Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

by Eric Metaxas

And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, and self-government all entered history through the door that Luther opened to the future in which we now live.

When he made it clear that he feared God’s judgment more than the judgment of the powerful figures in that room, he electrified the world.

How dare anyone, much less a mere monk, imply there could be any difference between them?

Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty responsibility before God of doing so.

he became the very man who brought about everything he had hoped to avoid.

It was Rome’s mystifying inflexibility that drove Luther to bolder and bolder public positions, eventually putting him beyond rapprochement and setting him along a path that will forever be debated either as heretical and ignominious or as orthodox and glorious.

How can history reconcile the intense and dourly over-pious monk of his earlier years with the bold, courageous, and even sometimes raucous joke-and-insult-producing machine of later years?

many thought he must be demon possessed—or at least simply mad.

Luther’s upbringing, from all we know, was about as typical as can be,

So much passed between them over the years that Erikson’s assertion comes across as dishonest cherry-picking in the service of a modish Freudian narrative.

There is ample evidence that Luther loved his father and that Luther’s father loved his son.

Even more, he says, “through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.”

Luther’s mature recollections have more than a little editorial English on the ball and must be understood as an often irascible older man making a particularly sharp point about an event from decades earlier, rather than as a simple and placidly indifferent recounting of the facts.

Luther used this as an illustration of how even when God reached out to us in love and grace, we are often so suffused with the idea of him as a stern judge bent on punishing us that we tragically shrink from his loving grasp, thus to our own sad detriment denying ourselves the very thing for which we long.

Franciscan monk Johannes Hilten, who was at that time imprisoned in the Eisenach monastery for his pronounced criticisms of the church.

We must not tolerate a simplistic view of church history, as though there had been no dissent until the Great Day of Martin Luther.

Many others had done as much to bring the church back to its true and only roots and had failed.

Wycliffe also worked with others to translate the Old Testament and was as passionate in his day as Luther would be in his own that everyone should know the Gospels in his own spoken language.

There is no question that Luther’s future ability to have his own vernacular German translation of the Bible printed en masse would dramatically help him in the wider work of reformation that Wycliffe had hoped for in his own time.

Wycliffe died of a stroke in 1384 while in the very act of saying Mass, but at the Council of Constance in 1415 he was posthumously denounced as a heretic, and in 1428 his bones were exhumed from their “Christian burial” and burned.

Hus was greatly influenced by Wycliffe

spoke strongly against indulgences and the papacy, specifically criticizing the pope for his use of military power, holding that the church could not wield the sword.

But many inside the Vatican itself knew how corrupt the church had become and how badly reform was needed.

During Luther’s years as a teenage student at Eisenach, the pope in Rome was Alexander VI, perhaps the most depraved of all the many depraved pontiffs

Erfurt, Aetatis 17

we cannot doubt that even if he had never thought of it before then, he would during these years first have begun considering the idea of a life in holy orders.

Today most regard Scholasticism as a fussy, over-formalized way of instruction that was fatally removed from practical life issues.

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” This was no hyperbolic joke but something that the Scholastics earnestly debated.

Renaissance Humanism, whose great cry was ad fontes! Back to the sources!

The Bible was of course central to all of these new developments.

Erasmus of Rotterdam would play the central role in restoring the New Testament to its original Greek, making the raw and original words of the first Christians available to a new generation.

After only three semesters at Erfurt, Luther attained his baccalaureate degree, passing the examination on September 29 (Michaelmas Day), 1502.

He was ready to take the master’s exam as early as December 1504,

the mythic notion that his idea of entering the monastery was exclusively delivered by a lightning bolt from the sky near Stotternheim can hardly be the whole story.

It is easy for the modern mind to forget that at all times in history before our own the imminence of sudden death loomed heavily, especially for anyone thoughtful or sensitive, and Luther was both.

Luther’s Anfechtungen meant to do battle with one’s own thoughts and with the devil.

if we wonder in the future chapters of his life and this book what it was that made Luther more than anyone else persist and persist where others had failed, it is this despair that must be our answer.

He had no patience for theological bromides and had no fear of being burned at the stake.

That would have been less painful than the deep soul agony o...

...of his Anfechtungen.

the great revolt against the medieval church arose from a desperate attempt to follow the way by her prescribed.”

“treasury of merit.”

in their lives sinned so little and had done so many good works that they had in fact amassed a surplus of merit.

The idea of indulgences comes from the treasury of merit.

Indulgences became a surefire income stream that in time became an absolute necessity.

We can only imagine the moment when Sixtus realized that as pope he was able to decree that the infinite treasury of merits could be sold not just for sins committed by people living but to people who wanted to use them to alleviate the sufferings of their relatives in purgatory.

He did not yet understand that there really was no bottom, that we were sinful all the way down.

Here was the central difficulty of late medieval Catholic theology:

understanding one’s sinfulness and one’s unworthiness before God but was not told what to do at that moment of understanding except to lie paralyzed with hopelessness, to confess and try harder.

But at some point between the writings of Aristotle and the writings of Saint Augustine, Luther saw a small thread sticking out, and he decided to pull at it.

what Luther himself said many times was that the study of the Bible per se was simply unheard of in his early years as a monk.