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In 1522, he preached 117 Sunday sermons in Wittenberg. The next year he preached 137 sermons there. And he preached many sermons on the road too.
violent Anabaptist movement.
one of his signal achievements in history would be bringing congregational singing into the church.
Personal Prayer Book,
In contrast, when we pray over and over again for the same thing, it is a sign that we do not believe God
It is vintage Luther that he says that praying over and over is in fact not only utterly useless but actually counterproductive because it demonstrates our lack of faith.
Staupitz left the Augustinians entirely and joined the Benedictines.
But how in the world to figure out the German word equivalents of such rare gems as chrysoprase, chrysolite, jasper, beryl, and carnelian? For this conundrum, he turned to his friend Lucas Cranach, who was creating twenty-one original illustrations—which were heavily influenced by Dürer—for the book of Revelation, which would be published with the New Testament itself.
September Testament.
Luther’s commentary prefaces in front of each book were for many Germans the very first explanations they had of what was in this book that had been for centuries hidden from them.
the Latin Vulgate was riddled with errors, which Luther was thrilled to discover and correct, although knowing they had been promulgated by the church for centuries must have caused him pain too.
Luther’s words in this preface so purely communicated what it meant to be “born anew” that more than two centuries hence, in May 1738, John Wesley heard them read aloud and instantly had a profound conversion experience.*
This led to Wesley’s preaching this same Gospel message on a grand scale, which had tremendous historical ramifications, including the Methodist revival of the eighteenth century, which in turn led to the conversion of William Wilberforce, who led the battle to end the slave trade in the British Empire. It also led to the ministry and preaching of George Whitefield in the American colonies, which over several decades led to the unification of the colonies under the same egalitarian ideas as those that Germans were encountering in the early sixteenth century through the preaching of Luther and
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Dominicans were so outraged to hear him and to know that the Reformation had invaded their distant country that they contrived to have him captured and killed without a trial. The subsequent story of what happened to Luther’s friend is a horrific one, and we only know the details of his brutal treatment and murder because
Luther himself wrote them in his heartbreaking essay “The Burning of Brother Henry.”
kidnap, brutalize, and then murder Henry von Zütphen
The story of Luther’s marriage begins with his having planned and arranged the daring escape of the twelve nuns from the Nimbschen convent.
He not only was waiting to give them succor in Wittenberg but had himself instigated and arranged their flight. For him, it was a moral duty, but inasmuch as it was punishable by death, it was inarguably audacious.
breaking nuns out of a convent as someone today might feel about springing someone from a federal prison: it was wrong, and it was illegal, in this case to the point of being punishable by death.
Luther’s central role in all of this is often forgotten. He was not merely the recipient of nine escaped nuns—one until death do them part—but he was the one who had managed the details of their genuinely dangerous escape, knowing that if it was successful, it would be a dramatic victory over the forces of darkness and a bold defiance of the devil and his various henchmen such as Duke George, who must have been steaming indeed when he realized what had just taken place.
Luther took the plight of those trapped in holy orders very seriously, and that of nuns especially so. He knew many of them had been put in convents as girls and had never had the slightest say in whether they wished to stay. Many were unhappy and had never voluntarily taken any vows, so the
idea that it should be illegal for them to leave struck ...
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She wrote an account of her story, telling how at age six she had been forced to go into holy orders and attempted to leave but was violently forbidden to do so.
When she escaped, Luther wrote letters to the five counts of Mansfeld, explaining that no one could or should be forced to serve God against one’s will.
He asked Spalatin to inquire among his noble friends who would donate food and clothing to the cause.
Katharine von Bora—known as Kathie—was also of noble birth,
The Cranachs’ home was so distinguished that for a time during this period they hosted the exiled king of Sweden, Christian II, who was the emperor’s brother-in-law.
Müntzer is one of those cases in history when a madman rises to power and draws others into his madness,
Müntzer, like all utopianists, was divorced from reality
Luther rightly saw that freedom and truth and love cannot be separated. They partake of each other, and whenever they are divided from each other, the devil gains a foothold and violence enters.
freedom became license and then bondage.
But in Müntzer, there was a utopianist urge to utterly nullify all state authority,
Karlstadt. He had also allowed an atmosphere that ended in the burning of images and the destruction of altars.
Müntzer and the Zwickau prophets, all of whom pushed a kind of forced egalitarianism that smacked more of pure social ferment and anger at the nobles than of the Gospel of Christ.
reliance on “hearing from God” via inner voices and revelation that was unmoored from the Scriptures and therefore wide open to excess and theological confusion.
radical journeymen weavers of the town. It was from being in their circle that he presumably developed his ideas of a revolution of the working classes against the nobility.
Luther thought Müntzer insane.
Luther knew that Müntzer’s time in Wittenberg had set him on this course, just as it had set Karlstadt on his, and it bothered him deeply that what was born of his own good efforts could lead to such madness.
“the godless have no right to live except as the elect are willing to grant it to them.”
Luke 19, Müntzer misread the context of the final line—“But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”
Müntzer also made it clear that Luther must be one of those slaughtered.
He called him “Brother Fattened-Hog”—and Melanchthon “Brother Soft-Life”10—and derided Luther for his love of pleasure and for living only “to devour juicy morsels at court.”
Müntzer threatened unleashing the peasant hordes.
All must either accept his gospel or confess themselves heathen and die. There is nothing quite like religious madness, and that it is a foretaste of hell can hardly be debated.
Karlstadt immediately saw that Müntzer was about to do what everyone had feared, to lead an armed “people’s” revolt against the nobles, and so he promptly tore up the letter.
Karlstadt had never promoted violence, and two days later he wrote to Müntzer, firmly refusing to participate and counseling him to cease and desist from his martial plans.
Luther rightly believed they hadn’t heard the last of him.
Highly Necessary Defense and Answer Against the Soft-Living Flesh of Wittenberg, Which in Miserable and Perverted Fashion Has Soiled Poor Christendom Through the Theft of Holy Scripture.
The princes bleed the people with usury and count as their own the fish in the stream, the bird of the air, and the grass of the field, and Dr. Liar says, “Amen!” What courage has he, Dr. Pussyfoot, the new pope of Wittenberg, Dr. Easychair, the basking sycophant?
mystical idea of hearing God’s voice.
