He’s been known by many titles over the years. Modern Apostle, founder of the reformation, preacher, revolutionary, gift from God…obstinate heretic…all, I suppose, have some element of truth to them. He certainly was obstinate. But its sufficient to say that his reputation does, in fact, precede him. You may have noticed the world “Lutheran” on the sign as you drove into our parking lot this morning. But the real question we’re first going to address today is just who is the Martin Luther fellow…
Sadly, a large quantity of the population have no idea who this man is, despite the fact that they enjoy the fruits of his labors. If you ask most people today who Martin Luther was, they’ll immediately talk about Martin Luther King Junior. While MLK was a great man, and I hold him in great respect and regard, he is not our focus today…maybe some other day.
Martin Luther was born to Hans and Margarethe Luther on November 10th, 1483. Their family lived in Eisleben, Germany where his father was a leaseholder of copper mines and smelters and served as one of four citizen representatives on the local council, and his mother was described as a hard working woman. The family could be considered by today’s standards as middle class, with several children to look after. Hans had plans for Martin, the eldest son of the family, and decided his boy should be a lawyer.
He sent Martin to Latin schools in Mansfeld, then Magdeburg in 1497, where he attended a school operated by a lay group called the Brethren of the Common Life, and Eisenach in 1498. The three schools focused on the so-called "trivium": grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Luther later compared his education there to purgatory and hell.In 1501, at the age of nineteen, he entered the University of Erfurt — which he later described as a beerhouse and whorehouse. The schedule called for waking at four every morning for what has been described as "a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercises.” He received his master's degree in 1505.
In accordance with his father's wishes, Luther enrolled in law school at the same university that year but dropped out almost immediately, believing that law represented uncertainty. Luther sought assurances about life and was drawn to theology and philosophy, expressing particular interest in Aristotle, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel. He was deeply influenced by two tutors, Bartholomäus Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter, who taught him to be suspicious of even the greatest thinkers and to test everything himself by experience. Philosophy proved to be unsatisfying, offering assurance about the use of reason but none about loving God, which to Luther was more important. Reason could not lead men to God, he felt, and he thereafter developed a love-hate relationship with Aristotle over the latter's emphasis on reason. For Luther, reason could be used to question men and institutions, but not God. Human beings could learn about God only through divine revelation, he believed, and Scripture therefore became increasingly important to him.
He later attributed his decision to an event: on 2 July 1505, he was on horseback during a thunderstorm and a lightning bolt struck near him as he was returning to university after a trip home. Later telling his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment, he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!" He came to view his cry for help as a vow he could never break. He left law school, sold his books, and entered a closed Augustinian friary in Erfurt on 17 July 1505.
Luther dedicated himself to monastic life, devoting himself to fasting, long hours in prayer, pilgrimage, and frequent confession.
Luther described this period of his life as one of deep spiritual despair. He said, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul."
Johann von Staupitz, his superior, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career. In 1507, he was ordained to the priesthood, and in 1508 began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg.[23]He received a Bachelor's degree in Biblical studies on 9 March 1508, and another Bachelor's degree in the Sentences by Peter Lombard in 1509.[24]On 19 October 1512, he was awarded his Doctor of Theology and, on 21 October 1512, was received into the senate of the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg, having been called to the position of Doctor in Bible.[25]He spent the rest of his career in this position at the University of Wittenberg.
But still something was missing for Martin, something just didn’t quite click. In the times he went on pilgrimages he saw first hand the outward corruption in the Vatican, and started wondering just how deep it went. As he gained steam in his education and work as an instructor, he found discrepancies between that the Vatican said was law, and what the Scripture said was right.
Now, I’m going to take a second to say that this does NOT reflect the Catholic Church as it stands today. This is the ROMAN CATHOLIC church 500 some odd years ago.
One of the things Martin Luther takes issue with is termed the Sale of Indulgences. What does this mean?
Indulgences were a way of getting bail from Purgatory. They were never meant as a forgiveness of sins, but as a lessening of the punishment incurred by sins. I could go on about What the Bible actually says about Purgatory…but that’s a different Bible study. The short of it is…say your friend commits a sin, and then dies. As a Christian, and through confession, he is forgiven by God, but his sins still put him into Purgatory for a stint, kind of like jail. It’s not as bad as Hell, but its no where near as good as Heaven. You could perform good deeds in that person’s name and that would serve as bail to get your friend’s immortal soul out of Purgatory and into Heaven. As the practice progressed, it evolved into a money making method for the Church. You could actually buy your friend’s or family’s way out of Purgatory.
By the time Luther hit the scene, the practice of selling indulgences was in full swing. But Luther found there was no scriptural basis for this practice. A guy name Johann Tetzel was really pushing indulgences with a vengeance, and Luther decided it was time to push back.
