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No one wished people to be puffed up with religious pride, but neither should one invite Dionysus with his thyrsus into St. Peter’s to lead maenads in bacchanalian revelry. The woeful news coming out of Germany indicated that this was happening already.
. It terribly pains me, as it must all good men, that your arrogant, insolent, rebellious nature has set the world in arms. . . . I would wish you a better disposition were you not so marvelously satisfied with the one you have.
The Catholic church had always taught that the priest was able via his singular spiritual authority to transform the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood—literally.
he blamed the church for importing Aristotle’s unchristian philosophy into places where it had no business existing.
Luther, in creating the worship services for the new Reformation church, sought to bring every kind of good music into God’s service and sought to bring the “priesthood of all believers” into God’s choir in church.
before Luther introduced it, there was no congregational singing in churches.
THE YEAR 1527 began with Luther calling King Henry VIII of England a Satan
never-ending medical difficulties for Luther.
(“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”).
The spiritual darkness sometimes felt so strong that he said he was sure they were dealing not with mere demons but with the prince of demons himself.
mastered the fine art of misusing all their freedom.
his grief led him to write what is one of his greatest works, called The Large Catechism.
Muslim Turks in Hungary and Austria,
The Turks had already conquered all of Greece and much more. Suleiman the Magnificent was now pushing to extend his caliphate—and what we now call sharia law—all the way to the Rhine and would very soon be attacking Vienna.
his imperial forces had repelled the Turks at the gates of Vienna in October 1529.
the end of monastic communities.
Melanchthon had written what has come to be known as the Augsburg Confession,
Luther went on to say they had already done more than should be expected: they had “rendered unto Caesar” by appearing at the diet and faithfully doing all they had done, and they had “rendered unto God” by preparing the Augsburg Confession,
The translation of the Bible moved forward apace, and the entire extraordinary work would be published in a single volume in 1534.
Luther’s theology never pushed forward on this issue of the precise boundaries between church and state, so those who belonged to the church—which is to say all true Christians—were not given clear parameters on when they were permitted to take up arms against the state. Dietrich Bonhoeffer would four centuries later bump up against this again and would do his best to resolve the dilemma and formulate a solution, but by then he was so far ahead of the Lutheran ministers in Germany that they could not follow him, and the National Socialists had no resistance from the churches and were able to
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Three months later, Luther wrote to Thomas Cromwell, at that time the most powerful man in England—save the king—and one of the chief architects of the English Reformation.
In June, when the shocking news of Anne Boleyn’s trial and subsequent beheading made its way to Wittenberg,
In that same year of 1536, Erasmus died.
in Antwerp, the English Reformer William Tyndale was imprisoned and questioned by the same man—Jacob van Hoogstraten—who had questioned and murdered the Lutheran priests so many years before.
while bound to the stake, he was first strangled to death before his body was burned. He had dared to write against Cardinal Wolsey and against K...
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he had translated the Bible into English and smuggled many copies into England and Scotland, spreading the Reformation there.
Lenchen died in her father’s arms at 9:00 a.m. It was September 20. Melanchthon was there, as was Kathie, who reportedly sobbed uncontrollably for days. And young Hans was likely there, as was George Rörer. When Lenchen was placed into her coffin, Luther said, “Go ahead and close it! She will rise again on the last day!” And when the coffin was carried out of their home, he said to those in attendance, “Do not be sorrowful! I have sent a saint to heaven!” Then he recalled their infant Elisabeth, who had died fourteen years before, and said, “In fact, I have now sent two of them!”
it was always around death that Luther’s faith shone brightest.
Without question, one of the most bizarre episodes of Luther’s life concerns his writings at the very end of his life on the subject of the Jews.
On the Jews and Their Lies, he angrily advocates setting fire to their synagogues, destroying their houses, and even confiscating their prayer books and money.
If it hadn’t been for the Nazis, almost no one would ever have heard of these writings.
a political malevolence would rise up in his beloved Germany and that its most diabolical proponents would ferret out from the mountains of his writings those few passages of his most injudicious writings to aid their cause.
That the Nazis’ cynical master of propaganda would find the few vile words Luther had written against Jews and broadcast them to the world, ignoring the 110 volumes of Luther’s other writings, is of course fathomlessly cynical.
If he had bided his time those many years only to tempt Luther to give in to his basest emotions, he was successful, for what he accomplished not merely would help the Nazis justify what they did to the Jews, which is itself the standard by which we measure human evil, but also would cause millions to read with a jaundiced eye every good thing Luther had ever written before.
much of what he wrote took its lead from books such as Victory over the Godless Hebrews, written by a Carthusian monk named Salvagus Porchetus around 1300.
Luther also believed that Jews really did poison wells and abduct children for ritual murders and that they would lead others away from Christ with these terrible lies,
Luther commissioned Cranach to create a dozen woodcuts depicting the extraordinarily vulgar and disgusting things Luther had written about.
He was sixty-two years old. His eldest, Hans, was nineteen; Martin was fourteen; and Paul was thirteen.
On January 23, Luther said good-bye to Kathie and their remaining daughter, Margaret, who was then eleven, and with his boys began the trip to Eisleben.
the Mansfeld counts sent a troop of sixty horsemen to escort Luther and his party.
“fontanelle”—meaning
“The devil does this to me every time I intend and ought to undertake something important.
his final words would be preached sitting down, for sometime during this last sermon his ill health overtook him. He even ended the sermon earlier than he had wished, saying, “This and much more might be said concerning this Gospel, but I am too weak and we shall let it go at that.”6 This was his final sentence from a pulpit.*
In these sermons, he contrasted this idea with the faith of the papists and the Jews and the Turks, in which one must earn God’s favor and make one’s way to heaven through one’s own efforts.
Word had gotten out that Luther was dying, and more people came to stand vigil.
“I think I will stay here at Eisleben where I was born and baptized.”
It was obvious to all that he had died peacefully.
Luther would not be buried here in Eisleben after all. This was because the Mansfeld counts had been outranked and overruled by the elector, who insisted that Luther be brought back home to Wittenberg and buried there, in the Castle Church, on whose doors he had posted his theses nearly three decades before. So the afternoon of the twentieth, Luther’s coffin was set in a wagon, and the church bells tolled as the wagon—accompanied by fifty horsemen—bore Luther’s body from the city of his birth, and now his death too. Around five that afternoon, the procession reached Halle, where a tremendous
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on the morning of the twenty-second, at around 9:00, the procession reached Wittenberg.
Melanchthon gave the eulogy, lifting Luther up as one of the greatest figures in history:
