Martin Luther
Biography of Martin Luther
Luther was born in Eisleben most probably in 1485, the son of an industrious father who had risen up from below to earn a prosperous return from speculating in the mining industry, and to marry above his social standing. His wife’s family were from Eisenach and it was to this town that Luther was sent to get a good education, in the expectation that he would continue at university to become a lawyer, a profession that it was hoped would firmly place him out of poverty’s reach. He received a good education and seemed destined for the bar.
However he was a sensitive man, fearful of elemental spirits and in the midst of a fierce storm made a vow that he would enter a monastery, were he to survive. He did, and rather sensibly entered the Priory of St. Augustine in Erfurt. I say sensibly, because here he could continue his education in philosophy and theology in a manner that would not have been possible had he remained a layman. Furthermore the Augustinian Priory offered opportunities far beyond the average. He studied hard and was finally sent to Wittenberg to teach scripture to the novices of the order.
There was already a reformation afoot. In his own monastic order, the Augustinians, there was a vehement dispute between those who chose to live strictly by the rule, and those who allowed themselves a more comfortable existence. The former sought to discover a purity that they felt the Church at large had abandoned, the latter accepted the modern ways and compromises that entailed. Luther appears to have wavered but came down firmly on the stricter side. Meanwhile a new pope was getting heavily into debt. To pay for his building works he sent out peddlers in his name who sold written promises of forgiveness of sins to the living and the dead. Indeed, if the Pope, the ‘holiest man in Christendom’ was saying that for the little mint of money that an ordinary person could scratch together they could release the tortured soul of mum or dad from purgatory, then what loving son or daughter wouldn’t do so? Luther wrote out a list of 95 reasons why these promises were wrong, nailing this list to a church door in Wittenberg.
This was 1517. I imagine that Luther was not intending to do anything other than bring to the notice of the learned people in Wittenberg the real sense behind the issue. However the list caused a furore and was soon circulating all over Germany. People had swallowed the abuse for too long, and here at last was somebody prepared to call a spade a spade. Indulgences, as the promises were called, were a travesty of truth.
Luther, famous over night, was summoned to the Imperial Court, which met at different places throughout central Europe. In 1521 the Court was at Worms and there Luther was asked to withdraw his accusations against the holy church. He refused. He apparently said: ‘Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise’. It was a courageous thing to do, and Luther must have expected to die as a result, but he had some important defenders. He was ‘abducted’ by friends before the enemy could get him, and kept in secret at the Wartburg near Eisenach. In the long time that he was there he worked tirelessly on translating the Bible into German, a language that effectively didn’t exist before Luther. Each German town would have had its own dialects, blending into others, or away from others into quasi foreign languages. Luther had to create a language for this translation, and modern German was the result. Luther died in 1546.
The world changed as a result of Luther. The monopoly of power in the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor on the one hand, and the Pope on the other, was broken. There was war and revolution as the peasants revolted in the wake of the break down of authority, and if we go into the next century with the thirty year war, several million died. In the end at the Peace of Westphalia agreement was reached that allowed peace and security to return to Europe. At that peace modern Europe was born.
We take so many things for granted today, our right to disagree and advocate our point, the freedom of the press, religious freedom, the nationalities to which we belong, and the use of languages that belong to these nationalities. All of these basic things are the result of the changes that Luther wrought. The world simply changed for ever. Another hundred and fifty years after Luther came the Enlightenment. Now all truth claims could be examined, and needed to be examined. Luther had prepared the way for this bold next step. ‘I said so’ was no longer enough.
One could argue that if Luther didn’t open the door somebody else would have. This may be true. However, we don’t know this. Islam has lacked such a voice, and remains largely at the stage that Christianity was before Luther. There can be no examination of the Koran as there now is of the Bible. Scholars have come to the Bible and minutely examined it. They see four different accounts of the life of Jesus. They can put the four side by side, and sometimes make a good judgement that one scenario is more likely than another. We can say that the idea of six days of creation should not be taken literally, or that putting a whole town to the sword, man, woman and child, was not a godly thing. Islam lacks this critical analysis, and perhaps Christianity would too, were it not for Luther.
Still, Luther was no liberal and would abhor many lax modern religious stances. He anchored authority in scripture, seeing there the powerful workings of God. For him God breaks into a world that knows him not, and like a devastating whirlwind rips up trees, rends mountains, and surprises us at every turn. This God acts at the right time, in people like Moses, St. Paul or Luther. In our time God can do it again! Maranatha!