Martin Luther

Martin Luther
Luther in 1529 by Lucas Cranach
Born	November 10, 1483(1483-11-10) Eisleben, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
Died	February 18, 1546 (aged 62) Eisleben, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
Occupation	Monk, Priest, Theologian
Spouse(s)	Katharina von Bora
Children	Hans (Johannes), Elisabeth, Magdalena, Martin, Paul, Margarethe
Parents	Hans and Margarethe Luther (née Lindemann)
Signature

Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) changed the course of Western civilization by initiating the Protestant Reformation. As a priest and theology professor, he confronted indulgence salesmen with his 95 Theses in 1517. Luther strongly disputed their claim that freedom from God's punishment of sin could be purchased with money. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms meeting in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the emperor.

Luther taught that salvation is a free gift of God and received only through true faith in Jesus as redeemer from sin, not from good works. His theology challenged the authority of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those that identify with Luther's teachings are called Lutherans.

His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation, and influenced the translation of the King James Bible.[5] His hymns inspired the development of singing in churches. His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.

Although Luther's call for the Jews to be relocated to Jerusalem following the destruction of their homes and synagogues, restriction of their liberty, and redistribution of their interest earnings was forgotten for centuries after his death, they were republished for Nazi propaganda purposes from 1933–45. This sparked a scholarly controversy that continues to the present.

[edit] Early life

[edit] Birth and education

Martin Luther was born to Hans Luder (or Ludher, later Luther) and his wife Margarethe (née Lindemann) on 10 November, 1483 in Eisleben, Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He was baptized the next morning on the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. His family moved to Mansfeld in 1484, where his father was a leaseholder of copper mines and smelters, and served as one of four citizen representatives on the local council. Martin Marty describes Luther's mother as a hard-working woman of "trading-class stock and middling means," and notes that Luther's enemies would later wrongly describe her as a whore and bath attendant.[ He had several brothers and sisters, and is known to have been close to one of them, Jacob.

Hans Luther was ambitious for himself and his family, and was determined to see Martin, his eldest son, become 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 seventeen, he entered the University of Erfurt — which he later described as a beerhouse and whorehouse, — which saw him awakened 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, he 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 the importance, for Luther, of loving God. Reason could not lead men to God, he felt, and he 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 decided to leave his studies and become a monk, later attributing his decision to an experience during a thunderstorm on 2 July, 1505. 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 July 17, 1505. One friend blamed the decision on Luther's sadness over the deaths of two friends. Luther himself seemed saddened by the move. Those who attended a farewell supper walked him to the door of the Black Cloister. "This day you see me, and then, not ever again," he said. His father was furious over what he saw as a waste of Luther's education.

[edit] Monastic and academic life

Luther dedicated himself to monastic life, devoting himself to fasting, long hours in prayer, pilgrimage, and frequent confession. Luther tried to please God through this dedication, but it only increased his awareness of his own sinfulness. He would later remark, "If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them." 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. 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. 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. He spent the rest of his career in this position at the University of Wittenberg.

[edit] The start of the Reformation

In 1516-17, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal commissioner for indulgences, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St Peter's Basilica in Rome. Roman Catholic theology stated that faith alone, whether fiduciary or dogmatic, cannot justify man; and that only such faith as is active in charity and good works (fides caritate formata) can justify man. These good works could be obtained by donating money to the church.

On 31 October, 1517, Luther wrote to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, protesting the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," which came to be known as The 95 Theses. Hans Hillerbrand writes that Luther had no intention of confronting the church, but saw his disputation as a scholarly objection to church practices, and the tone of the writing is accordingly "searching, rather than doctrinaire." Hillerbrand writes that there is nevertheless an undercurrent of challenge in several of the theses, particularly in Thesis 86, which asks: "Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?"

Luther objected to a saying attributed to Johann Tetzel that "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory [also attested as 'into heaven'] springs," insisting that, since forgiveness was God's alone to grant, those who claimed that indulgences absolved buyers from all punishments and granted them salvation were in error. Christians, he said, must not slacken in following Christ on account of such false assurances.

