Martin Luther

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms on the 17th of April 1521, a German priest summoned to answer for his own books. The Emperor Charles V presided. His writings lay spread across a table, and Luther was asked a plain question: were these his, and would he take them back. He confirmed he wrote them, then asked for a day to think. The next day he refused to recant, saying his conscience was captive to the Word of God. Within weeks the Emperor declared him an outlaw, banned his literature, and made it a crime to give him food or shelter. The edict allowed anyone to kill him without legal consequence. How does one friar, born in Eisleben in 1483, end up condemned by both a pope and an emperor and still walk free? What did Luther teach that frightened the powerful so deeply? And why does his name carry both a Bible translation that shaped a language and pamphlets that historians link to centuries of hatred? The answers run from a thunderstorm to a marriage smuggled in herring barrels.

• 2. The Vow In The Storm

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  On the 2nd of July 1505, a lightning bolt struck near Luther during a thunderstorm as he returned to university on horseback. Terrified of death and divine judgement, he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!" He treated that cry as a vow he could never break. There is a rival account, told by Melanchthon, that the shock came instead from the sudden death of a university friend, Hieronimus Buntz, blamed variously on lightning, plague, pleurisy, or even a duel. Whatever the trigger, Luther withdrew from the University of Erfurt, sold his books, and entered St Augustine's Monastery on the 17th of July 1505. His father Hans had wanted a lawyer. Hans was furious, seeing the choice as a waste of his eldest son's education. The years that followed were not peace but despair. Luther fasted, prayed for long hours, went on pilgrimage, and confessed often, yet he wrote, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul." His superior, Johann von Staupitz, decided the cure was work, and ordered him into an academic career. On the 3rd of April 1507, Jerome Schultz, Bishop of Brandenburg, ordained Luther in Erfurt Cathedral, the first step toward the lecture hall at the University of Wittenberg.

• 3. Justification By Faith Alone

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  From 1510 to 1520, Luther lectured on the Psalms and on Hebrews, Romans, and Galatians, reading alongside Erasmus' new annotated translation. There he reached the conviction that would organise everything else he taught: that a sinner is declared righteous by faith alone, through God's grace, as a free gift. He called it "the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of all godliness." Good works, he held, were a necessary fruit of living faith, not the price of salvation. Faith itself was a gift from God, and being justified felt to him "as though I had been born again." He pressed this idea to its sharpest edge in his 1525 work On the Bondage of the Will, written against Erasmus' On Free Will of 1524. Where the Catholic and Orthodox traditions taught that the believer's righteous acts cooperate with grace, Luther argued that righteousness comes entirely from outside the believer. It is the righteousness of Christ, he said, credited to Christians through faith rather than poured into them. This single conviction reshaped his view of the church itself. If faith alone justifies, then no priesthood was needed as a go-between, and Luther came to consider every baptised Christian a member of a holy priesthood.

• 4. Indulgences And The Ninety-Five Theses

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  In 1516, the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel was sent to Germany to sell indulgences to fund the rebuilding of St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Behind the campaign stood Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, deeply in debt and obliged to contribute ten thousand ducats toward the basilica, with half the proceeds set aside to pay his own fees. Luther objected to a saying attributed to Tetzel: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Forgiveness, he insisted, was God's alone to grant, so anyone claiming an indulgence wiped away all punishment and secured salvation was simply in error. On the 31st of October 1517, Luther wrote to Archbishop Albert protesting the sale and enclosed his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, soon known as the Ninety-five Theses. Hans Hillerbrand writes that Luther meant a scholarly objection, not a confrontation, giving the work a "searching, rather than doctrinaire" tone. Yet challenge ran underneath, as in Thesis 86, which asks why the pope, "whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus," builds St Peter's "with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money." The famous image of Luther nailing the theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg is disputed. Scholars including Walter Krämer and Gerhard Ritter doubt it, while the historian Roland H. Bainton holds it true. What is certain is the spread. Friends translated the Latin into German in January 1518, and within two weeks copies had reached across Germany, with his writings touching France, England, and Italy by 1519.

