Who is martin luther 1500

Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks. Luther was born in and grew up in Mansfeld, a small mining town in Saxony. His father started out as a miner but soon rose to become a master smelter, a specialist in separating valuable metal in this case, copper from ore. The family was not poor. Archeologists have been at work in their basement.

The Luthers ate suckling pig and owned drinking glasses. They had either seven or eight children, of whom five survived. Caught in a violent thunderstorm one day in —he was twenty-one—he vowed to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that if he survived he would become a monk. He kept his promise, and was ordained two years later. Today, psychoanalytic interpretations tend to be tittered at by Luther biographers.

This man who changed the world left his German-speaking lands only once in his life. In , he was part of a mission sent to Rome to heal a rent in the Augustinian order. It failed. Most of his youth was spent in dirty little towns where men worked long hours each day and then, at night, went to the tavern and got into fights. He built a castle and a church—the one on whose door the famous theses were supposedly nailed—and he hired an important artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, as his court painter.

Most important, he founded a university, and staffed it with able scholars, including Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars of the German-speaking territories. In this capacity, he lectured on Scripture, held disputations, and preached to the staff of the university. He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis.

He called his problem his Anfechtungen —trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God.

There were good reasons for an intense young priest to feel disillusioned. One of the most bitterly resented abuses of the Church at that time was the so-called indulgences, a kind of late-medieval get-out-of-jail-free card used by the Church to make money. You might pay to have a special Mass said for the sinner or, less expensively, you could buy candles or new altar cloths for the church.

But, in the most common transaction, the purchaser simply paid an agreed-upon amount of money and, in return, was given a document saying that the beneficiary—the name was written in on a printed form—was forgiven x amount of time in Purgatory. The more time off, the more it cost, but the indulgence-sellers promised that whatever you paid for you got. Actually, they could change their minds about that. In , the Church cancelled the exculpatory powers of already purchased indulgences for the next eight years.

If you wanted that period covered, you had to buy a new indulgence. Realizing that this was hard on people—essentially, they had wasted their money—the Church declared that purchasers of the new indulgences did not have to make confession or even exhibit contrition. They just had to hand over the money and the thing was done, because this new issue was especially powerful. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar locally famous for his zeal in selling indulgences, is said to have boasted that one of the new ones could obtain remission from sin even for someone who had raped the Virgin Mary.

Even by the standards of the very corrupt sixteenth-century Church, this was shocking. It brought him up against the absurdity of bargaining with God, jockeying for his favor—indeed, paying for his favor.

Why had God given his only begotten son? And why had the son died on the cross? From this thought, the Ninety-five Theses were born. Most of them were challenges to the sale of indulgences. This was not a new idea. Furthermore, it is not an idea that fits well with what we know of Luther. Pure faith, contemplation, white light: surely these are the gifts of the Asian religions, or of medieval Christianity, of St.

Francis with his birds. As for Luther, with his rages and sweats, does he seem a good candidate? Lest it be thought that this stern man then concluded that we could stop worrying about our behavior and do whatever we wanted, he said that works issue from faith. Like sola fide , this was a rejection of what, to Luther, were the lies of the Church—symbolized most of all by the indulgence market.

Indulgences brought you an abbreviation of your stay in Purgatory, but what was Purgatory? No such thing is mentioned in the Bible. Some people think that Dante made it up; others say Gregory the Great. In any case, Luther decided that somebody made it up. He preached, he disputed. Luther's legacy is immense and cannot be adequately summarized.

On a larger canvas, his reform unleashed forces that ended the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern era. It has been said that in most libraries, books by and about Martin Luther occupy more shelves than those concerned with any other figure except Jesus of Nazareth.

Though difficult to verify, one can understand why it is likely to be true. Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives. Christian History Archives Eras Home. Martin Luther. Current Issue November Subscribe. Read This Issue. Subscribe to Christianity Today and get instant access to past issues of Christian History! Get the best from CT editors, delivered straight to your inbox!

Tags: Martin Luther Reformation Theologians. Issue SHARE tweet link email print. More on Martin Luther Mothers of the Reformation. From to his death in , Luther served as the dean of theology at University of Wittenberg. During this time he suffered from many illnesses, including arthritis, heart problems and digestive disorders. The physical pain and emotional strain of being a fugitive might have been reflected in his writings. Some works contained strident and offensive language against several segments of society, particularly Jews and, to a lesser degree, Muslims.

Luther died following a stroke on February 18, , at the age of 62 during a trip to his hometown of Eisleben. He was buried in All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, the city he had helped turn into an intellectual center. Luther's teachings and translations radically changed Christian theology. Thanks in large part to the Gutenberg press, his influence continued to grow after his death, as his message spread across Europe and around the world.

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John Calvin, Martin Luther's successor as the preeminent Protestant theologian, made a powerful impact on the fundamental doctrines of Protestantism. Martin Van Buren was the eighth president of the United States.

Although these ideas had been advanced before, Martin Luther codified them at a moment in history ripe for religious reformation. His writings changed the course of religious and cultural history in the West. At age five, Luther began his education at a local school where he learned reading, writing and Latin. But Hans Luther had other plans for young Martin—he wanted him to become a lawyer—so he withdrew him from the school in Magdeburg and sent him to new school in Eisenach.

Then, in , Luther enrolled at the University of Erfurt, the premiere university in Germany at the time. In July of that year, Luther got caught in a violent thunderstorm, in which a bolt of lightning nearly struck him down. He considered the incident a sign from God and vowed to become a monk if he survived the storm. The storm subsided, Luther emerged unscathed and, true to his promise, Luther turned his back on his study of the law days later on July 17, Instead, he entered an Augustinian monastery.

Luther began to live the spartan and rigorous life of a monk but did not abandon his studies. Between and , Luther studied at the University of Erfurt and at a university in Wittenberg. In —, he took a break from his education to serve as a representative in Rome for the German Augustinian monasteries.

In , Luther received his doctorate and became a professor of biblical studies. In early 16th-century Europe, some theologians and scholars were beginning to question the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

It was also around this time that translations of original texts—namely, the Bible and the writings of the early church philosopher Augustine—became more widely available.

Augustine — had emphasized the primacy of the Bible rather than Church officials as the ultimate religious authority. He also believed that humans could not reach salvation by their own acts, but that only God could bestow salvation by his divine grace.

Indulgence-selling had been banned in Germany, but the practice continued unabated.