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Martin Luther

Martin Luther (1483–1546), German Augustinian friar and professor at Wittenberg whose Ninety-Five Theses (1517) began the Reformation. See Lutheran Justification.

History

Roots

Luther was born in Eisleben in Saxony in November 1483, the son of a miner who had risen to own smelting works. His father sent him to the University of Erfurt to become a lawyer. In July 1505, caught in a thunderstorm, he vowed to St. Anne that he would become a monk, and within weeks he entered the house of the Augustinian friars in Erfurt. He was ordained priest in 1507, visited Rome on his order’s business in 1510–11, and in 1512 took a doctorate and the chair of Bible at the new University of Wittenberg, a post he held for the rest of his life.

The monastery did not give him peace. Luther later described a conscience that confession and penance could not quiet, and a God whose justice he experienced as a threat. His superior, Johann von Staupitz, pointed him to Christ’s wounds and to Scripture. Lecturing on the Psalms (1513–15), Romans (1515–16) and Galatians, he came to read “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 as a gift God gives rather than a standard God demands. In the preface to his collected Latin writings (1545) he recalled: “All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates” (Preface to the Latin Writings). He read Augustine closely in these years, and his early theology is an Augustinian protest against late-medieval teaching that a person could prepare for grace by “doing what lies within them.”

Causes

The spark was a preaching campaign for indulgences, run by Johann Tetzel on behalf of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, with half the proceeds going to rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome. On 31 October 1517 Luther sent Albrecht a letter with ninety-five Latin theses for academic debate. The first set the tone: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance” (Ninety-Five Theses, Project Gutenberg; Matthew 4:17). Printers turned the theses into a German sensation within weeks.

The dispute moved quickly from indulgences to authority. At Heidelberg (April 1518) Luther set out his “theology of the cross” before his own order. At Augsburg (October 1518) he refused Cardinal Cajetan’s demand to recant. At Leipzig (1519) Johann Eck pressed him into saying that some of Jan Hus’s condemned articles were Christian and that councils can err. In 1520 he wrote three treatises that made the break public: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church and The Freedom of a Christian (all in First Principles of the Reformation, CCEL). Pope Leo X condemned 41 of his propositions in the bull Exsurge Domine (June 1520); Luther burned it in December and was excommunicated by Decet Romanum Pontificem (January 1521).

Summoned before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in April 1521, he refused to recant unless convinced by Scripture and plain reason, and was declared an outlaw (Diet of Worms, secondary). His prince, Frederick the Wise, had him hidden at the Wartburg castle, where he translated the New Testament into German (published September 1522). The complete German Bible followed in 1534.

Influence

The rest of Luther’s life was spent building a church and arguing with almost everyone. He came back to Wittenberg in 1522 to slow the radical reforms of Andreas Karlstadt. He turned against the rebels of the Peasants’ War in 1525 (German Peasants’ War, secondary). That same year he married the former nun Katharina von Bora, which helped set the pattern of the Protestant pastor’s household. He answered Erasmus on free will (1525), broke with Huldrych Zwingli over the Lord’s Supper at Marburg (1529), and wrote the Small Catechism and Large Catechism (1529) for parish teaching. His colleague Philip Melanchthon drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530), which became the founding statement of the Lutheran churches; Luther’s own Smalcald Articles (1537) were later added to the Book of Concord (1580). He died in Eisleben, the town of his birth, in February 1546.

His influence reaches well beyond Lutheranism. The Reformation he began produced the Reformed, Anglican and Anabaptist traditions, each partly in conversation with or reaction against him. His German Bible shaped the modern German language. His hymns, including “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” set the pattern of congregational singing. His doctrine of justification provoked the Council of Trent and remained the central Protestant–Catholic dispute until the Joint Declaration on Justification (1999).

Key ideas and contributors

Justification by faith alone. Luther’s central claim is that a sinner is declared righteous before God not by works or merit but by trusting Christ, whose righteousness is counted as theirs. He called it “alien righteousness,” given from outside. The believer is simul iustus et peccator: at once righteous and a sinner. The Smalcald Articles call this “the first and chief article” and say: “Of this article nothing can be yielded or surrendered” (Part II, Article I). The Augsburg Confession gives the confessional form: people “are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith” (Article IV). The later Lutheran development is traced in Lutheran Justification.

Law and gospel. God speaks two words. The law commands and accuses, showing people their sin; the gospel promises forgiveness in Christ. Confusing the two, Luther held, either turns the gospel into a new law or makes the law harmless. His Commentary on Galatians (1535, CCEL) is the fullest statement.

Scripture above popes and councils. After Leipzig and Worms, Luther treated Scripture as the only authority that could bind the conscience, with popes and councils subject to it. This is the root of Sola Scriptura. He did not reject tradition wholesale; he kept the creeds and much of the liturgy, and judged them by Scripture.

The bondage of the will. Against Erasmus’s On Free Will (1524), Luther argued in The Bondage of the Will (1525, CCEL) that the fallen will cannot turn itself to God, and that salvation rests entirely on God’s choice and grace. He thanked Erasmus for going to the heart of the matter. The book stands behind later Protestant rejection of Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism, and Calvinism drew on it heavily.

Freedom and service. The Freedom of a Christian (1520) opens with a paradox: “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one” (Project Gutenberg). Faith frees the believer from earning salvation; love then binds them to their neighbor. The same treatise grounds the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9): every baptized Christian is a priest, so ordinary work in a household or trade is a calling from God.