According to Philipp Melanchthon, writing in 1546, Luther nailed a copy of the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg that same day — church doors acting as the bulletin boards of his time — an event now seen as sparking the Protestant Reformation, and celebrated each year on 31 October as Reformation Day. Some scholars have questioned the accuracy of Melanchthon's account, noting that he did not move to Wittenberg until a year after the event, and that no contemporaneous evidence exists for it. Others have countered that such evidence is not necessary, because this was the customary way of advertising a university event in Luther's day.

The 95 Theses were quickly translated from Latin into German, printed, and widely copied, making the controversy one of the first in history to be aided by the printing press. Within two weeks, the theses had spread throughout Germany; within two months throughout Europe.

Luther's writings circulated widely, reaching France, England, and Italy as early as 1519, and students thronged to Wittenberg to hear him speak. He published a short commentary on Galatians and his Work on the Psalms. At the same time, he received deputations from Italy and from the Utraquists of Bohemia; Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen offered to place Luther under their protection against any reprisals from the pope.

This early part of Luther's career was one of his most creative and productive. Three of his best known works were published in 1520: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian.

[edit] Justification by faith

From 1510 to 1520, Luther lectured on the Psalms, the books of Hebrews, Romans, and Galatians. As he studied these portions of the Bible, he came to view the use of terms such as penance and righteousness by the Roman Catholic Church in new ways. He became convinced that the church was corrupt in their ways and had lost sight of what he saw as several of the central truths of Christianity, the most important of which, for Luther, was the doctrine of justification — God's act of declaring a sinner righteous — by faith alone through God's grace. He began to teach that salvation or redemption is a gift of God's grace, attainable only through faith in Jesus as the messiah.

Luther came to understand justification as entirely the work of God. This teaching by Luther was clearly expressed in his 1525 publication On the Bondage of the Will, which was written in response to On Free Will by Desiderius Erasmus (1524). Luther based his position on Predestination on St. Paul's epistle to the Ephesians 2:8-10. Against the teaching of his day that the righteous acts of believers are performed in cooperation with God, Luther wrote that Christians receive such righteousness entirely from outside themselves; that righteousness not only comes from Christ but actually is the righteousness of Christ, imputed to Christians (rather than infused into them) through faith. "That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law," he wrote. "Faith is that which brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ." Faith, for Luther, was a gift from God. He explained his concept of "justification" in the Smalcald Articles:

[edit] Breach with the papacy

Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and Magdeburg did not reply to Luther's letter containing the 95 Theses. He had the theses checked for heresy and in December 1517 forwarded them to Rome.[1] He needed the indulgences revenue to pay off a papal dispensation for his tenure of more than one bishopric, and, as Luther later noted, "the pope had a finger in the pie as well, because one half was to go to the building of St Peter's Church in Rome".[2]

Pope Leo X was used to reformers and heretics, and he responded slowly, "with great care as is proper". Over the next three years, he was to deploy a series of papal theologians and envoys against Luther, which only served to harden the reformer's anti-papal theology. First, the Dominican theologian Sylvester Mazzolini drafted a heresy case against Luther, whom Leo then summoned to Rome. The Elector Frederick, however, persuaded the pope to have Luther examined at Augsburg, where the Imperial Diet was held. There, in October 1518, Luther informed the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan that he did not consider the papacy part of the biblical Church, and the hearings degenerated into a shouting match. More than the 95 Theses, this confrontation cast Luther irrevocably as an enemy of the pope. Cajetan's original instructions had been to arrest Luther if he failed to recant, but he lacked the means in Augsburg, where the Elector guaranteed Luther's security. Luther slipped out of the city at night, without leave from Cajetan.

In January 1519, at Altenburg in Saxony, the papal nuncio Karl von Miltitz adopted a more conciliatory approach. Luther made certain concessions to the Saxon, who was a relative of the Elector, and promised to remain silent if his opponents did. The theologian Johann Maier von Eck, however, was determined to expose Luther's doctrine in a public forum, and in June and July 1519 he staged a disputation with Luther's colleague Andreas Karlstadt at Leipzig and invited Luther to speak. Luther's boldest assertion in the debate was that Matthew 16:18 does not confer on popes the exlusive right to interpret scripture, and that therefore neither popes nor church councils are infallible. For this, Eck branded Luther a new Jan Hus, after the Czech reformer and heretic burned at the stake in 1415. From that moment, he devoted himself to Luther's downfall.

