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

by Eric Metaxas

the fabled young emperor himself,

What did the elegant grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain make of

this crude, impertinent monk...

of Charles from this time give the unmistakable impression of a perfect twit, a cruel victim of spoiling and aristocratic inbreeding....

Emperor Charles himself spoke German rather poorly, so it might have been mostly for his benefit that everything was also spoken in Latin.

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, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. God help me. Amen.17

It is recorded that Frederick the Wise was particularly charmed by the Latin rendition.

hear him talk . . . and to act and proceed against him as against a notorious heretic. —Emperor Charles V

THERE ISN’T A historian the last five centuries who could argue against the idea that Luther’s stand that day at Worms—before

the assembled powers of the empire, and against the theological and political and ecclesiastical order that had reigned for centuries, and therefore against the whole of the medieval world—was one of the most significant moments in history. It ranks with the 1066 Norman Conquest and the 1215 ...

homes in on the word “conscience.” Luther declared, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.”

Luther, in saying that he could not go against conscience, was simply saying that if his own understanding, his own knowledge, as guided by plain logic and clear arguments, showed him that Scripture said one thing and anyone else—even the church—said another, he had no choice but to go with what the Scriptures said. The Word of God trumped all else. So it was not Luther’s conscience that trumped anything. It was the Word of God that trumped everything.

He therefore concluded that only the Scriptures spoke for God. The church must therefore bow to that greater authority.

they were ignoring what the Scriptures said and were asserting the naked power of the church.

Luther was trying to call the church back to its true roots, to a biblical idea of a merciful God who did not demand that we obey but who first loved us and first made us righteous before he expected us to live righteously.

This was the good news of the Gospel that the church had so horribly obscured.

first to put “individual conscience” before the authority of the church and empire. But ironically, he was not at all asserting the freedom of the individual to do as he pleased. He was asserting the freedom of the individual to do as God pleased—if

Luther was asserting the modern idea of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience for the first time in history.

the common German people had found in Luther a champion and now were clearing their throats to announce themselves.

He spoke for them—with the wit and fire of the common man—and they would certainly not stand aside while some Spanish emperor and Italian papal flunkies strove to crush one of their own.

Luther was at the Wartburg castle, and almost no one in the empire knew about it,

many soon heard about the kidnapping and wondered whether

Begun in 1067 by a Thuringian count known as Ludwig der Springer,* the Wartburg was already by Luther’s time a fabled site.

he translated the New Testament

Berlepsch settled him in a very small apartment—containing a humble and sparsely furnished living room and a tiny bedroom—that was sometimes used as a temporary prison for errant knights.

a public burning of Luther’s books. The bonfire was lit in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral and had been organized by Cardinal Wolsey

England’s Thomas More to write his Utopia in 1516,

In Paris, Francis I oversaw the public burning of Luther’s works,

accomplishing more in his ten months of seclusion than many writers do in a lifetime.

the man who had put forth all of these radical ideas was not there to oversee them first being put into practice.

If their experiences only partook of a peachy keenness, one had better beware.

Melanchthon was not on board. He knew that Karlstadt and Zwilling had not managed things well, that events had taken an unnecessarily unpleasant and strident turn.

That Luther managed to pull off the entirety of this project in eleven weeks has boggled the mind of scholars for half a millennium.

hardly considered positive. Luther relied mostly on Erasmus’s second edition of his Greek New Testament, which came out in 1519.

Although there were a number of rather turgid German New Testament translations in circulation, they had all relied on the Latin Vulgate—with its innumerable errors—rather than on the original Greek, which had not existed until Erasmus’s 1516 edition.

Old—not only succeeded in revolutionizing the Christian faith in Germany but also had the effect almost of creating a new German language.

“It was from Luther’s Bible that the

German people learned to speak the language they were t...

It is a startling fact of linguistic happenstance that a number of these dialects, which were merging to become a universal or “High” German around that time, were doing so in precisely the area of Luther’s Saxony.

By using this new language with what can only be reckoned virtuoso skill, and putting it into a book that was the only book many families would own, he helped Germans find a national voice in a way that he never particularly intended but that can never be sufficiently appreciated.

Luther also came upon terms which had no German equivalent, such as “scapegoat,” and was forced to invent a word, which he did: Sündenbock.

The city council included his dear friend Lucas Cranach and the goldsmith Christian Döring, and when they summoned him, he saw it as nothing less than a call from God himself.

To Luther, what Karlstadt and Zwilling had done smacked more of angry political protest than of humble Christian faith.

he definitively and clearly explained the issues that were dividing people and corrected the excesses that had crept in under Karlstadt and Zwilling.

No one doubted whom Luther was criticizing in these sermons.

Where Karlstadt and Zwilling had insisted that images were clearly forbidden in Scripture, Luther said no. There were cherubim on the ark, and there was a bronze serpent in the wilderness.

Luther was saying that freedom and love must be at the center of Christian

Karlstadt and Zwilling had, as it were, forced nonconformity in the same way that the pope had forced conformity.

Luther’s relationship with Karlstadt, however, was badly damaged. He was three years Luther’s senior and did not easily swallow Luther’s public rebukes of what he had been doing in Wittenberg. Zwilling, who was younger, rather quickly took Luther’s criticisms to heart and indeed mended his ways, but Karlstadt was more inclined to want to prove that Luther was wrong.