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

by Eric Metaxas

And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, and self-government all entered history through the door that Luther opened to the future in which we now live. Luther is principally known for two iconic events that precipitated all else.

When he made it clear that he feared God’s judgment more than the judgment of the powerful figures in that room, he electrified the world.

How dare anyone, much less a mere monk, imply there could be any difference between them? Since time immemorial, such men had spoken for God and for the state. But Luther defied them, humbly but boldly, in a watershed moment in world history. Those of us in the West have lived on the far side of it ever since.

Suddenly the individual had not only the freedom and possibility of thinking for himself but the weighty

responsibility before God of doing so.

Oedipus—he

heart. 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

But not a single one of these seven things is true. They are each sloppy glosses on the actual facts and have over time congealed and finally ossified into the marmoreal narrative that has existed for half a millennium.

by simple faith one could accept God’s diagnosis and solution to the otherwise insoluble problem, and at the moment one did this, the problem was instantly solved.

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.

Before we pluck Martin’s woven basket from the cattails and proceed further, we should add that Luther’s name was originally not Luther at all but Luder or Ludher. Luther changed it at some point later in life, although precisely when and why is unclear. His father and mother eventually incorporated the change to their own names, probably because of their son’s increasing fame, and perhaps also because the word Luder had a number of unattractive associations they preferred to leave behind and thereby relegate to the squint-eyed netherworld of historical footnotes.*

The reason for this is that her womb was said to have borne two inestimable jewels. From her own womb had come Mary, and then from Mary’s womb had come Jesus. Anyone whose womb had produced these eternal treasures could hardly be improved upon as a patron saint for those making their livings searching for treasures themselves.

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.

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.

Wilhelm had so utterly forsaken the trappings of this world, even those of a prince, could not have failed to captivate the sensitive young man, whose extraordinary introspection, as would be so powerfully evidenced in later years, would place a powerful check on the worldly ambitions his father had carefully planned for him.

Luther was already at the very young age of fourteen ensconced in the life of a wealthy, well-connected young man with tremendously bright prospects.

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.

Johannes Hilten, who was at that time imprisoned in the Eisenach monastery for his pronounced criticisms of the church.

Hilten predicted in his apocalyptic writings that a man would arise in the year 1516 who would fight to reform the church—and who would succeed—and who would end the centuries-long reign of the monks.

But in his story we may again see that the idea of a holy man standing against the church was not at all a foreign one.

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.

But in all of these things, they had lacked a champion who would fight and win.

The earliest dramatic and well-known example comes from the thirteenth century when the nobleman’s son who one day became Saint Francis heard God’s voice say, “My house is in ruins. Restore it!”11 Between Francis and Luther, there were numerous figures within the church who had tried to bring reform, although some of them, far from being lauded like Francis, had rather because of their efforts been denounced as heretics and excommunicated and gruesomely immolated.

Of course the printing press would not be invented until about 1450, and the first book printed would be the now famous Gutenberg Bible of 1455, in the Latin Vulgate edition. 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.

What’s more, the devil’s hordes in the shape of the Turks were on the march, and Domenico and many others knew that if things in Rome did not change dramatically, all of Christendom would be lost to the martial religion of Muhammad.

Alexander declined to lobby for the golden throne, which was the accepted corrupt practice of that time, but simply leaped ahead of his competitors by purchasing it outright with cash.

Only one year before he began his legal studies, in 1504,* Martin had been traveling home to Mansfeld for Easter when the student’s sword that he carried—and that many students carried in those days—somehow badly cut his leg, severing a main artery. The bleeding was clearly life threatening, and so Luther’s traveling companion quickly ran to the nearby town to summon a doctor.

cried out to Saint Mary in prayer, begging her to spare his life.

the wound reopened and he bled copiously once more. Luther feared for his life, again crying out to Mary to spare him. And

He clearly had much time to rest and think about twice leaning over the pit of death.*

In April 1505 and then later in that year, two young Erfurt lawyers were swept from this life by the plague, which had freshened its attacks in that region.

village of Stotternheim,

Luther collapsed to the wet ground in abject terror and cried out to Saint Anne. “Hilf du, Sankt Anna!” he shouted. “Help me, Saint Anne!”

“Ich will ein Mönch werden!” he shouted. “I will become a monk!” He

To make the decision more final, he even sold his Corpus Juris.

It would beget violence and would even reshape nations and empires, and would paint the panorama of the future in as yet unimaginable colors. But first, Luther had to become a monk. The following morning, accompanied by a number of his friends, who even now persisted in entreating him to change his mind, the young man made his way to the door of the Augustinian cloister of Erfurt and presented himself there to take holy orders.

It has been said that the Augustinians in Erfurt were known to be a strict order and that that would have appealed to him.

They were also known for their devotion to theology, which also might have appealed to him. But these must remain speculations.

prostrating himself upon the tile floor, which remains there to this day.

A hundred years earlier, at the Council of Constance, it was Zacharias who had most vigorously attacked the theology of the Bohemian Jan Hus, who was soon thereafter burned at the stake for heresy, most say as a direct result of Zacharias’s zealous efforts.

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.

Thus it was precisely one year to the day after this that was fixed for Luther’s ordination: April 4, 1507. After that looming milestone, Luther would be able to celebrate Mass.

By this time, relations with Luther’s father had improved enough that Luther invited him.

The most recent scholarship suggests it was two of his younger sons who had died during this period—for the plague struck Mansfeld hard in 1505, the year of Luther’s entrance into the monastery—so it might well have been the horror of losing two of his boys that brought Hans Luther to some kind of repentance, or perhaps simply to a deeper appreciation of his

No one knows whether Luther’s celebration of the Mass came across as halting to those there as witnesses, nor whether any of them noticed his uncomfortableness and anxiety. But there were in attendance people from every part of his life.

His father’s response to this was a shocking one. “You learned scholar,” he said, “have you never read in the Bible that you should honor your father and your mother? And here you have left me and your dear mother to look after ourselves in our old age.”

Is it not also possible that the event was so festive and such a palpable relief from two years of unspoken tension that Luther’s question was asked half in jest? And that his father’s response was less a withering public rebuke, made awkwardly in front of the gathered assemblage, than a “you should talk” tu quoque riposte, made in the same semi-jesting spirit?

To pray the Our Father forty times over a certain period was meant to be done in a thoughtful and focused way, in which

But beyond this concept was another concept that the church has called the “treasury of merit.” The church taught that some special people, such as the saints and Jesus, had been not merely able to get back to zero but had in their lives sinned so little and had done so many good works that they had in fact amassed a surplus of merit.

They had achieved not just the bare minimum to get them to heaven but an impressive positive balance—not of money, but of merits.