[edit] Excommunication

On June 15, 1520, the Pope warned Luther with the papal bull (edict) Exsurge Domine that he risked excommunication unless he recanted 41 sentences drawn from his writings, including the 95 Theses, within 60 days.

That autumn, Johann Eck proclaimed the bull in Meissen and other towns. Karl von Miltitz, a papal nuncio, attempted to broker a solution, but Luther, who had sent the Pope a copy of On the Freedom of a Christian in October, publicly set fire to the bull and decretals at Wittenberg on December 10, 1520,^[1] an act he defended in Why the Pope and his Recent Book are Burned and Assertions Concerning All Articles.

As a consequence, Luther was excommunicated by Leo X on January 3, 1521, in the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.

[edit] Diet of Worms

The enforcement of the ban on the 41 sentences fell to the secular authorities. On 18 April, 1521, Luther appeared as ordered before the Diet of Worms. This was a general assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire that took place in Worms, a town on the Rhine. It was conducted from 28 January to 25 May, 1521, with Emperor Charles V presiding. Prince Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, obtained an agreement that Luther would be promised safe passage to and from the meeting.

Johann Eck, speaking on behalf of the Empire as assistant of the Archbishop of Trier, presented Luther with copies of his writings laid out on a table, and asked him if the books were his, and whether he stood by their contents. He confirmed he was the author, but requested time to think about the answer to the second question. He prayed, consulted friends, and gave his response the next day: "Unless I shall be convinced by the testimonies of the Scriptures or by clear reason ... I neither can nor will make any retraction, since it is neither safe nor honourable to act against conscience."^[2] He is also famously said to have added: "Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen." ("Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen."). This description of the declaration may be apocryphal,^[3] as only the last four words appear in contemporaneous accounts.

Over the next five days, private conferences were held to determine Luther's fate. The Emperor presented the final draft of the Edict of Worms on May 25, 1521, declaring Luther an outlaw, banning his literature, and requiring his arrest: "We want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic".^[4] It also made it a crime for anyone in Germany to give Luther food or shelter. It permitted anyone to kill Luther without legal consequence.

[edit] At Wartburg Castle

Luther's disappearance during his return trip was planned. Frederick III, Elector of Saxony had him intercepted on his way home by masked horsemen and escorted to the security of the Wartburg Castle at Eisenach. Luther grew a beard and lived incognito at the castle from May 1521 to March 1522, pretending to be a knight called Junker Jörg.^[5]

During his stay at Wartburg, which he referred to as "my Patmos",^[6] Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German and poured out doctrinal and polemical writings. These included a renewed attack on Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, whom he shamed into halting the sale of indulgences in his episcopates,^[7] and a "Refutation of the Argument of Latomus," in which he expounded the principle of justification to Jacobus Latomus, an orthodox theologian from Louvain.^[8] In this work, one of his most emphatic statements on faith, he argued that every good work designed to attract God's favour is a sin.^[9] All humans are sinners by nature, he explained, and God's grace, which cannot be earned, alone can make them just. On 1 August 1521, Luther wrote to Melanchthon on the same theme:

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In the summer of 1521, Luther widened his target from individual pieties like indulgences and pilgrimages to doctrines at the heart of Church practices. In On the Abrogation of the Private Mass, he condemned as idolatry the idea that the mass is a sacrifice, asserting instead that it is a gift, to be received with thanksgiving by the whole congregation.^[10] His essay On Confession, Whether the Pope has the Power to Require It rejected compulsory confession and encouraged private confession and absolution, since "every Christian is a confessor".^[11] In November, Luther wrote The Judgement of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows. He assured monks and nuns that they could break their vows without sin, because vows are an illegitemate and vain attempt to win salvation.^[12]

Luther made his pronouncements from Wartburg in the context of rapid developments at Wittenberg, of which he was kept fully informed. Andreas Karlstadt, supported by the ex-Augustinian Gabriel Zwilling, embarked on a radical programme of reform there in June 1521, exceeding anything envisaged by Luther. The reforms provoked disturbances, including a revolt by the Augustinian monks against their prior, the smashing of statues and images in churches, and denunciations of the magistracy. After secretly visiting Wittenberg in early December 1521, Luther wrote A Sincere Admonition by Martin Luther to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion.^[13] Wittenberg became even more volatile after Christmas when a band of visionary zealots, the so-called Zwickau prophets, arrived, preaching revolutionary doctrines such as the equality of man, adult baptism, and Christ'’s imminent return.^[14] Luther decided it was time to act.

