Martin Luther
God’s Volcano: The Monk Who Found the Gate of Paradise
e 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. After many struggles, Providence graciously led him to the Sacred Scripture. God opened the eyes of his heart to behold the love and grace of Christ toward sinners in the Gospel.
His newfound convictions in the old and unimproved truth soon collided with the church that he loved. 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.1
His world was divided about him. At Worms he was condemned as a “demon in the appearance of a man.” One man, first questioning Luther’s theology, later insisted, “He alone is right!”2 Oswald Spengler has insightfully reasoned that “Luther fought the church not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little.”3 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.
The Child
Martin Luther was born to Hans and Margarete in the small German town of Eisleben on November 10, 1483. They promptly baptized their firstborn the next day, which happened to be St. Martin’s Day according to the Roman Catholic calendar. Accordingly, his parents named him Martin. It is said that Hans Luther prayed aloud at the bedside of his newborn son, asking the Lord to grant that Martin would be known for learning and piety.4
The family was relatively poor, from peasant stock, though hard working. Hans sought to advance the family in the booming business of copper mining, and his relentless labors later enabled him to send his brilliant son to some of the finest schools available. Martin was educated at Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach. As a poor scholar he sometimes begged door to door for food and sang carols for a meal, until a kind and generous lady, Ursula Cotta, welcomed him into her house. The Cotta family cheerfully met many of his needs.5
Martin proved to be both exceptionally bright and unusually sensitive in conscience. He took religion very seriously even at a young age. As the oldest son, it fell to him to advance the family in society. But Martin’s easily troubled conscience and deep interest in religious devotion did not complement his parents’ intentions for him.6
The Lawyer
At eighteen years old, Martin was sent to one of the oldest and most famous universities in Germany, the University of Erfurt. He was to study law, and some say this was one of the best schools of jurisprudence in all of Europe. But Erfurt was a center of religion as well, with a grand cathedral and more than one hundred buildings devoted to professional religion. There is no wonder why Erfurt had earned the title “Little Rome.” By 1502 he had earned his bachelor’s degree, followed by his master’s degree just three years later.7
Luther was brilliant, but he did not find relief in his studies. His great sensitivity to sin owed much to his great study of the law.8 As Roland Bainton observes, “The entire training of home, school, and university was designed to instill fear of God and reverence for the Church.”9
The Thunderstorm and the Vow
Providence would redirect Luther’s steps away from the study and application of man’s justice to that of God’s. In the summer of 1505, after an unexpected leave from the university to visit his parents, Luther was overtaken by a violent thunderstorm. He was nearing his return to Erfurt on July 2 when “a bolt of lightning struck the ground near him. ‘Help me, St. Anne!’ Luther screamed. ‘I will become a monk!’”10 St. Anne, the mother of Mary, was the patron saint of miners. He took the storm to be the judgment of God.
On July 17, 1505, he entered the monastery of the Observant Augustinian Friars at Erfurt. Bainton captures the significance well:
The meaning of Luther’s entry into the monastery is simply this, that the great revolt against the medieval Church arose from a desperate attempt to follow the way by her prescribed. … To the monastery he went like others, and even more than others, in order to make his peace with God.11 Roland H. BaintonHere I Stand
Hans was furious with Martin for abandoning such an excellent education and the opportunities it held out for fame and wealth. He felt that Martin was breaking the fifth commandment: “Honor thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12).12
The Monk
A Painfully Devout Brother
Luther was painfully devout as a monk. He would later confess that if ever a monk could get to heaven by monkery, he would have.
I was a good monk, and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I. All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.13 Martin Luther
Here is the bankruptcy of self-righteousness. The harder Luther labored, the less peace he found.
The Terror of the Holy
In observation of his exceptional devoutness, his superior selected him for the priesthood. He was ordained in the spring of 1507 and said his first mass on May 2.14 Where we might have expected joy, Luther found terror. He would now, for the first time, dare to serve as a mediator between a holy God and sinful man. “The occasion was always an ordeal,” Bainton explains, “because the mass is the focal point of the Church’s means of grace.”15 When he came to the words, “We offer unto thee, the living, the true, the eternal God,” the weight was too great. Luther later recounted:
At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, “With what tongue shall I address such Majesty … ? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? … For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal and the true God.”16 Martin Lutheron his first mass, 1507
“Look to the Wounds of Christ”
His confessor, Johann von Staupitz, vicar general of the German Augustinians, pointed him away from himself: “Look to the wounds of Jesus Christ, to the blood which he has shed for thee; then thou shalt see the grace of God.”17 Luther did not yet understand, but the counsel lodged in him like a seed.
