German Info: Martin Luther

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Luther the Reformer

In the early 16th century, religious leader Martin Luther launched a protest that shook the authority of the church in Rome, brought new power to ordinary believers and ultimately led to the Protestant movement in Christianity. Today, churches that take Luther’s theology as their guide have some 60 million members. The U.S. alone is home to nearly 8.5 million Lutherans. They represent just a fraction of those whose religious traditions have roots in the Protestant Reformation.

Luther posts his 95 Theses.

Yet founding a new church was anything but Luther’s goal when he presented his “95 Theses” in 1517, the event customarily seen as the opening act of the Reformation. A farmer’s son from Eisleben, Saxony, Luther was a monk, an ordained priest and a professor of theology in Wittenberg at the time, fully loyal to the established church and papacy. He had joined his order in a moment of profound conviction – according to his own account, he had nearly been struck by a lightning bolt – and in monastic life, he had proved his devotion many times. Luther had prepared the 95 Theses – a series of statements on theological matters – as the starting point for academic debate, little knowing they would spark an upheaval.

Salvation by Faith
The 95 Theses explained Luther’s objections to the church-approved practice of selling “indulgences.” A person who bought an indulgence received in exchange an assurance that his or her time in purgatory would be reduced. In the 95 Theses, Luther was less concerned with indulgences per se than with the ideas about salvation that lay behind them. That question of how the individual Christian could achieve righteousness in the eyes of God was of much more than academic interest to Luther. During his early years as a monk, he had been tortured by feelings of his own unworthiness. The more he had tried to be the perfect monk, the less he considered himself worthy of God’s grace. His spiritual turmoil came to an end when, guided in large part by the writings of the apostle Paul and Saint Augustine, he came to the belief that there was in fact nothing he could do to earn God’s grace; grace was, rather, a gift freely bestowed upon the faithful. Formulated as the doctrine of justification by faith alone, this belief became one of the cornerstones of Luther’s theology.

Luther had sent copies of the 95 Theses to a handful of colleagues and officials within the church, some of whom in turn made copies and passed them along to others. In a few weeks, word of the theses and Luther’s attack upon indulgences had spread throughout the German-speaking lands and all of Europe. Luther’s views were eagerly received by many of the church’s countless critics, who were unhappy with the state of religious life in western Christendom.

Portrait of Martin Luther Wearing the Cap of Doctor of Theology. Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1521. Copper engraving. Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar

Captive to the Word
As the indulgence controversy grew, Luther was called upon to address an ever broader array of questions about faith and worship. And as he tried to answer those questions, he found himself increasingly at odds with ecclesiastical officials in Germany and, eventually, Rome. By 1521, when Luther was summoned to appear before Emperor Charles V and the other leaders of the Holy Roman Empire at an imperial assembly in Worms – the “Diet of Worms” – a clear breach had opened between Rome and Luther’s supporters. Luther was asked to recant. But declaring his conscience “captive to the Word of God,” he refused.

Luther debates with Catholic clergy at Worms. Anonymous, 1521. Courtesy Pitts Theology Library Digital Image Archive.

There were repeated attempts to end this impasse in the quarter century between the Diet of Worms and Luther’s death in 1546, but none was to succeed. Luther himself continued to teach and write, and to supervise the implementation of reforms in worship that, as he contended, were in keeping with the practices of Christianity’s early centuries. He also spent a decade and a half working on what many consider his crowning achievement, his translation of the Bible into German. Much as the “King James” translation was to shape English prose, the “Luther Bible” played a decisive role in the development of High German.

Luther in 2003
A new exhibition on Luther’s life and work opened in March at Luther Hall, the reformer’s former home in Wittenberg (Saxony-Anhalt). Organizers hope the display will attract a fresh wave of tourists to the historic building, a UNESCO World Heritage site that reopened in October 2002 after a two-year, 5-million-euro renovation. To celebrate the renewal, the Luther Center of Wittenberg has created a supplemental exhibit, “Martin Luther – the Reformer,” touring Canada and the United States starting this summer.

Also to be released in 2003 is a film about Luther’s life, starring Joseph Fiennes and Peter Ustinov and shot by British director Eric Till on location in Rome and Wittenberg. “Martin Luther was an extraordinary man of infinite complexity, with remarkable courage and compassion, someone who changed the world,” says Till. “There is something of him in all of us, I think. We would all like to, at some point in our lives, stand up in front of the greatest power of the time and say, ‘I don’t give a damn, this is what I believe and I don’t care what you do.’”

Links

More information on Luther:
http://www.www.luther.de
http://www.www.wittenberg.de
http://www.pbs.org