[edit] Return to Wittenberg

Luther secretly returned to Wittenberg on March 6, 1522. "During my absence," he wrote to the Elector, "Satan has entered my sheepfold, and committed ravages which I cannot repair by writing, but only by my personal presence and living word."^[15] For eight days in Lent, beginning on 9 March, Invocavit Sunday, and concluding the following Sunday, Luther preached eight sermons, which became known as the "Invocavit Sermons." In these sermons, he hammered home the primacy of core Christian values such as love, patience, charity, and freedom, and reminded the citizens to trust God's word rather than violence to bring about necessary change.

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The effect of Luther’s intervention was instantaneous. After the sixth sermon, Jerome Schurf wrote to the elector: "Oh, what joy has Dr. Martin’s return spread among us! His words, through divine mercy, are bringing back every day misguided people into the way of the truth."^[15]

Luther next set about reversing or softening some of the new church practices and worked alongside the authorities to restore public order, signaling his reinvention as a conservative force within the Reformation. After banishing the Zwickau prophets, who abused him as a new pope, he now faced a battle not only against the corrupt and distorted practices of the established Church but against those on his own side who threatened the new order by fomenting social unrest and even violence.^[15]

[edit] Peasants' War

Despite his victory in Wittenberg, Luther was unable to stifle radicalism further afield. Preachers such as Zwickau prophet Nicholas Storch and Thomas Müntzer helped instigate the Peasants' War of 1524–25, during which many atrocities were committed, often in Luther's name. There had been revolts by the peasantry on a smaller scale since the 15th century.^[16] Luther's pamphlets against the Church and the hierarchy, often worded with "liberal" phraseology, now led many peasants to believe he would support an attack on the upper classes in general.^[17] Revolts broke out in Swabia, Franconia, and Thuringia in 1524, even drawing support from disaffected nobles, many of whom were in debt. Gaining momentum under the leadership of radicals such as Müntzer in Thuringia and Michael Gaismair in the Tyrol, the revolts turned into war.^[18]

Luther sympathized with some of the peasants' grievances, as he showed in his response to the Twelve Articles of the Black Forest in May 1525, but he reminded the aggrieved to obey the temporal authorities.^[19] During a tour of Thuringia, he became enraged at the widespread burning of convents, monasteries, bishops’ palaces, and libraries. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, written on his return to Wittenberg, he explained the Gospel teaching on wealth, condemned the violence as the devil's work, and called for the nobles to put down the rebels like mad dogs: Template:Quotation

Luther justified his opposition to the rebels on three grounds. First, in choosing violence over lawful submission to the secular government, they were ignoring Christ's counsel to "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." St. Paul had written in his epistle to the Romans 13:1-7 that all authorities are appointed by God, and should therefore not be resisted. This teaching by St. Paul forms the basis of the doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings. Second, the violent actions of rebelling, robbing, and plundering placed the peasants "outside the law of God and Empire," so they deserved "death in body and soul, if only as highwaymen and murderers." Lastly, Luther charged the rebels with blasphemy for calling themselves "Christian brethren" and committing their sinful acts under the banner of the Gospel.^[20]

Without Luther's backing for the uprising, many rebels laid down their weapons; others felt betrayed. Their defeat by the Swabian League at the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May, 1525, followed by Müntzer’s execution, brought the revolutionary stage of the Reformation to a close.^[21] Thereafter, radicalism found a refuge in the anabaptist movement, while Luther's Reformation flourished under the wing of the secular powers.^[22]

[edit] Marriage and family

On the evening of 13 June, 1525, Luther married Katharina von Bora, one of a group of 12 nuns he had helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April 1523, when he arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels. "Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts," he wrote to his friend Link, "the Lord has plunged me into marriage."^[23] Katharina was twenty-six years old, Luther forty-two.

