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

by Eric Metaxas

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. But for good and for ill, Martin Luther was the midwife of the irrevocably divided world in which we now live.

So like some madman—and yet one who understood he had unaccountably been given the honor of great knowledge—he dedicated every subsequent second of his life and spent every calorie of energy available to spreading these world-changing tidings. He did it fearlessly, too, but not because he was traditionally brave; rather, because in this discovery, he had also come to see that death itself had been soundly and forever defeated and that this was in fact the central point of what he was saying.

We are sure of the date of his birth, November 10, and we are even sure of the hour, which was just past midnight, according to his mother. But the year, alas, eludes us. Much for this reason, Luther would heap scorn upon astrological prognostications of any kind during his life—especially those of his future co-conspirator Melanchthon, a dedicated devotee of this art. Luther always maintained that he was probably born in 1484, but neither Luther nor even his own mother could be sure, and current reckoning puts it more likely at either 1482 or 1483, with the preponderance of evidence favoring the latter, so that in the course of this book we shall use that year.

The Roman city called Borbetomagus where this Martin took the death-defying stand for his faith that set him on his path of sainthood would in the future become known as the German city of Worms. Thus, eleven centuries from when this first Martin took his Christian stand against the Roman Empire, the second Martin would take his Christian stand against the Holy Roman Empire—in precisely the same place.

Furthermore, 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.

One gets the general impression that childhood for an exceedingly sensitive and intelligent boy such as the young Martin Luther must have been an endless, fear-filled trial from which he could hardly wait to escape.

One day a kindly man ran after Luther and his friends with sausages in his hands. His intention was to give them the sausages, but Luther and his friends ran away in fear, certain that this real-life Hanswurst* somehow meant them harm. 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.

While at Magdeburg, he was placed with the Nullbrüder (Brethren of the Common Life), who were not an official monastic order but who nonetheless had gathered together in a monastic-type community and took in student boarders. They lived in relative poverty but, unlike most actual monks, did not resort to begging, choosing instead to make a living by copying books, because printing presses had not yet become commonplace. Luther would here have for the first time been exposed to lives of serious piety, and it follows that any penchant he might have had for taking God more seriously than the average student would first have been encouraged during this time.

The Schalbe family not only taught Luther that God must be at the center of life in a way that far surpassed anything he would have learned at home in Mansfeld but also exposed him to the idea that there could be a dark side to the church and that there might be some daylight between God’s idea of the church and the institution of the church itself.

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. “Christ and his apostles taught the people in that tongue that was best known to them,” he said. “Why should men not do so now?”

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.

Hus was greatly influenced by Wycliffe and 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.

The subsequent election in 1471 of Pope Sixtus would in fact catapult things dramatically in the wrong direction. Like his predecessors and successors, Sixtus saw the cry for reform only as a wearisome threat to his power, and thus with his ruby slippers kicked it away. Anyone crying out for reform must be shooed out of the room like a fly—or crushed like a beetle.

Ironically, then, it was the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Muslim aggressors that spawned what came to be the definitive response to Scholasticism. Innumerable Byzantine Greek scholars fled the region to settle in Europe, and as a result Greek and Latin studies enjoyed a great revival, leading to what we now call Renaissance Humanism, whose great cry was ad fontes! Back to the sources!

“Renaissance” means “rebirth,” and so it was not just a return to the original sources of antiquity but a new birth of all of these sources that would allow scholars to apply their newfound knowledge to these old texts. These things had been hidden and even believed lost forever, but now suddenly the doors were opened and everyone could go picking through what had been untouched for many centuries. Who knew what they might find?

the word Anfechtung really has no English equivalent. It has as its root the verb fechten, which means “to fence with” or “to duel with.” Fecht is also obviously etymologically related to the word “fight.” So Luther’s Anfechtungen meant to do battle with one’s own thoughts and with the devil. But for him this was something so horrible that it’s difficult for us to fully comprehend.

So for Luther, this Anfechtungen was a vivid picture of the nightmare of hell itself, a place in which one had indeed been utterly forsaken by God, with no end to the hopelessness.

But we can hardly doubt that the profound agony of this depression, this Anfechtungen, would have driven him in fits and starts at first and then in a kind of wild, single-minded quest to find the problem and slay it. That much he believed was possible. His faith made it possible. And 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 of his Anfechtungen, and the inescapable tortures of hell itself, so he rode on and on and would get where he meant to go or would die riding.

Luther would in time follow in the footsteps of this famous martyr, advocating for almost precisely the same things that Hus did, so his prostration for holy orders only a few feet away from the hallowed bones of the man who had kindled the fire to burn Hus was a strange beginning to his life as a monk.

