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

by Eric Metaxas

Martin Luther King. His five-year-old son was also named Michael—and

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

sinner to redeem himself,

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.

Procrustean

anagogic

obfuscation

Frederick the Wise’s Relics

burning bush itself.

thorn from the crown

Christ included a swatch of his swaddling clothes,

vial containing drops of milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary.

complete skeleton of one of the infants killed by Herod

the very feather of an angel!

“If our Lord God in this life—in this shit house—has given us such noble gifts, what will happen in that eternal life, where everything will be perfect and delightful?” So “in this life” is clarified as “in this shithouse,” meaning in this execrable, this abominably shitty, life.6

For Luther, any appeal to Mary and the saints instead of to Jesus himself became a satanic twisting of the holiest and highest truth in the universe. It was therefore anti-Christ, and he knew that to expose it as such was the most important

As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, The soul from purgatory springs.*

A contemporary of Luther’s named Myconius recounted the following hilarious incident regarding Tetzel: After Tetzel had received a substantial amount of money at Leipzig, a nobleman asked him if it were possible to receive a letter of indulgence for a future sin. Tetzel quickly answered in the affirmative, insisting, however, that the payment had to be made at once. This the nobleman did, receiving thereupon letter and seal from Tetzel. When Tetzel left Leipzig the nobleman attacked him along the way, gave him a thorough beating, and sent him back empty-handed to Leipzig with the comment that this was the future sin which he had in mind. Duke George at first was quite furious about this incident, but when he heard the whole story he let it go without punishing the nobleman.

Luther Is Married, Aetatis 41

Odder far than the idea that these marriages were consummated before the weddings was the idea that they must be consummated in full view of a witness.

where Jonas did the curious honors, watching the two become one flesh literally and figuratively. He wept to see it, knowing the huge significance of it all on every level.