Challenging religious authority, creating a Reformation that shifted issues of faith, morality, and even government from institutions to individuals
MARTIN LUTHER
(1483 –1546)
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther—a monk, theology professor, biblical translator, and ecclesiastical composer—sent Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, Germany, a momentous letter: ninety-five “theses” challenging the authority and morality of the Catholic Church’s practice of selling forgiveness of sin: “indulgences.” That day is today commemorated by Protestants worldwide as Reformation Day. It has long been believed that, on this same day, Luther also nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church and other churches in Wittenberg. It is by no means certain that he ever posted the document in this manner, but, if he did, it was not until sometime in November.
On the face of it, Luther had nothing more than a bone to pick with his church, the Church of Rome. He was a theologian, after all, and thus predisposed to finely parsing articles of faith. In fact, the entire dispute may well have been aggravated by the monk’s chronic and apparently intractable constipation. He himself referred to “a secretus locus monachorum hypocastum”—a toilet—where he contemplated, one fateful day, a theological problem as intractable as the difficulty with his bowels. Luther included an account in a sermon, which the British playwright John Osborne portrayed in his 1961 play Luther. As rendered by Osborne, the monk preached to his congregation:
Who’ll speak out in rough German? . . . It came to me while I was in my tower, what they call the monk’s sweathouse, the jakes, the john or whatever you’re pleased to call it. I was struggling with the text [from the Epistle of Paul] I’ve given you: “for therein is the righteous of God revealed, from faith to faith; as it is written, the just shall live by faith.”
Osborne’s Luther relates how, sitting on the toilet,
he seemed to sense beneath me a large rat, a heavy, wet, plague rat, slashing at my privates with its death’s teeth. . . . And I sat in my heap of pain until the words emerged and opened out. “The just shall live by faith.” My pain vanished, my bowels flushed and I could get up.
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Get up Martin Luther did. He realized the truth in Scripture, that the just shall live by faith alone, not by paying any church or any priest for forgiveness. All a sinner needed was “my sweet redeemer and mediator, Jesus Christ,” not an institution corrupted by money.
After his revelation, Luther realized that his reading of the Bible simply could not be reconciled with the practice of the Roman church. For Luther, a sinful believer in God is made righteous by faith in God’s mercy, not through his own good works or his money. Luther’s epiphany was much more than a theological dispute or a fit of constipation—if the message of Christ is that believers can turn directly to God through prayer at any time, then there is no need for priest or church or any other middleman. Not only did this challenge the Catholic Church, the most powerful religious and political force on earth at the time, it challenged the very concept of organized religion and of the nations, societies, and civilizations based on it. Luther’s message was that under God, all people of faith are equal; the individual’s relationship to God is supreme; and the individual conscience of a person of faith is the ultimate and unimpeachable source of morality and right versus wrong.
The implications of Luther’s argument were vast and enormously disruptive. Luther’s beliefs affected not just how religion was conceived and practiced in the Western world, but the role of law and ethics in societies, and even how governments were created and knocked down. Historically, the Protestant Reformation launched by Luther’s Theses unleashed more than a century of war in Europe. The continent was riven with religious conflict that began in 1524 and culminated in the cataclysmic Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Violent disputes between Catholics and Protestants continued sporadically into the twentieth century, most familiarly in “The Troubles,” a low-intensity civil war that wracked Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998.
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Born on November 10, 1483, in Eisleben, Saxony, Martin Luther was the child of a prosperous family. Martin was educated at the University of Erfurt, from which he received a master’s degree in 1505. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, and Martin dutifully enrolled in the law school at Erfurt. But the already headstrong young man quickly left, complaining that the study of law was the study of “uncertainty.” What the young man demanded was truth, certain truth, and so he dived into philosophy. When this field failed to satisfy him, he turned finally to religion. The story Luther himself tells is that while returning to Erfurt on July 2, 1505, he was very nearly struck by a bolt of lightning. The close call provoked him to cry out “Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!” And so he dedicated himself to the Augustinians. Ordained in 1508, he was chosen by the dean of the newly founded University of Wittenberg to teach theology, and in 1512 he was awarded the degree of doctor of theology.
A monk-turned-professor, Martin Luther was also a zealous preacher and proselytizer. His Theses were rapidly printed in pamphlet form and as placards. During 1517, several hundred copies of the document were printed and, thanks to the rapid rise of the movable-type printing press, introduced by Johannes Gutenberg less than seventy years earlier, the document was soon widely broadcast across Germany and Europe. The Wittenberg-based artists Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son Lucas Cranach the Younger painted several portraits of Martin Luther that were widely reproduced. Colleagues of the theologian circulated admiring stories about him as well. Thus, it was a combination of the ideas and the personality behind the ideas that gave the Reformation its early momentum.
