I hope that being honest about Luther encourages us to be just as honest about ourselves, celebrating our genuine accomplishments while confessing and repenting of our failures. Olaf family, three important topics come to mind. Many people today have little to no understanding about the history of Christianity and how this history continues to shape our present world. Learning about Luther teaches us that the past is much more complicated and dynamic than we might realize. The different Protestant reformers who followed Luther built on his teaching, whether they looked to extend or reject his ideas.
We know that the world can be a less than gifted and gracious place at times. We are constantly being evaluated, whether in the classroom or on our social media feeds. Third, Luther was an ambitious young man in the right place at the right time. He identified an important, concrete challenge and sought to address it in a way that fit with his identity as a Christian preacher and professor. I believe that this lesson remains essential today.
When we look at people who have had a significant impact on the world, they have done this by honing their skills and focusing their attention on concrete problems they identified. I think that we do the same kind of work here on the Hill. We have students, faculty, staff, and alumni holding us accountable to our stated commitment to being a critical, inclusive, and engaged community. Remembrance is at the heart of the Reformation movement.
It had also started an ambitious building campaign, including the reconstruction of St. As they point out, Luther wanted no part of pluralism—even for the time, he was vehemently anti-Semitic—and not much part of individualism.
People were to believe and act as their churches dictated. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent.
To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work.
Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks. Luther was born in and grew up in Mansfeld, a small mining town in Saxony. His father started out as a miner but soon rose to become a master smelter, a specialist in separating valuable metal in this case, copper from ore. The family was not poor. Archeologists have been at work in their basement. The Luthers ate suckling pig and owned drinking glasses.
They had either seven or eight children, of whom five survived. Caught in a violent thunderstorm one day in —he was twenty-one—he vowed to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that if he survived he would become a monk. He kept his promise, and was ordained two years later. Today, psychoanalytic interpretations tend to be tittered at by Luther biographers.
This man who changed the world left his German-speaking lands only once in his life. In , he was part of a mission sent to Rome to heal a rent in the Augustinian order. It failed. Most of his youth was spent in dirty little towns where men worked long hours each day and then, at night, went to the tavern and got into fights. He built a castle and a church—the one on whose door the famous theses were supposedly nailed—and he hired an important artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, as his court painter.
Most important, he founded a university, and staffed it with able scholars, including Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars of the German-speaking territories.
In this capacity, he lectured on Scripture, held disputations, and preached to the staff of the university. He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis.
He called his problem his Anfechtungen —trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists.
Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. There were good reasons for an intense young priest to feel disillusioned. One of the most bitterly resented abuses of the Church at that time was the so-called indulgences, a kind of late-medieval get-out-of-jail-free card used by the Church to make money.
You might pay to have a special Mass said for the sinner or, less expensively, you could buy candles or new altar cloths for the church. But, in the most common transaction, the purchaser simply paid an agreed-upon amount of money and, in return, was given a document saying that the beneficiary—the name was written in on a printed form—was forgiven x amount of time in Purgatory.
The more time off, the more it cost, but the indulgence-sellers promised that whatever you paid for you got. Actually, they could change their minds about that. In , the Church cancelled the exculpatory powers of already purchased indulgences for the next eight years. If you wanted that period covered, you had to buy a new indulgence. Realizing that this was hard on people—essentially, they had wasted their money—the Church declared that purchasers of the new indulgences did not have to make confession or even exhibit contrition.
They just had to hand over the money and the thing was done, because this new issue was especially powerful. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar locally famous for his zeal in selling indulgences, is said to have boasted that one of the new ones could obtain remission from sin even for someone who had raped the Virgin Mary.
Even by the standards of the very corrupt sixteenth-century Church, this was shocking. It brought him up against the absurdity of bargaining with God, jockeying for his favor—indeed, paying for his favor. Why had God given his only begotten son? And why had the son died on the cross? From this thought, the Ninety-five Theses were born. Most of them were challenges to the sale of indulgences. This was not a new idea. Furthermore, it is not an idea that fits well with what we know of Luther.
Pure faith, contemplation, white light: surely these are the gifts of the Asian religions, or of medieval Christianity, of St. Francis with his birds.
As for Luther, with his rages and sweats, does he seem a good candidate? Lest it be thought that this stern man then concluded that we could stop worrying about our behavior and do whatever we wanted, he said that works issue from faith. Like sola fide , this was a rejection of what, to Luther, were the lies of the Church—symbolized most of all by the indulgence market. Indulgences brought you an abbreviation of your stay in Purgatory, but what was Purgatory?
No such thing is mentioned in the Bible. Some people think that Dante made it up; others say Gregory the Great. In any case, Luther decided that somebody made it up. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints.
He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he Frederick had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker. Things came to a head in Leo gave Luther sixty days to appear in Rome and answer charges of heresy. Reformers had been executed for less, but Luther was by now a very popular man throughout Europe.
The authorities knew they would have serious trouble if they killed him, and the Church gave him one more chance to recant, at the upcoming diet—or congregation of officers, sacred and secular—in the cathedral city of Worms in The first few years of monastic life were difficult for Luther, as he did not find the religious enlightenment he was seeking. A mentor told him to focus his life exclusively on Jesus Christ and this would later provide him with the guidance he sought.
At age 27, Luther was given the opportunity to be a delegate to a Catholic church conference in Rome. He came away more disillusioned, and very discouraged by the immorality and corruption he witnessed there among the Catholic priests. Upon his return to Germany, he enrolled in the University of Wittenberg in an attempt to suppress his spiritual turmoil.
He excelled in his studies and received a doctorate, becoming a professor of theology at the university known today as Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Through his studies of scripture, Luther finally gained religious enlightenment. Finally, he realized the key to spiritual salvation was not to fear God or be enslaved by religious dogma but to believe that faith alone would bring salvation.
This period marked a major change in his life and set in motion the Reformation. Luther also sent a copy to Archbishop Albert Albrecht of Mainz, calling on him to end the sale of indulgences. Aided by the printing press , copies of the 95 Theses spread throughout Germany within two weeks and throughout Europe within two months.
The Church eventually moved to stop the act of defiance. In October , at a meeting with Cardinal Thomas Cajetan in Augsburg, Luther was ordered to recant his 95 Theses by the authority of the pope. Luther said he would not recant unless scripture proved him wrong. The meeting ended in a shouting match and initiated his ultimate excommunication from the Church.
Following the publication of his 95 Theses , Luther continued to lecture and write in Wittenberg. In June and July of Luther publicly declared that the Bible did not give the pope the exclusive right to interpret scripture, which was a direct attack on the authority of the papacy.
Finally, in , the pope had had enough and on June 15 issued an ultimatum threatening Luther with excommunication. On December 10, , Luther publicly burned the letter. In March , Luther was summoned before the Diet of Worms , a general assembly of secular authorities. Again, Luther refused to recant his statements, demanding he be shown any scripture that would refute his position. There was none.
Friends helped him hide out at the Wartburg Castle. Though still under threat of arrest, Luther returned to Wittenberg Castle Church, in Eisenach, in May to organize a new church, Lutheranism.
He gained many followers, and the Lutheran Church also received considerable support from German princes.
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