Martin Luther

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Martin Luther was a German Augustinian friar, biblical scholar, and theologian whose challenge to the late-medieval Church became the opening of the Protestant Reformation and the rupture of Western Christianity. Born in Eisleben in 1483 to a family of mining stock, he trained for the law before a vow taken in a thunderstorm — by his own later telling — turned him to the cloister. He took his doctorate in theology and lectured on scripture at the new university of Wittenberg.

The thunderstorm has a place and a date that the man never quite let go of. In July 1505, traveling on the road near Stotternheim, the young master of arts was thrown to the ground by lightning and cried out to Saint Anne, patron of miners, that he would become a monk. He kept the vow against his father’s furious wish. Hans Luder had climbed out of the copper pits to lease his own smelting works and had meant his promising son for the law and the magistracy; the boy who ran to the cloister broke that plan, and the breach with the father shadowed the son for years. Luther entered the house of the Observant Augustinian Hermits at Erfurt, one of the strictest of the reformed orders, and submitted himself to the full apparatus of late-medieval penance — the daily offices, the fasts, the confessions so scrupulous that his superiors grew weary of them. He would later describe a state he named Anfechtung, a word that means assault or trial: the terror of a conscience that could find no assurance it had done enough, that read the love of God as a tribunal and itself as the defendant. The man who emerged from that cloister was not at peace. He was learned, ordained, a priest who trembled so badly at the consecration of his first mass that he nearly could not finish it; and he was, by his own account, a man who had come to fear and even to hate the God he served.

The cloister and the crisis over justification

The crisis was personal before it was public. Luther was a man tormented by the question of how a guilty person could stand before a righteous God, and the penitential machinery of the Church — confession, satisfaction, the purchase of indulgences against the pains of purgatory — gave him no rest. His vicar-general, Johann von Staupitz, watching the young friar destroy himself over the accounting of his sins, did two things that turned the course of the matter: he pressed Luther toward the wounds of Christ rather than the inventory of his own failures, and he ordered him, against his protests, to take the doctorate and the chair of biblical studies at Wittenberg. The cure for a soul in torment, Staupitz seems to have judged, was the discipline of the text.

It was in the text that the resolution came. Lecturing on the Psalms and then on Romans in the years after 1512, Luther fixed on a phrase he had come to hate — the righteousness of God, iustitia Dei. His teachers had taught him to read it as the standard by which a just God condemns the unjust; so read, it left a scrupulous man no exit. Reading Paul, and above all the line that the righteous shall live by faith, he came instead to read the righteousness of God not as the measure that damns but as the gift that saves — a righteousness reckoned to the believer, not wrung from him. Justification, on this reading, is God’s free act, received through faith alone and not earned by any work. Luther set the breakthrough down decades later, in a famous autobiographical preface to his collected Latin works written in the last year of his life; whether it arrived in a single moment, as that preface tells it, or ripened slowly across the early lectures, historians still dispute. What is not in dispute is that the doctrine he found in Paul became the lever under everything that followed.

The ninety-five theses

In 1517 the abstraction met an occasion. To fund the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s in Rome and to clear the enormous debts Albert of Brandenburg had taken on to buy the archbishopric of Mainz, a campaign of indulgences was preached across Germany, the Dominican Johann Tetzel its most aggressive salesman. An indulgence, in the Church’s account, drew on a treasury of merit — the superabundant righteousness of Christ and the saints — to remit the temporal penalty owed for sins already forgiven, the satisfaction otherwise to be paid in this life or in purgatory. In Tetzel’s preaching the doctrine had collapsed into a transaction that sprang souls from purgatory for coin, advertised, in the jingle the friars long remembered, as the instant a coin rang in the chest the soul sprang from the fire. To a man who had found his own peace precisely in giving up the accounting of merit, this was the gospel sold backward. On the eve of All Saints, 31 October 1517, Luther objected in a set of ninety-five theses for academic debate, sending them with a letter to Albert himself — the archbishop whose campaign they attacked — and, by the tradition that grew up around the day, posting them on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg that served as the university’s notice board. They were Latin propositions, framed for the schools, and they conceded more to the papacy than his later positions would; the first of them held that the whole life of the believer is meant to be one of repentance, against a sacrament that had narrowed penitence to a fee. The charge running under them was incendiary: that the treasury of merit the Church claimed to dispense could not bind God’s free forgiveness, that the pope had no jurisdiction over purgatory, and that true contrition, not purchase, was what the gospel asked. Printed and circulated far beyond his intent, translated from the scholar’s Latin into German and reprinted within weeks on the new presses, the protest made him a public figure almost overnight.

The doctrinal system

What followed hardened into a system of principles. Pressed in public disputation — most sharply by Johann Eck at Leipzig in 1519, who maneuvered him into denying the authority of popes and councils alike — Luther was driven to the conclusions his premise contained. He held that scripture, not the Church’s tradition or the pope’s office, is the final authority in matters of faith — sola scriptura — and that salvation comes by grace through faith alone — sola fide. He denied that the priesthood was a separate sacramental order standing between God and the soul, teaching instead a priesthood of all believers, in which every baptized Christian has direct access to God and the layman’s calling is no less holy than the monk’s. In a torrent of treatises in 1520 — an address to the German nobility to take reform into their own hands, a frontal attack on the sacramental system under the title of a Babylonian captivity of the Church, and a short, luminous tract on the freedom of a Christian — he turned a quarrel over indulgences into a wholesale reconstruction of how a person is saved and how the Church is ordered. Underneath the slogans lay a austere paradox he never softened: the believer is at once justified and a sinner, righteous before God by faith and unrighteous in himself, and the God who saves is most truly known not in glory but hidden under its opposite, in the suffering and the cross.