Rome did not take the challenge lying down. In June 1518, Luther was summoned to stand trial in Augsburg on charges of heresy. Under intense interrogation from the papal envoy Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, Luther refused to renounce his assertions. In 1519, Charles V (1500–1558) became the new Holy Roman emperor and swore to protect the Catholic Church against the likes of Luther. Nevertheless, Luther persisted in believing that he could reform the Catholic Church from the inside. He wrote a series of three works, considered foundational texts of the Protestant movement. The central of the three, “On the Freedom of a Christian,” held that a “Christian is a free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” In these two sentences, Luther liberated the Christian believer from all arbitrary earthly authority, religious or secular—though he explicitly renounced armed rebellion. In January 1521, Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther. Four months later, Luther was compelled to defend himself before Charles V. He told the Holy Roman emperor that he would take back his words if—and only if—scriptural fact could be shown to disprove them. To act against his own conscience, he told the emperor, was a thing he could not do: “Here I stand. God help me. Amen.”
Unimpressed, Charles V issued the Edict of Worms, banning Luther’s writing and proclaiming him an outlaw of the empire.
But Luther was not alone. Frederick III, prince of Saxony, arranged for Luther’s “abduction” as he journeyed back from Worms. Frederick had the theologian brought to his Wartburg Castle, where, under the prince’s protection, he continued to write—albeit under a pseudonym. In the space of ten months at Wartburg, Luther wrote various statements on issues relating to the Reformation, and he also worked intensively to complete a German translation of the New Testament. In contrast to the many error-ridden translations that others had made from the Latin text, the scholarly Luther used the ancient Greek testament as his source. His was the first translation from the original Greek to the German—and it was a masterpiece of literary translation. Printed in 1522, his New Testament was both a spiritual and commercial success, even though Pope Leo X’s excommunication of Luther the previous year had effectively banned his writings, including his biblical translations.
Despite his having been declared an outlaw, Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1522. Having been excommunicated from the Catholic Church, he considered himself freed from his monkish vow of celibacy. In 1525, Luther married a former nun, Katharina von Bora, with whom he raised a family of six children. In 1526, the Reformation enjoyed a political triumph when the Imperial Diet (the legislative body of the Holy Roman Empire), meeting at Speyer, issued a decision that allowed princes and states to determine for themselves whether to remain Catholic or become “Lutheran.” This opened the way for the creation of the first officially sanctioned Lutheran churches and “Protestant” schools.
As the Reformation gained traction, Luther, recognizing that the religion he had fostered was populist rather than dictated by a clergy, embarked on an effort to educate Germans in the principles of Christian belief. In 1529, he wrote and published a “Small Catechism,” aimed at informing the common layman, and a “Large Catechism” for the new Protestant priesthood.
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Remarkably—and despite his excommunication, Luther persisted in clinging to the hope that Protestantism would reform the Catholic Church and remain unified with it. During the summer of 1530, a nervous Charles V convened an imperial diet in Augsburg, hoping to avoid the breaking apart of the Holy Roman Empire. Because the emperor had both outlawed and banned him, Luther dared not attend the diet. Instead, Luther deputized his friend and colleague Philip Melanchton to represent him. At Augsburg, Melanchton made a valiant but doomed effort to earn Catholic recognition of the Protestant denomination—which was not formally named Lutheranism until 1597. Nevertheless, the result was no victory for Charles V, either. With the Islamic Ottoman Empire aggressively threatening all of Christian Europe, and especially his own Habsburg (Austrian) regime, Charles did not dare risk the political unity of the Christian states. Accordingly, he granted Protestants religious freedom in exchange for the military participation of the Protestant states in the Ottoman-Habsburg wars.
While Luther made this critical political headway, he turned his attention to translating the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into German. Completed in 1534, the result was another literary masterpiece. What the King James Bible of 1611 would become to the English language, the Lutheran translation of the Old Testament of 1534 became to the German tongue: a source of innumerable sayings and idioms intimately woven into the fabric of the common language.
This is evidence of the pervasiveness of Luther’s translations. More than any vehicle before them, his New and Old Testaments conveyed Christianity to people of virtually every class, bringing to practical fruition his dream of creating a Christian religion unmediated by a corrupt and corruptible institution and clergy.