Who, after all, could "live by faith" but those who were already righteous? The text was clear on the matter: "the righteous shall live by faith. Luther remarked, "I hated that word, 'the righteousness of God,' by which I had been taught according to the custom and use of all teachers Meanwhile, he was ordered to take his doctorate in the Bible and become a professor at Wittenberg University. During lectures on the Psalms in and and a study of the Book of Romans, he began to see a way through his dilemma.
On the heels of this new understanding came others. To Luther the church was no longer the institution defined by apostolic succession; instead it was the community of those who had been given faith.
Salvation came not by the sacraments as such but by faith. The idea that human beings had a spark of goodness enough to seek out God was not a foundation of theology but was taught only by "fools.
Faith no longer consisted of assenting to the church's teachings but of trusting the promises of God and the merits of Christ.
It wasn't long before the revolution in Luther's heart and mind played itself out in all of Europe. It started on All Saints' Eve, , when Luther publicly objected to the way preacher Johann Tetzel was selling indulgences.
These were documents prepared by the church and bought by individuals either for themselves or on behalf of the dead that would release them from punishment due to their sins.
As Tetzel preached, "Once the coin into the coffer clings, a soul from purgatory heavenward springs! Luther questioned the church's trafficking in indulgences and called for a public debate of 95 theses he had written.
Instead, his 95 Theses spread across Germany as a call to reform, and the issue quickly became not indulgences but the authority of the church: Did the pope have the right to issue indulgences?
Events quickly accelerated. At a public debate in Leipzig in , when Luther declared that "a simple layman armed with the Scriptures" was superior to both pope and councils without them, he was threatened with excommunication. In the first, he argued that all Christians were priests, and he urged rulers to take up the cause of church reform. In the second, he reduced the seven sacraments to two baptism and the Lord's Supper.
In the third, he told Christians they were free from the law especially church laws but bound in love to their neighbors. Luther arrived prepared for another debate; he quickly discovered it was a trial at which he was asked to recant his views. Luther replied, "Unless I can be instructed and convinced with evidence from the Holy Scriptures or with open, clear, and distinct grounds of reasoning I can do no other.
God help me! He rejected their demands and upheld the right of the authorities to suppress the revolt, which lost him many supporters. In , Luther published a complete translation of the bible into German, underlining his belief that people should be able to read it in their own language. The translation contributed significantly to the spread and development of the German language.
Luther's influence spread across northern and eastern Europe and his fame made Wittenberg an intellectual centre. In his final years he wrote polemics against the Jews, the papacy and the Anabaptists, a radical wing of the reforming movement.
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Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. 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 He went, and declared that he could not retract any of the charges he had made against the Church, because the Church could not show him, in Scripture, that any of them were false:.
Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.
I cannot and will not retract anything. The Pope often errs! Luther will decide what God wants! By consulting Scripture! The knights spirited him off to the Wartburg, a secluded castle in Eisenach, in order to give the authorities time to cool off.
During his lifetime, Luther became probably the biggest celebrity in the German-speaking lands. When he travelled, people flocked to the high road to see his cart go by. This was due not just to his personal qualities and the importance of his cause but to timing. Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him. The majority of his writings were in Early New High German, a form of the language that was starting to gel in southern Germany at that time. Under his influence, it did gel. The crucial text is his Bible: the New Testament, translated from the original Greek and published in , followed by the Old Testament, in , translated from the Hebrew.
It was not the first German translation of the Bible—indeed, it had eighteen predecessors—but it was unquestionably the most beautiful, graced with the same combination of exaltation and simplicity, but more so, as the King James Bible.
Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. This made his texts easy and pleasing to read aloud, at home, to the children. The books also featured a hundred and twenty-eight woodcut illustrations, all by one artist from the Cranach workshop, known to us only as Master MS. There were marginal glosses, as well as short prefaces for each book, which would have been useful for the children of the household and probably also for the family member reading to them.
These virtues, plus the fact that the Bible was probably, in many cases, the only book in the house, meant that it was widely used as a primer. More people learned to read, and the more they knew how to read the more they wanted to own this book, or give it to others. The three-thousand-copy first edition of the New Testament, though it was not cheap it cost about as much as a calf , sold out immediately.
As many as half a million Luther Bibles seem to have been printed by the mid-sixteenth century. In his discussions of sola scriptura , Luther had declared that all believers were priests: laypeople had as much right as the clergy to determine what Scripture meant.
With his Bible, he gave German speakers the means to do so. In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts. Michael Knoche. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy.
Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry. He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms.
Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them. At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family. She was the one who proposed. One crucial factor was her skill in household management. One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on.
It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet. Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.
Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man.
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