Martin Luther: Reformer, Rebel, and Father of the Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther was the most consequential religious revolutionary in the history of Western Christianity — the man whose challenges to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century split the unified Christianity of the medieval West into the competing confessions that have defined European and American religious life ever since. His act of nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in October 1517 — whether literally true or largely symbolic, the event that marks the beginning of the Protestant Reformation — set in motion a religious, cultural, political, and social transformation whose consequences have not yet fully played out more than five centuries later. He was also a theologian of genuine brilliance, a translator of extraordinary skill, a writer of unmatched polemical force, and a man of profound personal contradictions whose inner life has fascinated historians and psychologists for generations.

He was born on November 10, 1483, in Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld in what is now Germany, the son of Hans Luder (the family name was later Latinized to Luther) and Margarethe Ziegler. His father was a copper miner who had risen to manage a smelting operation of modest prosperity, a man of fierce ambition for his son who planned that Martin would study law and eventually occupy a position of social respectability. The household was devout and serious; the religious culture of late medieval Germany was deeply saturated with fear of divine judgment and a sense of the precariousness of human souls before an angry God, and this atmosphere shaped the child's inner life in ways that would prove decisive.

He attended Latin schools in Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach, receiving the humanist education that was the foundation of learned culture in the late medieval world. He was sent to the University of Erfurt in 1501, intending to study law in accordance with his father's plans. In July 1505, however, while returning to Erfurt after a visit home, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm. A bolt of lightning struck near him; terrified, he cried out to St. Anne and vowed that if he survived he would become a monk. He survived, and within two weeks he had entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt — a decision that horrified his father and that determined the course of his life.

His years as an Augustinian friar were marked by an intensity of religious practice that alarmed even his superiors. He fasted, prayed, confessed, and flagellated himself with a scrupulousness that went far beyond what the Rule required, driven by a terror of damnation and an inability to experience the assurance of divine grace that the sacramental system of the medieval Church was supposed to provide. His confessor, Johann von Staupitz, observed his anguish with concern and suggested that he redirect his energies toward scholarship — a piece of pastoral wisdom that would change the history of Christianity. Under Staupitz's guidance, Luther pursued advanced theological study and was ordained a priest in 1507.

The Road to Wittenberg and the Development of Lutheran Theology

Staupitz arranged for Luther to be transferred to the newly founded University of Wittenberg in 1508, where he began teaching theology, and it was at Wittenberg that the intellectual development that led to the Reformation took place. The decisive theological breakthrough — the "tower experience" that Luther described in later life as the moment he understood the meaning of Paul's phrase "the righteousness of God" — may have occurred around 1515, though the exact date and circumstances have been debated by Luther scholars for generations.

The theological question at the center of Luther's anguish was the question of how a sinful human being could stand before a holy God and be accepted. The late medieval Church taught that salvation was a cooperative process: God provided grace through the sacraments, and human beings could cooperate with that grace through good works, prayers, penances, and the other means the Church provided. Luther found this teaching profoundly unsatisfying, not as a theological proposition but as a personal experience: the harder he tried to cooperate with grace, the more aware he became of his own sinfulness and the more terrified he was of divine judgment.