“The meaning of Luther’s entry into the monastery is simply this, that the great revolt against the medieval church arose from a desperate attempt to follow the way by her prescribed.”3

Part of the difficulty that Luther would find as he trod this well-worn path was that God the Father and Jesus the Son were both principally thought of as fierce judges. So the role of comforter fell to Mary, the human one who understood us and our trials, the soft mother full of grace who could protect her beloved child from harsh and unyielding men. Although Christian doctrine had always clearly taught that Jesus himself had been fully human, and could therefore understand and sympathize with our trials and sufferings and temptations, the reality of church life at this point in history was that this part of Jesus had mostly been ignored, so that he was now thought of as every bit as distant and remote and terrible as God the Father ever had been. So only Mary, his entirely human mother, could comfort us. And not only that, but she could appeal to her harsh and perhaps indifferent son as only a dear mother could. Similarly, the faithful frequently appealed to the saints to understand human difficulties, again feeling that by dint of their humanity, they were closer to us than Jesus, who might technically have been human but who we knew was actually God. The saints would therefore be more patient with us and more desirous of helping us, and perhaps the implication was also that they had more time on their hands than God himself, who was far too busy running the vast universe to be bothered with our insignificant concerns. This way of thinking was in fact as heretical as sa...

When one considers the tone of many of Luther’s future writings, the tone of this particular letter seems nearly impossible. It is true that Luther was always deeply respectful of authority, but this letter gives us a measure of his mind-set at this time. He had been at the monastery for more than a year and was doubtless consumed with his own unworthiness.

He knew that to do what he was doing now in a state of unconfessed sin was tantamount to stepping off a cliff. Priests had a genuinely godlike role in the medieval church. They were separated from every other human being on earth in that they had the right to perform the most sacred of all acts on the planet. Luther was well aware of this and felt unworthy of this honor.

Although the theology of the Christian faith had always been that God saved us from our sins—that Jesus was the Savior, not we—and that in his mercy and love God rescued us who could not rescue ourselves, there had nonetheless crept into the reality of Christian life another idea altogether, one that was dramatically opposed to this first idea. There was in medieval Christian life the strong implication that if one could not earn one’s own salvation outright, one could certainly go a long way toward earning it, and one had better do what one could.

So the theology of the church had strayed very far from the pure idea that God saved us, and strongly implied that, on the contrary, we must save ourselves.

But precisely because he was so scrupulous and honest and clear thinking, it didn’t work. Luther’s overactive mind was constantly finding ways in which he had fallen short,

So Luther would drive himself and his confessor half-mad with his endless confessions, which seemed to make him feel no better, because he would torture himself afterward, feeling that surely he must have forgotten something.

Once the priest had heard one’s confession, he would then assign penance. For example, he might say that one was obliged to say twenty Hail Marys and forty Our Fathers or to pray the rosary so many times. Our knee-jerk modern view of this tends to be dismissive, as though these assignments were always mere rote exercises. But they were not originally intended as such. To pray the Our Father forty times over a certain period was meant to be done in a thoughtful and focused way, in which the prayer helped one to focus on God. So if the person praying did the prayers in a rote manner—simply mumbling the words to get past them and be done with the tedious assignment—that was hardly the fault of the priest who had assigned them.

So by the time they went to heaven, they had put these merits in the heavenly bank, so to speak, and, far from being in the red, were in the black. They had achieved not just the bare minimum to get them to heaven but an impressive positive balance—not of money, but of merits. So the collected merits of all the holy people in church history amounted to this tremendous treasury of merit. Who could ever imagine how vast it was? Who could say how much merit had been amassed by Jesus alone? And by Mary? And Peter and Paul and all the hundreds of saints who had ever lived? And who controlled that vast treasury of merit but the church itself? In fact, it was also called the “treasury of the church.” The church believed that Jesus had given “the keys of the kingdom” to Peter, whom it believed to be the first pope, and that those keys had been transferred from pope to pope, down through the ages, so that the church and the pope had these keys, which gave them access and authority to dip into that treasury of merits and make a withdrawal whenever they deemed it necessary. Which of course brings us to the thorny subject of indulgences.

He knew that according to all he understood of church doctrine, a sin must be recalled and confessed before it could be repented of and forgiven. But hadn’t he tried as hard as possible to find and confess every one? How did the others do it? Was he more sinful than they? He concluded that he must be and must therefore try harder yet.

Here was the central difficulty of late medieval Catholic theology: that one was brought to the place of 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. At some point, the sinner—and Luther chief among them—came to feel that he wholly deserved God’s fierce anger.

At what point did loving the church mean questioning the church? At what point did one have an obligation to boldly and forthrightly—albeit lovingly—help it see its errors? And at what point could one move from being shown one’s own errors by the church to oneself showing the church its errors?

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.

It was true that Aristotle and philosophy and reason could take us to the top of a very high mountain. But what then? They could not fashion wings for us, with which we could fly the rest of the way to God. They would leave us stranded on the top of the mountain. We could stretch and strain all we liked, but we would never touch the blueness of the sky itself. God must bring the sky to us, and therefore it must be divine revelation initiated by God to bridge this most unbridgeable of all gulfs.