A few priests and former monks had already married, including Andreas Karlstadt and Justus Jonas, but Luther’s marriage set the seal of approval on clerical marriage. He had long condemned vows of celibacy on biblical grounds, but his decision to marry surprised many, not least Melanchthon, who called it reckless.^[24] Luther had written to Spalatin on 30 November, 1524, "I shall never take a wife, as I feel at present. Not that I am insensible to my flesh or sex (for I am neither wood nor stone); but my mind is averse to wedlock because I daily expect the death of a heretic." Melanchthon reveals in a letter that prior to his marriage, Luther had been living on the plainest food, and that his mildewed bed was not properly made for months at a time.^[25]

Luther and Katharina moved into a former monastery "The Black Cloister," a wedding present from the new elector John Frederick, and embarked upon what appears to have been a happy and successful marriage. Between bearing six children, two of whom did not survive to adulthood, Katharina helped earn the couple a living by farming the land and taking in boarders.^[26] Luther confided to Stiefel on 11 August, 1526: "Catharina, my dear rib ... is, thanks to God, gentle, obedient, compliant in all things, beyond my hopes. I would not exchange my poverty for the wealth of Croesus."^[25]

[edit] Catechisms

In 1528, Luther visited parishes and schools in Saxony to determine the quality of pastoral care and Christian education. He wrote in the preface to The Small Catechism: "Mercy! Good God! what manifold misery I beheld! The common people, especially in the villages, have no knowledge whatever of Christian doctrine, and, alas! many pastors are altogether incapable and incompetent to teach."^[27]

In response, he prepared the Small Catechism and Large Catechism, instructional and devotional material on the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, baptism, confession and absolution, and the Lord's Supper. The Small Catechism was supposed to be read by the people themselves, and the Large Catechism by the pastors; both remain popular instructional materials among Lutherans. Luther, who was modest about the publishing of his collected works, thought his catechisms were one of two works he would not be embarrassed to call his own: "Regarding the plan to collect my writings in volumes, I am quite cool and not at all eager about it because, roused by a Saturnian hunger, I would rather see them all devoured. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the one Bondage of the Will and the Catechism."^[28]

[edit] Luther's translation of the Bible

Luther's 1534 bible.

See also the main Religion-wiki article on Luther Bible.

Luther translated the Bible from Greek into German to make it more accessible to ordinary people, a task he began alone in 1521 during his stay in the Wartburg castle. He was not the first translator of the Bible into German, but he was by far the greatest, according to the 19th-century theologian and historian Philip Schaff, who wrote that, had Luther done nothing but this, he would remain one of the "greatest benefactors of the German-speaking race."^[29]

His translation of The New Testament was published in September 1522 and, in collaboration with Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Caspar Creuziger, Philipp Melanchthon, Matthäus Aurogallus, and George Rörer, the Old and New Testaments together in 1534. He worked on refining the translation for the rest of his life.

The Luther Bible contributed to the emergence of the modern German language and is regarded as a landmark in German literature. The 1534 edition was influential on William Tyndale's translation,^[30] a precursor of the King James Bible.^[31] Schaff said of the work:

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[edit] Liturgy

Luther's German Mass of 1526 provided for weekday services and for catechetical instruction. He strongly objected to making a new law of the forms and urged the retention of other good liturgies. While advocating Christian liberty in liturgical matters, he also spoke out in favor of maintaining and establishing liturgical uniformity among those sharing the same faith in a given area.^[32]

He saw in liturgical uniformity a fitting outward expression of unity in the faith, while in liturgical variation, an indication of possible doctrinal variation. He did not consider liturgical change a virtue, especially when it might be made by individual Christians or congregations: he was content to conserve and reform what the Church had inherited from the past. He eliminated and condemned those parts of the Roman Catholic Mass that taught that the Eucharist was a propitiatory sacrifice and the body and blood of Christ by transubstantiation,^[33] but retained the use of historic liturgical forms and customs.

