Martin Luther

• Martin Luther was a Northern German Augustinian monk whose inability to reconcile his own beliefs with the practices and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church led to the Protestant Reformation. Born in Eisleben in 1483, Luther was the son of hard-working, middle-class Saxon parents. He was a bright and dedicated student, and was especially concerned with his faith. Luther struggled with what he perceived to be his own innate sinfulness, afraid he was perhaps unworthy of God's acceptance. In 1505, just after receiving his law degree, Luther was traveling between Erfurt and Eisleben when he encountered a violent thunderstorm. Scared by the lightning, Luther threw himself to the ground and made a vow to St. Anne, the mother of Mary, that he would become a monk if she allowed him to survive the storm. Luther survived, and two weeks later he joined an Augustinian monastery in Erfurt.

• Luther was a devout and introspective monk who could not accept the woeful, corrupt state of the Church. He was ordained a priest in 1507, and received his doctorate in theology only 5 years later. Luther had many questions about Catholic rituals and doctrine. While teaching and studying at the University of Wittenberg, he was troubled by the Church teaching that salvation was attainable through good acts. While studying St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, Luther came across the passage, "By faith are you saved." He interpreted that to mean by faith alone is one saved, and this insight changed his whole understanding of the relationship between God and humans. Luther no longer saw God as a judge with whom one could barter for eternal life. Instead, he believed that the key to salvation was in the acceptance that humans are inherently sinful and therefore incapable of the good works necessary to attain salvation. He argued that no matter how many good works people perform, they aren't guaranteed salvation, which can only be gained through sincere faith and God's grace, or compassion for the repentant sinner.

• Luther's justification by faith, as this theory was called, opened his eyes to the many abuses of the Church, which he saw not only as corruption but as insulting to God.  Chief among the abuses was the selling of indulgences. In 1517,
Pope Leo X allowed Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, Germany, to hold three Church offices at one time. To pay the pope the enormous fee for the positions, Albrecht took out a loan from the famous Fugger banking house of Augsburg. Albrecht then employed a Dominican monk, named Johan Tetzel, to come to Saxony to sell indulgences. Leo X arranged with Albrecht that one half of the proceeds from Tetzel's sales would go directly to the Fugger bank to pay off the loan, while the other half would be earmarked for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Church in Rome. Tetzel claimed that his indulgences could not only grant penance for sins already committed, but also for sins committed in the future. Luther was outraged.
In response, he wrote a document, now called the Ninety-Five Theses, that he hoped would lead to debate on the issue of Church abuses. The Ninety-Five Theses called into doubt the validity of indulgences. Many years after the Ninety-Five Theses were written, Philip Melanchthon, a long-time companion to Luther, claimed Luther had nailed them to the main door of the Wittenberg church. It is more likely that he posted them on a side door of the same church, but in any case he started more than a debate: his questions precipitated a revolution that split the western Christian world.

• Luther's Ninety-Five Theses were meant simply to create discussion about reform, but buried beneath the complex theology was the kernel of his dissent: that Christians did not need the Church to attain salvation, because faith alone mattered. Luther's views attracted many Germans who resented Italian control of the Church hierarchy, the pope's meddling in political affairs, and the sacrilegious nature of some Church practices and teachings. Many German princes saw Luther's reforms as a way to escape from papal control of the Holy Roman Empire. Within a year, Rome ordered Luther to report to the Church officials in Rome to explain his views. The secular leader of Saxony, Prince Frederick I, who sought to reduce papal power, advised Luther not to go and promised to protect him within his state. In 1520, Pope Leo X issued a formal document of excommunication that gave Luther 60 days to recant. Luther burned the Papal order in the square at Wittenberg, and was in tum excommunicated. Luther had officially broken with the Church.

• Luther then expanded his arguments against the Church. He published 24 books and pamphlets in which he claimed that all Christian men were as good as priests, and that the Church, especially the pope, held no special position of power. He said that congregations should be allowed to choose their own ministers, and that the worship of saints and holy days was sacrilegious. He proclaimed that only baptism and Eucharist were sacraments. He urged that liturgies be held in German, and he began the long and difficult task of translating the Bible into German. He also held that clergy should be allowed to marry. His beliefs had grown from outrage at the selling of phony indulgences to a call for a new Christian Church.

• Luther's reforms touched off widespread revolt in Germany.  At first, Luther himself supported German princes who agreed with him and renounced the Catholic Church. He supported the seizing of Church land, the refusal to pay Church fees, and the use of slanderous imagery to attack the Church. But, when in 1524 bands of peasants began ransacking monasteries and castles alike, Luther was appalled. The Peasants' Rebellion, as the uprising was called, had been inspired by Luther's ideas, but he had never agitated for armed class struggle. In his treatise "Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants," he wrote: "So let anyone who can, strike, kill, or stab [the rebels] secretly or openly, recalling that nothing can be more venomous, damaging, or demonic than a rebel." More than 100,000 rebel peasants were killed, and their leaders tortured and hanged. Despite this turn of events, Luther's ideas continued to create change in Europe.

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor during Luther's career as a reformer, was a devout Catholic who struggled to contain the spread of Luther's ideas. In 1521, he summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms, a meeting of all German princes from the Holy Roman Empire. Luther was asked to abandon the views expressed in his many published works. Luther claimed he would not do so unless Scripture could prove him wrong. Charles V did his best to prove him wrong, but instead was forced to accept that too many German princes were in favor of Luther's views. In 1529, Charles attempted to force all German states to re-institute Catholic practices; 6 princes and 14 cities refused. They became known as the Protesting Estates, and the word Protestant was subsequently applied to anyone who left the Roman Catholic Church. Charles was too preoccupied with fighting the French and Turks and maintaining his enormous Spanish overseas empire to concentrate on rebellious German princes. Finally, in 1555, after many wars, political battles, and religious debates, Charles signed the Peace of Augsburg, which allowed each German prince to choose which religion would be practiced in his respective state. Subjects were to abide by their leader's decision, but if they differed with the choice they were legally allowed to migrate.