Rome and Wittenberg
In late 1510 he made the long journey to Rome on business for his order and was struck by what he perceived as a superficial appropriation of the faith in the penance at the shrines and the selling of indulgences.18 In 1511 he was transferred to Wittenberg. Staupitz directed him to the study of Scripture, and on October 19, 1512, Luther was graduated Doctor of Theology.19 As professor of Bible he lectured from 1513 on the Psalms, Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews. The professor of the Bible was about to be mastered by the Bible.
The Gate of Paradise
Luther’s trouble was a single phrase in Romans 1:17, “the righteousness of God.” He had been taught to understand it as the justice by which God punishes the unrighteous sinner. Though he lived as a monk without reproach, he confessed, “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” Yet he “beat importunately upon Paul at that place” until the light dawned. Near the end of his life he recalled it:
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. … Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. … Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.20 Martin Lutherpreface to his Latin writings, 1545
Here is the heart of the Reformation. The righteousness of God is not our own, impossible for us to attain, but God’s gift to the believer, bestowed by God’s verdict upon him. It is not imparted but imputed; not infused but declared. And so the believer is simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and a sinner.21 Luther would call justification by faith alone “the summary of all Christian doctrine.”22
The Ninety-Five Theses
The gospel that filled Luther’s lectures could not live beside the traffic in pardons. In 1517 the Dominican Johann Tetzel was preaching indulgences just over the border.
Luther did not set out to become a Reformer. He did not formulate a plan to revolt or to start anything new.23 On October 31, 1517, the day before the Feast of All Saints, he posted Latin theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, which served as the university’s bulletin board, calling for a “disputation on the power and efficacy of indulgences out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light.”24 Rome had polluted the gospel by monetizing the remission of sin. Luther wrote not to seek glory nor the praise of men, but to call the church back to Scripture. The truths he declared were as fire kindled in dry stubble, spreading swiftly, for the Lord’s hand was in it.25 The next summer he explained what the theses were really about, the sufficiency of Christ: “All the righteousness of Christ becomes ours. … He spreads his cloak and covers us.”26 The theses themselves may be read on our Ninety-Five Theses page.
Heidelberg, Augsburg, and Leipzig
In April 1518 Staupitz invited Luther to present his theology to the Augustinian chapter at Heidelberg. There he set the “theology of the cross,” which sees God revealed in the suffering of Christ, against the “theology of glory,” which climbs to God by reason and works. Later Luther would put it in four words: “Crux sola est nostra theologia,” the cross alone is our theology.27
In October 1518 the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan examined him at Augsburg, expecting a prompt submission. Luther would not recant.28 The next summer, from June 27 to July 16, 1519, Johann Eck debated him at Leipzig and tried to brand him a follower of the condemned Jan Hus. During a break, Luther read what Hus had actually said and found some of his teachings “Christian and evangelical.” He went on to say that councils could err and that only Scripture is infallible.29 Eck knew church tradition better than Luther; Luther knew the Bible better than Eck.30
The Pen and the Fire
In 1520 Luther took up his pen. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation sought to demolish the “three walls” behind which Rome sheltered. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church attacked the sacramental system, and On the Freedom of a Christian set out the life of faith.31
Rome answered with the bull Exsurge Domine. Leo X called Luther a wild boar loose in the Lord’s vineyard. The bull charged him with forty-one heresies, ordered his books burned, and gave him sixty days to submit.32 On December 10, 1520, before the Elster Gate of Wittenberg, Luther cast the bull and the papal decretals into the fire with the words, “Because thou hast troubled the saints of the Lord, let eternal fire consume thee.” It was, as J. H. Kurtz says, “the utter renunciation of the pope and his church.”33 On January 3, 1521, he was excommunicated.34
Here I Stand
The young emperor Charles V summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms under a safe conduct. Luther answered, “Even if there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the rooftops, I must go.”35 On April 17, 1521, he was shown his books and asked whether he would recant. He asked for a day. That night he prayed, “O God! O God! O thou, my God! assist me against all the wisdom of the world! … for it is not my work, but Thine.”36 The next evening, April 18, he gave his answer:
Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.37 Martin Lutherat the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521
The earliest printed version adds, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” His stand is a landmark for the recovery of the Gospel.38 The edict that followed, dated May 26, 1521, made him an outlaw. It ordered that he be “apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic.”39
The Wartburg and the German Bible
On the road home, Luther vanished. Seized by the men of his own prince, Frederick the Wise, he was carried to the Wartburg castle above Eisenach and lived there in disguise as Junker Jörg, Knight George, for ten months.40 He also translated the entire New Testament from Erasmus’s Greek into German in about eleven weeks. The edict meant to eradicate his books from the memory of man produced the most consequential book he ever made.41
The “September Testament” appeared in an edition of about three thousand copies in September 1522.42 He deliberately wrote the German of the marketplace rather than of the chancery, listening for how the mother in the home, the children in the street, and the common man in the market actually spoke. The complete Bible followed in 1534, and Luther revised it until his death. No book did more to make one written German out of many dialects.43
The Word Did It All
In early March 1522 Luther left the Wartburg and returned to Wittenberg at the risk of his life. In his absence, reform had turned to riot. The Zwickau prophets claimed direct revelations.44 His Invocavit Sermons quickly quelled the agitation. He explained his own part that same year:
I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.45 Martin Luther1522
The Reformation was God’s work, not Luther’s. See Philip Melanchthon and Nicholas von Amsdorf.