[edit] Eucharist controversy

Luther's views on the Eucharist — the sacrament of the Lord's Supper — were put to the test in October 1529 at the Marburg Colloquy, an assembly of Protestant theologians gathered by Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, to establish doctrinal unity in the emerging Protestant states. Agreement was achieved on most points, the exception being the nature of the Eucharist, an issue crucial to Luther.^[34]

The theologians, including Zwingli, Andreas Karlstadt, Leo Jud, and Johannes Oecolampadius, differed on the significance of the words spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper: "This is my body which is for you," "This cup is the new covenant in my blood" (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). Luther insisted on the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine, but the other theologians believed God to be only symbolically present: Zwingli, for example, denied Jesus's ability to be in more than one place at a time. But Luther, who affirmed the doctrine of Hypostatic Union, that Jesus is both man and God, was clear:

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Even more forcefully, Luther expressed his belief in the real presence in a letter to the Christians in Strassburg, 15 December, 1524:

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Despite these disagreements on the Eucharist, the Marburg Colloquy paved the way for the signing in 1530 of the Augsburg Confession, and for the formation of the Schmalkaldic League the following year by leading Protestant nobles such as Philip of Hesse, John Frederick of Saxony, and Georg, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. According to Luther, agreement in the faith was not necessary prior to entering political alliances. Nevertheless, interpretations of the Eucharist differ among Protestants to this day.

[edit] Criticism of Islam

Luther also wrote several pamphlets about Islam and the relations between Islam and Protestantism, during the critical period of territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, marked by the capture of Budapest in 1526 and the Siege of Vienna in 1529. Initially, in his 1518 Explanation of the Ninety-five Theses, Luther had argued against resisting the Turks, whom he presented as a scourge intentionally sent by God to sinning Christians, and that resisting it would have been equivalent to resisting the will of God.^[35] With the Turkish advance becoming ever more threatening however, in 1528 Luther modified his stance and wrote On War against the Turk and in 1529 Sermon against the Turk, encouraging the German people and Emperor Charles V to resist the invasion.^[36]

Compared with his anti-Judaism, Luther's positions against Islam were relatively mild.^[37] On the one hand Luther extensively criticized the principles of Islam, but on the other hand he also expressed tolerance towards the practice of the Islamic faith: "Let the Turk believe and live as he will, just as one lets the papacy and other false Christians live."^[38] He also argued that the fight against the Turks should not be a Holy War, but only a secular one, made in self-defense, and led by the secular authorities of the Emperor and the Princes, and strongly warned against leading it as a religious war "as though our people were an army of Christians against the Turks, who were enemies of Christ. This is absolutely contrary to Christ's doctrine and name"^[39]

[edit] Augsburg Confession

Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, convened an Imperial Diet in Augsburg in 1530 with the goal of uniting the empire against the Ottoman Turks, who had besieged Vienna the previous autumn.

To achieve unity, Charles required a resolution of the religious controversies in his realm. Luther, still under the Imperial Ban, was left behind at the Coburg fortress while his elector and colleagues from Wittenberg attended the diet. The Augsburg Confession, a summary of the Lutheran faith authored by Philipp Melanchthon but influenced by Luther,^[40] was read aloud to the emperor. It was the first Lutheran confession included in the Book of Concord of 1580, and is regarded as the principal confession of the Lutheran Church.

[edit] Philip of Hesse controversy

From December 1539, Luther became implicated in the bigamy of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, who wanted to marry one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting. Philip solicited the approval of Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer, citing as a precedent the polygamy of the patriarchs. The theologians were not prepared to make a general ruling, and they reluctantly advised the landgrave that if he was determined, he should marry secretly and keep quiet about the matter.^[41] As a result, on 4 March 1540, Philip married a second wife, Margarethe von der Sale, with Melanchthon and Bucer among the witnesses. However, Philip was unable to keep the marriage secret, and he threatened to make Luther's advice public. Luther told him to "tell a good, strong lie" and deny the marriage completely, which Philip did during the subsequent public controversy.^[42] In the view of Luther's biographer Martin Brecht, "giving confessional advice for Philip of Hesse was one of the worst mistakes Luther made, and, next to the landgrave himself, who was directly responsible for it, history chiefly holds Luther accountable".^[43] Brecht argues that Luther's mistake was not that he gave private pastoral advice, but that he miscalculated the political implications.^[44] The affair has caused lasting damage to Luther's reputation.^[45]