Luther wrote up a list of 95 things he found wrong with the Catholic Church, specifically focusing on indulgences, and nailed them to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenburg. Admittedly this sounds pretty radical in of itself, nailing something to the door of a Church…but in fact this was actually a common practice of that day. The door to that church looked like a bulletin board in an office break room. Luther wasn’t necessarily calling out the Pope or anyone in specific in his writings, rather he was somewhat naïve about what was really going on. He thought Tetzel was up selling the indulgences for selfish reasons. In fact, Tetzel was working under the orders from the people Luther was trying to warn.
Soon enough, the 95 Thesis were translated from their original Latin into common German, and when that hit the printing press, it spread like wild fire. Within two weeks they were all over Germany. Within two months they were all over Europe and everyone was talking about them. The Roman Catholic Church suddenly had 95 problems to deal with.
To make matters worse for the Roman Catholic Church, the thesis were not Luther’s only written work. He was an accomplished theological author, having written several texts on religion, and was a household name throughout Germany. He was so well known because he spoke to the people in the people’s language and on their level. But the church started feeling the crunch, with the sale of indulgences plummeting and fractures starting to form when people actually started comparing doctrine to scripture.
Luther was soon enough called to Worms Germany to be put on trial for heresy. Originally the church wanted him on trial in Rome so he could be convicted quickly and silenced quietly, but Frederic III of Saxony worked a bit of political magic to have the trial in Germany instead. They spread out the work of Luther before him and asked him if he was the author of those books. He confessed he was. They then told him to recant, but he asked for time to consider the situation. They gave him one day. He came back with an answer that would shake the foundations of the church:
“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.”
-Martin Luther 1521
But what scripture was he talking about? What supported his argument? What does this mean?
Please pull out your Bibles, or visit: http://www.biblegateway.com/ and read the following scriptures:
Psalm 46 (it’s a short chapter and well worth it)
Isaiah 55:1-11
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Matthew 11:12-15
John 8:31-36
Revelation 14:6-7
If you are not familiar with the site I recommended, all you have to do is cut and paste the reading tag above into the search field and it will take you right there.
What we take from those readings is that Luther believed, and rightly so, that Salvation came through Christ alone, not through any man made element. He believed this so fervently that he risked his life and accepted ex-communication and a life as an outlaw in his homeland. The church wanted him dead, and they determined that no one would be found at fault if they ended Luther. But Luther still had his friends, one of which was Frederick III, who sheltered him during this time. And Luther wasn’t idle during his exile. Luther still wrote out against the church, realizing the greatest tool he had available was the written word. He also took up another task, one that would have a lasting affect on the world.
He made the Bible, the world of God itself, available to the people. Speak if you will of the Gutenberg Bible; that was printed in Latin and for the exclusive use of the church. When Christ was crucified, the temple curtain split, allowing man access to the Glory of God, and Luther was determined to bring it over the threshold of the church and into the hands of the people. What he did was remarkable in of itself. He obtained a copy of the Bible in the original Greek, compared it to the Latin Bible, and as he wrote it into German, he corrected the errors, the mistranslations, the misinterpretations of the Latin. As he did this, he went one step further.
Germany was divided in dialects. He combined them to form a common German language that everyone could understand.
Then he went even further. He saw the church was splintering apart and did what he could to salvage it. He wrote a new litany for the church, which closely resembled the Catholic originals so that it wasn’t a complete culture shock-you can only push the mind so far- then he wrote two more books. The Large Catechism was printed for the clergy so they had a clearer understanding of the Sacraments of Faith, and a Small Catechism brought that understanding into the homes of the people so children could be taught the meanings of their faith.
I want you to take a moment and reflect on your own life. If you are like every human being on the planet, you’ve probably felt overwhelmed in your life. You probably hear about folks like Martin Luther and think “There is no way I could ever do that.” You probably look at your own world, your own little sphere, and feel sometimes you are just too small to do anything.
You want to talk about feeling small, look up a copy of the 95 Thesis. It is less than twenty pages once you get past the introduction. Take a look:
It’s so very small and yet look at the great things it caused to happen.
What does this mean?
It means that no matter how little you feel, God believes in you. That no matter how meek, small, mild mannered, and unassuming you may think you are, when you stand up for what is right, what is good, what is just, God is behind you and even the tiniest mustard seed can move a mountain. Will it be easy? No. Will you be around to see the end results? Maybe and maybe not. Will you completely understand your role in God’s plan? In all likelihood, probably not. But if you hold fast to your beliefs and are justified by Scripture and by God, no earthly force can ever truly take you down. Martin Luther began life as a man, and he left this world as a symbol, as a battle cry for the freedom to believe and learn and study and grow in faith.
Now that I’ve painted such a glowing picture of Luther, let me remind you that he was…a man. In his later years he was frustrated, besieged by illness and angered by the inflexibility of other faiths. He was just as human as you or I, but his legacy lives on. We take from him exactly what we should; the fire and passion and intelligence, and we leave behind the frustration and anger. I’ve given you a very brief biography of the man, a historical snapshot if you will, but I encourage you to research him further on your own. If you do, don’t judge him too harshly. You may find in the end you are more like Martin Luther than you ever knew.
That’s what it means.
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