Katie, the Household, and the Hymns
On June 13, 1525, at the age of forty-one, Luther married Katharina von Bora, a twenty-six-year-old former nun who had escaped from her convent in 1523.46 The union proved happy and established the model of the Protestant parsonage. The Luthers’ hearts were broken twice, when they lost Elizabeth at only eight months and Magdalena at thirteen years. As Magdalena lay upon her deathbed in September 1542, her father asked, “Magdalena, my little girl, you would like to stay with your father here, and you would be glad to go to your Father in heaven?” “Yes, dear Father,” she answered.47
Luther also gave the church back its voice. In 1524 he published the first evangelical hymnal, the “Hymnal of Eight,” four of whose hymns were his own.48 His “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” speaks of the “one little word” that fells the devil, and Luther knew which word he meant: “When he hears a Christian speaking the one word ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ with true faith, he falls down as if struck by a thunderclap.”49
Bondage, Marburg, and Augsburg
In 1525 Luther answered Erasmus with The Bondage of the Will, a declaration of God’s sovereign grace that he counted among his best works.50 In 1529 he wrote his Large and Small catechisms.
That same year Philip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together at Marburg. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles, parting only on the presence of Christ in the Supper.51 Sad to say, Luther refused Zwingli’s hand as a brother in Christ.52 In 1530, with Luther still an outlaw, Philip Melanchthon presented the faith Luther preached at the Diet of Augsburg in the Augsburg Confession.53
Faithful to the End
Sickness wore Luther down in his later years, and in 1537 and again in 1541 his friends feared he would die.54 Finishing his long lectures on Genesis in November 1545, he said, “I can do no more. I am weak. Pray God for me, that he may give me a blissful end.”55 In January 1546 he traveled to Eisleben, his birthplace, to settle a dispute among the counts of Mansfeld.56
As he lay dying, his friend Justus Jonas asked him, “Reverend Father, will you stand by Christ and the doctrine you have preached?” The dying Reformer roused himself to answer, “Yes.” His last words were, “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” He died early on February 18, 1546, and his body was carried to Wittenberg and buried in the Castle Church.57 A slip of paper found afterward carried his last written words, half in German and half in Latin: “We are beggars. That is true.”58 He had nothing to bring. Christ had given him everything.
Cautions
An honest steward of history will not hide Luther’s faults. When the peasants rose in 1524–1525, he first showed sympathy for their grievances but then urged the princes to crush the revolt in harsh terms, and the war may have cost a hundred thousand lives.59 In his last years he wrote violent tracts against the Jews, calling for their expulsion, and in one case he advised a secret bigamy for Philip of Hesse.60 These should not be passed over or excused.
A few popular details also need care in the pulpit. Whether Luther nailed the theses to the door has been questioned since 1961, when Erwin Iserloh argued that they were “not nailed; they were mailed.”61 The words “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” come from the earliest printed account rather than the official record.62 Luther’s own recollection places his breakthrough in 1519, though many date it earlier.
The Legacy of Luther
The best summary of his Reformation discovery may be just three words: fides ex auditu, “faith out of hearing.”63 The nature of the Word is to be heard.
His major contributions include justification by faith alone (sola fide), the authority of Scripture over the church and tradition (sola Scriptura), salvation by grace alone (sola gratia), Christ as the only mediator (solus Christus), the theology of the cross, and the Bible, catechism, and hymnbook in the language of the people.
Martin Luther is simply one of the most significant figures in Western history. God raised him up from peasant stock to be the leading voice crying out across the land to return to Christ in the Gospel of justification by faith alone through the Scripture. But we do not study him to venerate a man. The Reformation is properly God’s work, and its history must live in our hearts, not merely in our books.64 Knowledge is a means to an end, and the greatest end for which we must strive is heart conviction for God and a thirst for the Lord Jesus Christ.
Reformers Timeline Ninety-Five Theses On the Freedom of a Christian