[edit] Antijudaism and antisemitism

Historian Robert Michael writes that Luther was concerned with the Jewish question all his life, despite devoting only a small proportion of his work to it.^[46] As a Christian pastor and theologian Luther was concerned that people have faith in Jesus as the messiah for salvation. In rejecting that view of Jesus, the Jews became the "quintessential other,"^[47] a model of the opposition to the Christian view of God. In an early work, That Jesus Christ was born a Jew, Luther advocated kindness toward the Jews, but only with the aim of converting them to Christianity: what was called Judenmission.^[48] When his efforts at conversion failed, he became increasingly bitter toward them.^[49] His main works on the Jews were his 60,000-word treatise Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies), and Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ) — reprinted five times within his lifetime — both written in 1543, three years before his death.^[50] He argued that the Jews were no longer the chosen people, but were "the devil's people." They were "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."^[51] The synagogue was a "defiled bride, yes, an incorrigible whore and an evil slut ..."^[52] and Jews were full of the "devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine."^[53] He advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbooks, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews' property and money, smashing up their homes, and ensuring that these "poisonous envenomed worms" be forced into labor or expelled "for all time."^[54] He also seemed to sanction their murder,^[55] writing "We are at fault in not slaying them."^[56]

Luther successfully campaigned against the Jews in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Silesia. Josel of Rosheim (1480-1554), who tried to help the Jews of Saxony, wrote in his memoir that their situation was "due to that priest whose name was Martin Luther — may his body and soul be bound up in hell!! — who wrote and issued many heretical books in which he said that whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition."^[57] Michael writes that Josel asked the city of Strasbourg to forbid the sale of Luther's anti-Jewish works; they refused initially, but relented when a Lutheran pastor in Hochfelden argued in a sermon that his parishioners should murder Jews.^[58] Luther's influence persisted after his death. Throughout the 1580s, riots saw the expulsion of Jews from several German Lutheran states.^[58][59]

According to Michael, Luther's work acquired the status of Scripture within Germany, and he became the most widely read author of his generation, in part because of the coarse and passionate nature of the writing.^[58] The prevailing view^[60] among historians is that his anti-Jewish rhetoric contributed significantly to the development of antisemitism in Germany,^[61] and in the 1930s and 1940s provided an ideal foundation for the National Socialist's attacks on Jews.^[62] Reinhold Lewin writes that "whoever wrote against the Jews for whatever reason believed he had the right to justify himself by triumphantly referring to Luther." According to Michael, just about every anti-Jewish book printed in the Third Reich contained references to and quotations from Luther. Heinrich Himmler wrote admiringly of his writings and sermons on the Jews in 1940.^[63] The city of Nuremberg presented a first edition of On the Jews and their Lies to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, on his birthday in 1937; the newspaper described it as the most radically anti-Semitic tract ever published.^[64] On 17 December, 1941, seven Protestant regional church confederations issued a statement agreeing with the policy of forcing Jews to wear the yellow badge, "since after his bitter experience Luther had already suggested preventive measures against the Jews and their expulsion from German territory." According to Professor Dick Geary, the Nazis won a larger share of the vote in Protestant than in Catholic areas of Germany in elections of 1928 to November 1932.^[65]

At the heart of the debate about Luther's influence is whether it is anachronistic to view his work as a precursor of the racial antisemitism of the National Socialists. Some scholars see Luther's influence as limited, and the Nazis' use of his work as opportunistic. Biographer Martin Brecht points out that "There is a world of difference between his belief in salvation and a racial ideology. Nevertheless, his misguided agitation had the evil result that Luther fatefully became one of the 'church fathers' of anti-Semitism and thus provided material for the modern hatred of the Jews, cloaking it with the authority of the Reformer".^[66] Johannes Wallmann argues that Luther's writings against the Jews were largely ignored in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that there is no continuity between Luther's thought and Nazi ideology.^[67] Uwe Siemon-Netto agrees, arguing that it was because the Nazis were already anti-Semites that they revived Luther's work.^[68][69] Hans J. Hillerbrand agrees that to focus on Luther is to adopt an essentially ahistorical perspective of Nazi antisemitism that ignores other contributory factors in German history. ^[70] Similarly, Roland Bainton, noted church historian and Luther biographer, wrote "One could wish that Luther had died before ever this tract was written. His position was entirely religious and in no respect racial."^[71][72] Other scholars argue that, even if his views were merely anti-Judaic, their violence lent a new element to the standard Christian suspicion of Judaism. Ronald Berger writes that Luther is credited with "Germanizing the Christian critique of Judaism and establishing anti-Semitism as a key element of German culture and national identity."^[73] Paul Rose argues that he caused a "hysterical and demonizing mentality" about Jews to enter German thought and discourse, a mentality that might otherwise have been absent.^[74]