• 5. The Breach With Rome

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  Over three years Pope Leo X sent a series of theologians and envoys against Luther, and each encounter hardened his anti-papal theology rather than softening it. In October 1518 at Augsburg, Cardinal Cajetan questioned him over three days, and the hearings collapsed into a shouting match. "His Holiness abuses Scripture," Luther retorted. "I deny that he is above Scripture." Cajetan had been instructed to arrest him if he would not recant, but with help from the Carmelite friar Christoph Langenmantel, Luther slipped out of the city at night. In June and July 1519, the theologian Johann Eck staged a disputation at Leipzig and drew Luther into his boldest claim yet: that neither popes nor church councils were infallible, since popes hold no exclusive right to interpret scripture. For this Eck branded him a new Jan Hus, the Czech reformer burned at the stake in 1415. On the 15th of June 1520, the papal bull Exsurge Domine gave Luther sixty days to recant forty-one sentences drawn from his writings. His answer was public defiance. On the 10th of December 1520 he set fire to the bull and the decretals in Wittenberg. The pope excommunicated him on the 3rd of January 1521 in the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem. That excommunication was never lifted, even after the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church reached a common understanding of justification by grace through faith in 1999.

• 6. Wartburg And The German Bible

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  After the Diet of Worms condemned him, Luther vanished, and the disappearance was theatre. His protector Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, had him intercepted in the forest near Wittenberg by masked horsemen posing as robbers, who carried him to Wartburg Castle at Eisenach. Luther called the place "my Patmos." There he translated the New Testament from Greek into German and poured out doctrinal and polemical writings, including a work assuring monks and nuns they could break their vows without sin. He completed the New Testament translation, published in 1522, and he and his collaborators finished the Old Testament in 1534, when the whole Bible appeared. Others had translated the Bible into German before him, among them the Mentelin Bible of 1456 and the Koberger Bible of 1484. Luther's stood apart because he wrote in the German of the Saxon chancellery, intelligible to northern and southern Germans alike, aiming for vigorous, direct language so everyday people could read it "without hindrance." Furnished with his notes and prefaces and with woodcuts by Lucas Cranach carrying anti-papal imagery, the Luther Bible spread his doctrine across Germany. It fostered a standard version of the German language and influenced other vernacular translations, including the Tyndale Bible, a precursor of the King James Bible. Of all his output he prized this least vainly and most honestly, writing that he acknowledged none of his books as truly his own, "except perhaps the Bondage of the Will and the Catechism."

• 7. Marriage And A New Church

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  Katharina von Bora was one of twelve nuns Luther helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April 1523, smuggled out in herring barrels. Two years later, on the 13th of June 1525, he married her, with Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Philipp Melanchthon, and Lucas Cranach the Elder among the witnesses; Bugenhagen married them that same evening. She was 26 and Luther was 41. The decision startled many, including Melanchthon, who called it reckless, and it came from a man who had written in November 1524, "I shall never take a wife, as I feel at present." The couple moved into a former monastery, the Black Cloister, a wedding present from Elector John the Steadfast, and Katharina bore six children while farming and taking in boarders to make ends meet. Their daughter Magdalene died in Luther's arms in 1542. He wrote to Michael Stiefel that his Katie pleased him so well he would not exchange his poverty "for the riches of Croesus." His wedding set the seal of approval on clerical marriage. While building a household, Luther was also building an institution. From 1525 to 1529 he set up a supervisory church body, wrote a new order of worship, and produced two catechisms. The Large Catechism guided pastors, the Small Catechism was meant for the people to memorise, covering the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, baptism, and the Lord's Supper. He wanted the basics understood, not learned by rote "the way monkeys do it." The Small Catechism remains in use today.

• 8. The Darkest Pages

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  In 1523 Luther urged kindness toward Jews in That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, hoping to convert them. When conversion failed, his bitterness grew, and twenty years later it turned to fury. In 1543, three years before his death, he published On the Jews and Their Lies, a treatise of some sixty thousand words, alongside On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ. He called the Jews "the devil's people" and demanded a "sharp mercy" against them. He advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying prayerbooks, forbidding rabbis to preach, seizing property and money, and forcing Jews into labour or expulsion. In Robert Michael's reading, Luther's words "We are at fault in not slaying them" amounted to a sanction for murder. He did not advocate killing Jews outright, but some historians contend his rhetoric encouraged antisemitism in Germany and, centuries later, the emergence of the Nazi Party. The Jewish spokesman Josel of Rosheim, who tried to help the Jews of Saxony in 1537, called him "that priest whose name was Martin Luther," and the rabbi Tovia Singer judged that among all the Church Fathers and Reformers, none uttered more vulgar curses against the Children of Israel. Luther's last sermon, delivered at Eisleben on the 15th of February 1546, three days before his death, was given over almost entirely to expelling Jews from German territory. He had returned to Mansfeld out of concern for his siblings' families, whose livelihood in his father Hans Luther's copper mining trade was threatened. His excommunication was still in effect when he died on the 18th of February 1546, in the same town where he had been born sixty-two years before.