Martin Luther
1483 - 1546
Leader of the Protestant Reformation
by Rit Nosotro First Published:: 2003( )
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther published a list of ninety-five considerations to stimulate theological debate. Of particular interest was the various "indulgences" of the Catholic Church which did not follow the teachings of the Bible. Although he did not necessarily wish it, his writings soon spread across the entire country of Germany, and sparked the Protestant Reformation. This influence also had a dark side.
Martin began life as the son of simple parents in Eisleben in Saxony, on November 10, 1483. His father made a living as a miner, and his mother had middle-class roots. At six months old, his family moved to Mansfield, where he began his schooling at age seven at the local Latin school, and Brethren of the Common Life at Magdeburg at fourteen. There he opened his heart up to the Jesus Christ in simple faith. He soon moved in with his relatives in Eisenach to continue his education, and grew up a pleasant young man. His father wanted Martin to succeed himself in wealth, and therefore sent his son to study law at the University of Erfurt in 1502.
By 1505, he completed his master's degree in law and had seen a Bible for the first time. However, within a couple months of his graduation, he had an enlightening religious experience, which involved an illness, an accident, and a thunderstorm in which he felt threatened his life. In surviving this series of events, he vowed to give his life in service to God. After joining the Augustinian Monastery in Erfurt in order to become a monk, he earned the title of priest in only two years.
Several years after becoming a priest, his order sent him to represent them on a mission to Rome. He arrived in high spirits, expecting a religious experience like no other in the capitol of the Catholic Church. However, he soon became disillusioned as he discovered the low morality of the priests there, which began changing his perspective of the Church for which he had devoted his life. In 1508, he was delighted to be appointed Professor of Philosophy at Wittenburg, and earned a Doctor of Theology in four years. At that point, he declared from then on to only preach the Word rather than unbiblical Catholic tradition, and to help others to understand the Word as well. He soon began lecturing, and continued a deep study of the Word for his own growth.
A great breakthrough came after meditating on Romans 1:17, which says, "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, 'The just shall live by faith'." From this position, the Bible took on an entirely new meaning to Luther, and set him free from the terror of God that he had felt before. He grew in his understanding of what the Word truly says about our salvation, greatly helped by the writings of three men: Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Tauler the mystic. The more that Martin saw and learned about salvation, the more distance came between himself and the Catholic Church. In addition to the matter of salvation, Martin also despised the sale of "indulgences" in the Catholic Church, which involved the Pope charging a fee for permission to sin. All of Martin's learning came to a head on October 31, 1517, when he posted his famous ninety-five theses.
His theses was partly in response to the presence of a friar named Tetzel, who had advertised indulgences regarding salvation, in direct violation of Martin's belief. Tetzel and his companions immediately told Martin to withdraw his theses, but Martin would not, and in fact, continued to confront Church doctrine and its servants. As his theses and succeeding pamphlets spread throughout Germany, he gained a large, supportive following. Students from various countries came to study under him. He met with tremendous opposition from the Church, who even named him an outlaw at the Diet of Worms. Martin Luther, and eariler leaders such as John Wycliffe and John Hess, knew the Church held the power to burn them at the stake. Still Luther's scathing remarks on the nature of the Roman Catholic doctrine led to the tremendous Protestant Reformation
That was not the only religious group he attacked. After Martin Luther's early efforts to convert Jews to Christianity had failed, he denounced those Jews and wrote, "Know, O adored Christ, and make no mistake that aside from the Devil, you have no enemy more venomous, more desperate, more bitter, than a true Jew who truly seeks to be a Jew." (Cohn-Sherbok 73) Martin's positions in this regard did not break with the long history of Roman Catholic persecution against the Jews. AntiSemitism had long been a tool to artificially increase the power of the papacy, finding a peak around the time of the Crusades.
As God establishes governments (Romans 13:1-2), the princes of Germany were able to use the people's support of Lutheranism in order to strengthen their hold on governmental power. By the time the Nazi government came to power, nearly four centuries later, the Lutheran Church was still well established. As the 16th century princes had used Luther to gain support, so to did the 20th century German goverment use the writings of Luther to justify its policies and actions against the Jews. "First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honour of God and of Christianity... Secondly, their home should likewise be broken down and destroyed." (Cohn-Sherbok 73)
While Martin would have protested against the Lutheran Church being named after him, he would not have protested against Kristalnacht, which destroyed so many synagogues and Jewish homes across Germany. Although a few men, like Luthern pastor Dietrich Bonnhoffer, operated in the spirit of Martin's early writings, e.g., That Christ was Born a Jew, the populous was largely swayed by what Martin wrote as an old man, Against the Jews and Their Lies, published in 1542, four years before his death.
In His sovereign timing, God had arranged the right environment for the Protestant Reformtion. The well established printing press, invented a century earlier, spread Luther's ideas like wildfire throughout the Christian world. Although man has used them for good and evil, God used them to cut away some of the corruption of the Catholic Church and even bring about the rebirth of national Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust.
Sources:
Cohn-Sherbok, Dan. The Crucified Jew. London: Harper Collins, 1992.