The sacraments. In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church Luther cut the seven sacraments to “but three — baptism, penance and the bread,” and later effectively to two (Project Wittenberg). He rejected the Mass as a sacrifice and Transubstantiation as a philosophical explanation, but he insisted that Christ’s body and blood are truly present “in, with, and under” the bread and wine. Lutherans call this Sacramental Union. He also defended Infant Baptism against the Anabaptists.

The theology of the cross. At Heidelberg Luther contrasted a “theologian of glory,” who tries to know God through reason and visible power, with a “theologian of the cross,” who finds God hidden in suffering and weakness, above all in the crucified Christ (Theology of the Cross, secondary).

Two kingdoms. God rules the world in two ways: through the gospel in the church, and through law and the sword in civil government (Romans 13:1–4). The distinction was meant to keep the church from wielding the sword and rulers from governing consciences.

Luther worked with others. Melanchthon systematized his theology in the Loci Communes (1521) and the Augsburg Confession. Johannes Bugenhagen organized the churches of northern Germany and Scandinavia. Staupitz, Karlstadt and Erasmus each shaped him early, before the last two became opponents.

Key controversies

Rome’s verdict. The Catholic response came first in Exsurge Domine and then, systematically, at the Council of Trent. Its decree on justification (1547) agreed that grace comes first but condemned the claim that the faith that justifies is “nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy” (canon 12) and taught that justification includes inner renewal. Trent also restated seven sacraments, transubstantiation and the authority of tradition beside Scripture (see Catholic Justification, Magisterium). Catholic historians long portrayed Luther as a rebel driven by pride or disordered conscience. Twentieth-century Catholic scholarship, notably Joseph Lortz’s The Reformation in Germany (1939–40), began to treat him as a sincere religious figure reacting against real abuses. The Joint Declaration on Justification of 1999 declared that the mutual condemnations of the sixteenth century do not apply to the teaching each side now presents, while leaving differences open.

“Alone” in Romans 3:28. Luther’s German New Testament rendered Romans 3:28 as justified “by faith alone” (allein durch den Glauben), adding a word not in the Greek. Catholic critics called it a falsification. Luther defended it in his Open Letter on Translating (1530), arguing that German idiom required it and that it gave Paul’s meaning. He also called James “an epistle of straw” in his 1522 preface to the New Testament, because it seemed to contradict Paul (James 2:24); he dropped the phrase from later editions.

The Lord’s Supper. At the Marburg Colloquy (1529) Luther and Zwingli agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and split on the fifteenth. Zwingli read “This is my body” (Matthew 26:26) as “signifies,” and held that Christ’s risen body is in heaven; Luther reportedly chalked Hoc est corpus meum on the table and would not move from the plain words (Marburg Colloquy, secondary). The quarrel left Protestantism permanently divided into Lutheran and Reformed churches, and it set the terms for Memorialism and John Calvin’s Spiritual Presence as rival accounts.

The Peasants’ War. Rebelling peasants appealed to Luther’s language of Christian freedom. He first urged both lords and peasants to settle, then in 1525 wrote Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, telling princes to “smite, slay and stab” the rebels. Perhaps 100,000 peasants were killed. Critics from the radical reformer Thomas Müntzer to Marxist historians charged him with selling out the poor to the princes; defenders read the tract through his two-kingdoms teaching and his fear of anarchy. Many Lutheran historians now judge it his worst moment.

The Jews. In 1523 Luther wrote That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, which criticized Christian mistreatment of Jews and hoped for their conversion. Twenty years later, in On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), he urged rulers to burn synagogues, destroy Jewish homes and expel Jews. Nazi propagandists reprinted these writings, and Julius Streicher cited Luther in his defense at Nuremberg (Martin Luther and antisemitism, secondary). Historians debate whether his hostility was religious anti-Judaism or something closer to modern racial antisemitism, and how directly it fed German antisemitism. Many Lutheran bodies have repudiated these writings, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in its Declaration to the Jewish Community (1994).

Did he nail the theses? The image of Luther hammering the theses to the door of the Castle Church comes from Melanchthon, writing after Luther’s death; Luther himself never mentioned it. The Catholic historian Erwin Iserloh argued in 1961 that the posting never happened and that Luther only sent the theses to bishops. A note by Luther’s secretary Georg Rörer in a 1540 Bible at Jena, found by Martin Treu around 2007, says the theses were posted on the doors of the churches in Wittenberg; scholars disagree on whether it confirms the posting or only repeats a later legend (evangelisch.de, secondary). The famous words at Worms, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” appear in early printed versions of the speech but not in the transcripts, and may have been added.

The bigamy of Philip of Hesse. In 1539 Luther and Melanchthon gave the Protestant prince Philip of Hesse secret counsel allowing a second marriage, treating it as a confessional matter. When it became public in 1540 it embarrassed the Protestant cause and gave opponents a weapon that is still used.

Reading Paul. Luther’s reading of Paul has been challenged from within Protestantism. Krister Stendahl’s essay “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (1963) argued that Luther read his own anguished conscience into Paul. E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright later argued that first-century Judaism was not a religion of earning salvation and that “works of the law” meant markers such as circumcision. This is the New Perspective on Paul, and Lutheran scholars have answered that Luther’s core reading still stands.

What remains unresolved

Luther’s legacy is fought over because he is the founder of so much. Catholics and Lutherans now agree on more about justification than either expected in 1517, but not on how far the Reformation was necessary. Protestants still dispute whether he or Zwingli read the Supper rightly, and whether his account of Paul answers the New Perspective. His writings on the peasants and the Jews raise a harder question: how a church should honor a teacher whose central insight it treasures and some of whose words it has formally repudiated.