priest.1

No monk was ever more earnest. Years later he told Duke George of Saxony, “If ever monk had got to heaven by monkery, I had been that monk.” Vigils, prayers, and fasting brought him no peace.3 His superior, Johann von Staupitz, pointed him elsewhere: “Look to the wounds of Jesus Christ, to the blood which he has shed for thee; then thou shalt see the grace of God.”4

The Gate of Paradise

In 1508 Staupitz brought him to the new University of Wittenberg. A journey to Rome on the business of his order disillusioned him with the holy city, and in 1512 he became a doctor of theology, lecturing on the Scriptures and preaching in the town church.1 Over the Epistle to the Romans he wrestled with the words of Habakkuk, “The just shall live by faith.”4 At last he understood that the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel is the righteousness by which a merciful God justifies us through faith. Looking back near the end of his life he wrote:

As I had previously, with all my heart, hated the words, ‘Justice of God,’ so from that time I began to esteem and love them, as words most sweet and most consoling. In truth, these words were to me the true gate of paradise.5 Martin Lutherpreface to his Latin works (1545)

The Ninety-Five Theses

The doctrine of grace that filled his lectures could not live beside the traffic in pardons that Johann Tetzel was preaching just over the border of Electoral Saxony.1 “On the 31st of October, 1517, Luther ... walks boldly towards the church to which the superstitious crowds of pilgrims were repairing, and puts up on the door of this church ninety-five Theses or propositions against the doctrine of indulgences.”6 Printed copies were soon circulating all over Germany. They were, as one writer put it, “ninety-five sledge-hammer strokes delivered at the grossest ecclesiastical abuse of the age.”1 In October 1518 he stood before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, would not yield, and appealed to a general council.1 The theses themselves may be read in full on our page, Ninety-Five Theses.

Leipzig and the Break with Rome

At Leipzig in July 1519, Johann Eck drove Luther to the question of the pope’s authority and tried to brand him a follower of the condemned Jan Hus. After the midday adjournment Luther rose and said, “Certain of the tenets of John Huss and the Bohemians are perfectly orthodox.… Whether Wickliffe or Huss has said so I care not.... It is the truth.”7 In 1520 he took his case to the nation with the Address to the German Nobility and The Babylonish Captivity of the Church, and set out the life of faith in On the Freedom of a Christian.8 When Leo X’s bull condemned him, he burned it with the papal law books outside the Elster Gate at Wittenberg on December 10, 1520.1 “I burnt the bull in great trembling,” he wrote to Staupitz, “but now I experience more joy from it than from any action of my life.”9

Here I Stand

Summoned before the young emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, Luther was shown his books and ordered to recant. On the evening of April 18, 1521, he gave his answer:1

If, then, I am not disproved by passages of Scripture, or by clear arguments; if I am not convinced by the very passages which I have quoted, and so bound in conscience to submit to the word of God, I neither can nor will retract any thing, for it is not safe for a Christian to speak against his conscience.10 Martin Lutherat the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521

Then, looking around on the assembly that held his life in its hands, he added, “Here I am,” and, “I cannot do otherwise: God help me. Amen.”10

The Wartburg and the German Bible

On the road home he vanished from public view, hidden by the men of Frederick the Wise for ten months in the Wartburg castle. There, working from the Greek of Erasmus’s New Testament, he gave Germany its New Testament in the language of “the common man.”1 In March 1522 he left the Wartburg to steady the work in Wittenberg, and on September 21, 1522, the New Testament appeared there in three thousand copies, with no name of man on its title page.1, 11

Marriage and the Later Years

On June 13, 1525, he married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, and the couple made their home in the old Augustinian cloister at Wittenberg.1 The same year he answered Erasmus with The Bondage of the Will. In 1529 he met Zwingli at Marburg and could not agree with him on the Lord’s Supper.1 In 1530 the Lutheran princes presented the Augsburg Confession, drawn up chiefly by Philip Melanchthon from material Luther had supplied.12 He lectured, preached, wrote, and revised his Bible to the end, though sickness wore him down from 1537 onward.1

In the winter of 1546, “old, spent, worn, weary, and cold, with but one eye to see with,” he traveled to Eisleben, his birthplace, to settle a dispute among the counts of Mansfeld.1 As he lay dying, his friend Justus Jonas asked, “Reverend Father, will you stand by Christ and the doctrine you have preached?” He roused himself to answer, “Yes.”12 He died early on February 18, 1546, and was buried in the Castle Church at Wittenberg.1 A scrap of paper found afterward held his last written words: “We are beggars. That is true.”13

Cautions

M’Crie’s sketch places the Leipzig Disputation in 1520 and the theses in 1516; Merle d’Aubigné gives the correct dates of 1519 and October 31, 1517. M’Crie also judges, fairly, that Luther cannot be held altogether free of responsibility for the violence of the Peasants’ War and its suppression.1, 7 Roland Bainton, his sympathetic biographer, is frank about the harsh tracts against the Jews that Luther wrote in his last years and wishes he had died before writing them. They should not be passed over or excused.14

Luther’s major contributions include:

  • Justification by faith alone (sola fide)
  • A high view of Holy Scripture (sola scriptura)
  • Salvation by grace alone (sola gratia)
  • A high view of God as specifically sovereign
  • Christ as head of the church (solus Christus)
  • The theology of the Cross
  • Emphasis on the Gospel in all ministry (sola gratia)
  • The authority of Scripture over the church and tradition (sola scriptura)

Martin Luther is simply one of the most significant figures in western history. God raised him up from peasant stock to be used as the leading voice crying out across the land to return to Christ in the Gospel of justification by faith alone through the Scripture. He was key in the magisterial Reformation. It was the event of Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the Wittenberg church door that today is recognized as the official start of the Protestant Reformation. His stance for the Word of God at the Diet of Worms (1521) proved to be a major milestone in the Reformation and would continue to inspire many other reformers after him.

Timeline   Ninety-Five Theses   On the Freedom of a Christian

Sources

  1. C. G. M’Crie, ed., Beza’s “Icones”: Contemporary Portraits of Reformers of Religion and Letters (London: Religious Tract Society, 1906), “Martin Luther.” The biographical sketches in this edition are the editor’s; the portraits and epigrams are Beza’s. ↩
  2. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 2, ch. 2, on the thunderstorm near Erfurt. ↩
  3. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 2, ch. 3, quoting Luther to Duke George of Saxony. ↩
  4. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 2, ch. 4, on Staupitz and on Luther’s study of Romans. ↩
  5. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 2, ch. 6, quoting Luther’s preface to his Latin works (1545). ↩
  6. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 3, ch. 5, on October 31, 1517. ↩
  7. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 2 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 5, ch. 5, on the Leipzig Disputation of July 1519. ↩
  8. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 2 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 6, ch. 3, and ch. 6, on the Address to the German Nobility and The Babylonish Captivity of the Church. ↩
  9. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 2 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 6, ch. 10, quoting Luther to Staupitz. ↩
  10. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 2 (Glasgow: William Collins), bk. 7, ch. 8, “Here I am. I cannot do otherwise”. ↩
  11. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, trans. H. White, vol. 3, bk. 9, ch. 9, on the September Testament. ↩
  12. Joel R. Beeke and Diana Kleyn, Reformation Heroes (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2007), chap. 5, “Martin Luther,” on Luther’s death, and chap. 6, “Philip Melanchthon,” on the Augsburg Confession. Summarized, with Luther’s own words as quoted there. ↩
  13. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. on Luther, quoting the note found after Luther’s death. ↩
  14. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon, 1950), chap. 22, “The Measure of the Man.” Summarized. ↩