They heard bits and pieces of it read aloud in Latin during the masses they attended, but the idea that there was a book containing all of these things was foreign to them, even in the decades after Gutenberg published his celebrated first Bibles. This did not mean that monks were unacquainted with much of what the Bible taught and said, but even for them biblical material was filtered by and parsed via the institution of the church, so one caught snippets here and there, but to think of them collected in the Bible itself was still rather a rare idea.

It was a plain fact that no one was really entrusted with reading the Bible by itself, so that monks and even priests and theologians were typically kept at one or more removes from it. But the new intellectual movement of Humanism—with its emphasis on reading the actual Greek and Latin and Hebrew texts of the Bible and other books of antiquity—was beginning to challenge Scholasticism and this view of the Bible that had held for many centuries.

We know that immediately upon entering the monastery, Luther was lent one that was bound in red leather, for he recollected this often in his later years. It seems that Luther did not receive the book lightly, for he not only read it but almost devoured it. He read it over and over until he was inordinately and perhaps even peculiarly familiar with it. This would of course have everything to do with the events of his future and the future itself.

This is because as odd as Luther was among the monks of his monastery in wanting to read and understand the Bible, Staupitz was nearly equally odd among the theologians of that era.

According to this entrenched academic approach, the four ways of seeing the text were: first in its literal sense; second in its topological; third in its allegorical; and fourth in its anagogic.

How this odd way of reading the Bible had arisen is beside the point, but what is not beside the point is that it surely forced students to invent interpretations that were downright wrong, that it was pedantic and tedious, and that most important it was not much use helping Luther—or anyone else—find God in or behind the words.

Luther felt that the impressiveness of the structure sacrificed the spiritual lives of the people who would come there. If feeding the Word of God to hungry flocks was the point of it all, and not mere shock-and-awe splendor, then these cavernous interiors would never do. What was the point?

It has been said that Luther went right through Italy in the middle of the Renaissance but somehow missed it.

Luther noted that Mass was said with such breathless speed that even he, who was exceedingly familiar with every word, found it utterly unintelligible. It was mystifying, as though the priests had secretly been replaced with fast-talking auctioneers. For Luther, who had revered the Mass to the point of awe and even terror, this cavalier attitude toward this holiest of privileges must have been a horror to behold. If ever one needed a picture of “dead religion” and “dead works,” here it was in all of its most legalistic ghastliness.

Staupitz saw that for Luther the Bible was not a book like Aristotle’s Ethics or like a volume of Livy or Cicero. It was something entirely apart from every book in the world. It was the living Word of God and therefore could not be read like any other book. It was inspired by God, and when one read it, one must do so in such a way—with such closeness and intimacy—that one fully intended to feel and smell the breezes of heaven. If one missed this aspect, one missed the whole point. For Staupitz, to read any other book like this was to be a fool, but to read the Bible in any other way than this was to be twice the fool. So he obviously hoped that he might persuade Luther to help him in this.

Some have speculated that Staupitz knew that being busy was one way for Luther to deal with the Anfechtungen, that in dealing with others he would be forced to take his mind off himself.

In making these observations, Luther was no doubt thinking of the innumerable hours that he and other monks had prayed the Psalms in their daily offices, sometimes reciting them with little more heartfelt understanding than a mynah bird or parrot might have done. To do that, Luther felt, not only was wrong, but actually hardened the heart against the deeper meaning. It was, in some way, blasphemous to read God’s Word in this superficial way. One must bring one’s heart and one’s whole person into it. Even Satan in the wilderness flawlessly quoted the words of God to Jesus, which of course had been blasphemy of the highest order. So without entering into God’s presence and asking for God’s understanding of the words, one was doing no better than the devil himself had done.

Anyone wishing to follow Christ must not shrink from suffering for his sake, however that suffering should manifest itself. So the idea that one could advance as a Christian merely by amassing a head full of intellectual knowledge was not only wrong but evil and perverse; it was the very reason for which Christ had railed against the Pharisees, who clearly knew the Torah backward and forward but whose lives were often at odds with what it taught. The Christian faith was an affair of the heart and of the whole person. To relegate it to the attic of mere learning was to miss the point. Luther understood this and stressed it in teaching his students.

As Luther taught the Bible from 1513 on, he often said things that were critical of how the Bible had previously been read or how the church was doing things that were not in accordance with what the Bible taught, but he never did so as someone who was itching for a larger battle. Like Erasmus and other critics of the church, he did so humbly hoping to help others see what he saw.

So Spalatin became the single and vital point at which Luther and Frederick communicated, and without Frederick, Luther’s story would be very different. It is a truly strange fact that Frederick and Luther never met but only and always communicated through Spalatin.