The Diet of Worms and the German New Testament

Rome answered with the bull Exsurge Domine in 1520, threatening excommunication; Luther burned it in the street at Wittenberg, and the excommunication followed in January 1521. Summoned before the emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms that spring and ordered to recant, he asked for a day, then refused: unless he were convinced by scripture and plain reason, he said, he could not and would not retract, for to act against conscience was neither safe nor right. The words long attributed to him there — Here I stand, I can do no other — are almost certainly a later embellishment, absent from the earliest records, though the defiance was real and the Edict of Worms that followed branded him a notorious heretic and an outlaw of the Empire. The ban was never effectively enforced. Frederick the Wise of Saxony had him spirited away and hidden in the Wartburg castle, and there, in the months of his disappearance, Luther did the work that may have outlasted all the rest. He translated the New Testament into German from the Greek, finishing in a matter of weeks; it was printed in 1522, and the whole Bible, Old Testament included, followed in 1534 from the Wittenberg press of Hans Lufft, the fruit of a long collaboration with Melanchthon and a circle of Hebrew and Greek scholars. The prose of that rendering — supple, spoken, made for the ear — did as much to shape the modern German language as any single book, and it put scripture, in a tongue a plowboy could read, at the center of a piety that had set the text above the priest. It was the working out, in ink and movable type, of sola scriptura: Jerome’s Latin Vulgate had carried the Bible to the medieval West in the language of the learned; Luther’s German carried it to the household.

The contested legacy

His legacy is double-edged and contested, even within the movement that bears his name. The reform he set off fractured almost at once into rival reformations he could not control — the Swiss under Zwingli and later Calvin breaking with him over the bodily presence in the supper, the radical Anabaptists and spiritualists pushing past him on baptism, church, and the sword — and the unity of Western Christendom did not survive the rupture. The man who had been condemned as a heretic was now, in turn, condemning others; the principle that scripture alone judged the church proved, in others’ hands, to license readings he abhorred, and the same conscience he had pleaded at Worms was pleaded against him. In 1525, when the German peasants rose in revolt and invoked his gospel to justify their rising, Luther turned on them with a ferocity that has never stopped troubling his admirers, urging the princes to strike the rebels down without mercy; tens of thousands died. The same year, in a gesture that scandalized friend and foe, the runaway friar married a runaway nun, Katharina von Bora, and made of the parsonage household a new model of Christian vocation. And in his later years his pen turned, more darkly still, against the Jews. The young Luther had hoped his rediscovered gospel would draw Jewish readers to Christ, and he had pressed his translators to learn Hebrew and read the Old Testament closely — even as he kept his distance from the living traditions of rabbinic and philosophical Judaism (Jewish philosophy) whose readings of those same texts diverged sharply from his own. When the conversions did not come, that hope soured into venom. The treatise On the Jews and Their Lies of 1543 called for the burning of synagogues and the expulsion of Jewish communities — a text that historians read both as the product of a late-medieval Christendom steeped in such hatred and as a genuine and grievous stain on the record, one that a later century would quote to monstrous purpose, and which Lutheran bodies have since formally repudiated. Tradition within Lutheran churches reveres him as the recoverer of the gospel; Catholic assessment, once wholly condemnatory, has in recent generations grown more measured, granting the reality of the abuses he named. In 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed a joint declaration affirming a shared understanding of the very doctrine of justification over which the schism had opened — not an erasure of the breach, but a striking measure of how far the assessment of the man and his cause had moved.

Texts and scholarship

Luther wrote enormously, in Latin and German both, and the scholarly recovery of that corpus is itself a monument. The critical standard is the Weimarer Ausgabe (D. Martin Luthers Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe), begun in 1883 on the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth and completed only in 2009 — some one hundred and twenty volumes spanning the writings, the German Bible, the letters, and the table talk recorded by his students. The principal English collection is Luther’s Works: American Edition, fifty-five volumes published by Concordia and Fortress between 1955 and 1986 under the general editorship of Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, with a continuing new series; it renders roughly a third of the Weimar corpus. The 1545 preface to the Latin works, the chief witness to the justification breakthrough, is widely available in translation; the German History in Documents and Images project hosts it in English at germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=4232. Among modern lives, Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand (1950) fixed the popular portrait for a generation; Heiko A. Oberman’s Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (1989) set him back inside the apocalyptic, devil-haunted world of the late Middle Ages he actually inhabited; and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (2003) places the rupture in the long European frame. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy carries a careful account of his thought at plato.stanford.edu/entries/luther.

For the esoteric and mystical currents this collection follows, Luther stands mostly at the boundary. He prized one strand of late-medieval German mysticism — the anonymous Theologia Germanica, which he edited and twice put into print, and the sermons of Johannes Tauler — for its teaching of self-abandonment to God and its scorn for the merit-keeping self; but he was hostile to speculation that ran past the plain text of scripture, suspicious of any claim to an inner light or a knowledge of the divine nature won apart from the word, and contemptuous of those he called Schwärmer, the enthusiasts who set the Spirit’s promptings above the letter. The German theosophists and Christian visionaries who came after — Jacob Böhme above all, whose Behmenist theosophy read God, nature, and the divine Sophia from within — worked in the religious world his break had opened while departing from much that he taught; so did the Lutheran-Paracelsian reformers, who carried his appeal from authority to experience out of the church and into the study of nature and the practice of healing. They were his heirs in a world he would not have recognized as his own. He died in 1546 in Eisleben, the town where he was born.

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