Since the 1980s, Lutheran Church denominations have repudiated Martin Luther's statements against the Jews and have rejected the use of them to incite hatred against Jews.^[75]

[edit] Final years and death

Luther had been suffering from ill health for years, including constipation, hemorrhoids, Ménière's disease (vertigo, fainting, and tinnitus), and a cataract in one eye.^[76] From 1531–1546, his health deteriorated further. The years of struggle with Rome, the antagonisms with and among his fellow reformers, and the scandal which ensued from the bigamy of the Philip of Hesse incident, in which Luther had played a leading role, all may have contributed. In 1536, he began to suffer from kidney and bladder stones, and arthritis, and an ear infection ruptured an ear drum. In December 1544, he began to feel the effects of angina.^[77]

His physical health made him short-tempered and even harsher in his writings and comments. His wife Katharina was overheard saying, "Dear husband, you are too rude," and he responded, "They are teaching me to be rude."^[78]

His last sermon was delivered at Eisleben, his place of birth, on February 15, 1546, three days before his death.^[79] It was "entirely devoted to the obdurate Jews, whom it was a matter of great urgency to expel from all German territory," according to Léon Poliakov.^[80] James Mackinnon writes that it concluded with a "fiery summons to drive the Jews bag and baggage from their midst, unless they desisted from their calumny and their usury and became Christians."^[81] Luther said, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert," but also that they are "our public enemies ... and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And so often they do."^[82]

Luther's final journey, to Mansfeld, was taken due to his concern for his siblings' families continuing in their father Hans Luther's copper mining trade. Their livelihood was threatened by Count Albrecht of Mansfeld bringing the industry under his own control. The controversy that ensued involved all four Mansfeld counts: Albrecht, Philip, John George, and Gerhard. Luther journeyed to Mansfeld twice in late 1545 to participate in the negotiations for a settlement, and a third visit was needed in early 1546 for their completion.

The negotiations were successfully concluded on 17 February, 1546. After 8:00 p.m., he experienced chest pains. When he went to his bed, he prayed, "Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God" (Ps. 31:5), the common prayer of the dying. At 1:00 a.m. he awoke with more chest pain and was warmed with hot towels. He thanked God for revealing his son to him in whom he had believed. His companions, Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius, shouted loudly, "Reverend father, are you ready to die trusting in your Lord Jesus Christ and to confess the doctrine which you have taught in his name?" A distinct "Yes" was Luther's reply.

An apoplectic stroke deprived him of his speech, and he died shortly afterwards at 2:45 a.m., 18 February, 1546, aged 62, in Eisleben, the city of his birth. He was buried in the Castle Church in Wittenberg, beneath the pulpit.^[83]

A piece of paper was later found on which he had written his last statement. The statement was in Latin, apart from "We are beggars," which was in German.

Template:Quotation

[edit] References

Works
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God · On War against the Turk · Large Catechism · Luther Bible · On the Bondage of the Will · On the Freedom of a Christian · On the Jews and Their Lies · Vom Schem Hamphoras · Smalcald Articles · Small Catechism · The Adoration of the Sacrament · Theology of the Cross · The Ninety-Five Theses · To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation · Confession Concerning Christ's Supper
Topics
Augsburg Confession · Decet Romanum Pontificem · Diet of Worms · Exsurge Domine · Lutheranism · Luther rose · Sacramental union · Martin Luther's views on Mary · Antisemitism · Words of Institution
people
Albert of Mainz · Bartholomaeus Arnoldi · Desiderius Erasmus · Georg Rörer · Johann Cochlaeus · Johann von Staupitz · Justus Jonas · Hans and Margarethe Luther · Karl von Miltitz · Katharina von Bora · Philipp Melanchthon