Martin Luther

Biography

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was the German monk and theologian who launched the Protestant Reformation. By challenging the sale of indulgences and then the authority of the pope, he broke the religious unity of Western Europe; his translation of the Bible also left a lasting mark on the German language.

Born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld, he was the son of Hans Luder, who ran copper smelting works and intended him for the law. While a student at the University of Erfurt, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm near Stotternheim on 2 July 1505 and vowed to become a monk if St Anne saved him. Two weeks later he entered the Augustinian friary in Erfurt, and he was ordained a priest in 1507. A doctor of theology from 1512, he taught Holy Scripture at the University of Wittenberg, where he became convinced that man is saved by faith alone, not by his works.

On 31 October 1517 he sent the Archbishop of Mainz his 95 Theses against the sale of indulgences, through which the Church promised, in return for money, the remission of the punishment due for sin; according to tradition, he also nailed them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Thanks to the printing press, they spread across Germany within weeks. Ordered to recant by the bull Exsurge Domine, he burnt it in public in December 1520 and was excommunicated by Leo X on 3 January 1521. Summoned in April 1521 before the Diet of Worms, in the presence of Charles V, he refused to disown his writings; placed under the ban of the Empire, he was sheltered by the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, at Wartburg Castle, where in about eleven weeks he translated the New Testament into German, published in 1522.

Back in Wittenberg in 1522, he organised a new Church: worship in German, hymns, catechisms, the marriage of priests. On 13 June 1525 he married a former nun, Katharina von Bora, who bore him six children. That same year he fiercely condemned the peasants' revolt, even though the rebels partly invoked his ideas, and backed the princes who crushed it. In 1530 his colleague Melanchthon drew up the Augsburg Confession, the founding text of Lutheranism, and the complete Bible in German appeared in 1534. His last years were marked by virulent writings against the Jews, such as On the Jews and Their Lies (1543). He died on 18 February 1546 in his native town of Eisleben and was buried in the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

The Lutheran Reformation took hold in much of Germany and in Scandinavia, and the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 recognised the right of princes to choose the religion of their subjects. His Bible, read throughout the German-speaking lands, helped to shape modern written German, and his hymns are still sung today. His thought inspired Protestant churches all over the world, but his anti-Jewish writings weigh heavily on his legacy.