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

by Eric Metaxas

make thee into a great nation, and I will bless thee, and magnify thy name, and thou shalt be a blessing.” So the Spirit tells me, and so I hope the future will be for you, my Philip, my work and my consolation.20 When he arrived at Witt...

Luther was mightily impressed. In his letter to Spalatin, he wrote, Four days after he had arrived, he delivered an extremely learned and absolutely faultless address. All esteemed and admired him greatly . . . [so w]e very quickly turned our minds and eyes from his appearance and person to the man himself. We congratulate ourselves on having this man and marvel at what he has in him. . . . I certainly do not wish to have a different Greek instructor as long as he is alive. I only fear that perhaps his constitution is not sturdy enough for the rough way of life in our region.21

One is bookish, slim, and diffident; the other stout, brash, and folksy. Later in life, Luther took on the familiar ox-like physical appearance that suited his personality, and the two of them would make a spectacularly effective odd couple in the years ahead.

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Melanchthon lost in thought—and in a dramatically oversized coat—underscores both his scholarly detachment from the world as well as his ethereal frame. (Note Cranach’s signature flying serpent glyph beneath the date.)

For now, however, Melanchthon’s job was simply to teach the Wittenberg students Greek, and this he did, with a passion and brightness that drew

them by the h...

LUTHER KNEW THAT if he was forced to go to Rome, he would face death.

the pope was at the time far more a prince—and at this time a prince in the worldly Florentine Medici mold—than anything else, so that his life’s focus and that of those around him consisted principally of manipulating worldly power.

The elegant evil of the Medici popes sometimes makes Machiavelli himself come across like a gap-toothed rube.

Frederick was already displeased with the way Rome was spe...

at the top of the agenda was a so-called Turkish tax, which was supposed to help pay for the considerable military efforts against the Muslim armies, who had been expanding ever westward for many decades.

Maximilian was also obsessed with ensuring that when he died, he would be succeeded by his grandson Charles I of Spain. His own son Philip the Handsome, who

was Charles’s father, had died in 1506. Maximilian wanted at all costs to prevent Francis I of France from becoming the next emperor, and he enlisted the help of the immeasurably wealthy Fugger family to bribe the seven electors in this direction.

Frederick the Wise was also on the list of those who might well be the next emperor. But for his own reasons, Pope Leo X did not want Charles I to be the next emperor, so he ...

The nationalistic and territorial side of things was at issue too. The Italians must be held at bay in their obvious zeal to take over the empire and must be given periodic demonstrations of the limits of their power. So in the end, Maximilian decided that Luther should be tried not in Rome but in Germany.

Luther well knew that he might in a few days be condemned to death.

the German princes were quite clear about their displeasure with the church’s endless demands for money.

the German estates resoundingly chose not to pay the new Turkish tax. They declared they had had enough of these Crusades and fighting the infidels.

They also protested at how “German money in violation of nature flies over the Alps.”

“Let the Holy Pope stop these abuses.”

Frederick had succeeded in getting a private meeting between Luther and Cajetan, but he was afraid—and rightly so—that the emperor and Cajetan might conspire to seize Luther, put him in chains, and bundle him off to Rome.

If the pope had declared indulgences to be doctrinally sound, they were then by definition doctrinally sound. So Luther must simply recant that he had not accepted the pope’s unquestioned authority.

So on October 12, Luther traveled to the Fuggers’ fabulous palatial residence, accompanied by three monks from the Carmelite monastery and by Wenceslas Linck.

The Latin word for “recant,” revoco, was all that was necessary. Luther would say this word, or he would be brought to Rome and presumably fed to the flames and, far worse, would be consigned to those infinitely more horrible flames that are eternal and that are reserved for the devil and his angels.

How could he recant unless he knew what it was that he had said that required recanting?

But Martin Luther had not spent the last fifteen years shucking corn. He knew the bull very well indeed, and countered brilliantly by informing the cardinal that the bull of 1343 said no such thing as the cardinal was maintaining that it said.

He saw that the cardinal cared not a fig for the Holy Scriptures, and quite seriously maintained that church decrees superseded them.

desperately hoped could not be true: that the greatest minds of the church were genuinely unaware of having become unmoored from the rock of the Scriptures and were even indifferent to this.

Frederick had himself invested much of his life and treasure in the idea of indulgences.

Staupitz was by this time in Salzburg, Austria, and in an extraordinary letter he invited the reprobate Luther to take refuge with him there:

The world hates the truth. By such hate Christ was crucified, and what there is in store for you today if not the cross I do not know. You have few friends, and would that they were not hidden for fear of the adversary. Leave Wittenberg and come to me that we may live and die together. The prince is in accord. Deserted, let us follow the deserted Christ.9

He seems very clearly to have made the distinction in his mind between the true church of God and that vast bureaucratic political entity centered in Rome called the church.

For an Augustinian monk to see that things had moved to where the center of Western Christendom was doing more harm to the name of Christ than the Islamic warriors making their way west with frightening force and violence said much.

Rome decided that it desperately needed to get on the good side of Frederick the Wise of Saxony for several reasons—to gain his favor with regard to the selection of the next emperor, to get his approval of the so-called Turkish tax, and, almost certainly the most important of all at this time, to get him to turn over that rascal in a monk’s habit who had turned the world upside down over indulgences—it was decided to confer upon this most loyal son of the church this exceedingly gracious favor.

Everywhere he stopped along the way, he saw that the public sentiment in Germany was disturbingly, was overwhelmingly for Luther.

It was not possible from Scripture to find any evidence that it had been divinely ordained.

he became convinced that the church had for four hundred years been in a kind of Babylonian captivity,

The debate itself was slated to begin June 27, but on that very same day the imperial diet had chosen the nineteen-year-old scion of the Hapsburg dynasty, Charles I of Spain, as the new Holy Roman emperor. He replaced his deceased grandfather, Maximilian I, and would himself become Emperor Charles V.

The German estates at the diet had initially chosen none other than Saxony’s own Frederick the Wise, but Frederick knew that any German prince would not have sufficient power to maintain the empire properly, so he self-sacrificially threw his vote to the young Charles of Spain, even though Pope Leo had desperately hoped he would not do this.

the new emperor would be too occupied with duties in Spain to bother much with Germany,

He came out decisively for the idea that the Bible must supersede the church,

He also derided the doctrine of purgatory, asking where in the Bible it could be found.

Luther to begin calling the pope anti-Christ. To stand where only Christ should stand was to be anti-Christ.

Because of some attacks on Erasmus and because his style in the debate had been so nakedly aggressive and polemical, Eck’s reputation immediately suffered, while Luther’s grew.

from now until Luther’s death, Eck would be his implacable and persistent foe.

The debate had made Duke George a dedicated opponent of Luther’s too, and he would remain so until his own death in 1539.

Luther’s writings, on the contrary, began to sell well, making printers and publishers very happy and zealous to print

reestablishing the biblical idea that everyone who has faith in Christ is equal and that the church’s position that priests are somehow different from the people in the pews is wrong.

Between October 1519 and October 1520, he would write three of his major works, one after the other. The first of these was titled To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, the second The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and the third The Freedom of a Christian.

“The time for silence is over!” he had written. “The time to speak has come!”