God’s Battle Axe – Martin Luther

Luther was many things to different people. While he was considered a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church, many people who were fed up with organized religion in his days saw him as their deliverer. The man whose convictions gave birth to the most effective reformation in church history was born on November 10, 1483, in Eisleben, Germany. His parents were Hans and Margaretha Luder (Martin later changed his last name to Luther while in college). Within six months of his birth, the family moved to Mansfield, Germany, and his father secured employment in the copper mines.

        Young Luther learned the value of hard work from his parents’ diligence. He watched as his father endured the severest of labours, pulling his family up from one economic class to the next. Starting as a worker in the mines, his father eventually established two smelter furnaces of his own and earned the respect of his community. This introduced the family to a whole new class of people. Soon young Luther was sitting down to dinner with people of stature in the community, officials from surrounding territories, schoolmasters, and the clergy.

         Though the Luthers had graduated out of the peasant class, there was one trait of that class that they did not leave behind. It is pertinent to note that most peasants of that time were extremely God-fearing. Not only was Luther’s mother a woman of prayer, but he recalled nightly being tucked away in bed, with his father kneeling to pray by his side. For the Luthers, prayer and discipline went hand in hand. Luther did not remember his parents ever sparing the rod, though he wrote later that he wished they had.

Never questioning their good intentions, he was nonetheless critical of their beatings. He claimed that his mother once drew blood while beating him with a cane for stealing a nut. On another occasion, his father’s discipline was so intense that he needed quite a bit of time, coaxing, and numerous apologies to warm up to him again.  By today’s standards, these punishments would be deemed as child abuse, but in that day, they were common, and the school system took up where the parents left off. The intense training and discipline paid off as they prepared Luther to be a man of influence.

Luther’s father was ambitious for himself and his family, and he was determined to see his son become a lawyer. He sent him to Latin schools in Mansfield, then to Magdeburg in 1947, where he attended a school run by a lay group called the Brethren of the Common Life. From there, Luther attended school in 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 age seventeen, he entered the University of Erfurt which he later described as a beerhouse and whorehouse. He was made to wake at four every morning for what has been described as a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercise. He received his master’s degree in 1505.

        On July 2, 1505, while Luther was returning to the university on horseback after a trip home, a lightning bolt struck near him during a thunderstorm. Later, he told his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment. On the strength of this experience, he decided to become a monk. Undeterred by his father’s sadness that his son would not become a lawyer, he left the university, sold his books and entered St. Augustine’s Monastery in Erfurt on July 17, 1505. There, Luther dedicated himself to the Augustinian order, devoting himself to fasting, long hours in prayer, pilgrimage and frequent confession. Luther described this period of his life as one of deep spiritual despair. He said, “I lost touch with Christ the Saviour and Comforter, and made him the jailer and the hangman of my soul”.

        Luther was ordained a priest on April 3, 1507. In 1508, he began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies on March 9, 1508 and another bachelor’s degree in the Sentences by Peter Lombard in 1509. On October 19, 1512, Luther was awarded Doctor of Theology, and was received into the Senate of the Theological Faculty of the University of Wittenberg on October 21, 1512, as Chair of Theology. Luther was also made the provincial Vicar of Saxony and Thuringia in 1515 by his religious order. This meant that he was to visit and oversee each of the eleven monasteries in his province.

         In 1515, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. On October 31, 1517, Luther wrote to his bishop, Albrecht von Brandenburg, protesting against the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his article titled, “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”, which came to be known as the ‘Ninety-five Theses’. An associate of Luther, Hans Hillenbrand claimed that he had no intention of confronting the Catholic Church at that point in time, but saw his disputation as a scholarly objection to the church practices.

          Luther was particularly offended by Tetzel’s claims that “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs into heaven”. Luther insisted 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. On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg.

In 1518, friends of Luther translated the document from Latin into German. Within two weeks, copies of the theses had spread throughout Germany, later reaching France, England and Italy by 1519. Also, many people including students thronged Wittenberg to hear Luther speak. He also published a short commentary on Galatians and his Work on the Psalms. Three of his best known works were published in 1520, namely, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian.

           From 1510 to 1520, Luther lectured on the Psalms, and on 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 Catholic Church in new light. He became convinced that the church was corrupt in its ways and had lost sight of what he saw as several of the central truths of Christianity. The most important 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. According to him, “This one and firm rock, which we call the doctrine of justification, is the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of righteousness”. He also said that “Faith is that which brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ”.

           Archbishop Albrecht did not reply to Luther’s letter containing the Ninety-five Theses. Rather, he had the theses checked for heresy and in December 1517 forwarded the letter to Rome. On his part, the incumbent Pope, Leo X responded slowly to the controversy. Over the next three years he deployed 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 Mazzoloni drafted a heresy case against Luther, prompting the Pope to summon him to Rome.

However, the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III persuaded the Pope to have Luther examined at Augsburg, where the Imperial Diet was held. Over a three-day period in 1518, Luther defended himself under questioning by papal legate Cardinal Cajetan. The Pope’s right to issue indulgences was at the centre of the dispute. The hearings degenerated into a shouting match. Realizing that the papal official was bent on having Luther arrested for heresy, a Carmelite monk, Christoph Langenmantel assisted him to escape from the city at night.

         In January 1519, the papal nuncio, Karl von Miltitz met with Luther at Altenburg in Saxony at the instance of Elector Frederick. Because Miltitz adopted a more conciliatory approach, Luther made certain concessions to him, promising to remain silent if his opponents did the same. The dispute escalated on June 15, 1520 when the Pope warned Luther with a papal bull (edict) that he risked excommunication unless he recanted 41 sentences drawn from his writings, including the Ninety-five Theses, within 60 days. In response, Luther set fire to the bull on December 10, 1520 at Wittenberg. On January 3, 1521, he was excommunicated by the Pope.

Thereafter, the secular authorities in Germany enforced a ban on the circulation of the Ninety-five Theses. On April 18, 1521, Luther was ordered to appear before the Diet of Worms, 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 January 28 to May 25, 1521, with Emperor Charles V presiding. Prince Frederick III, Elector of Saxony obtained a safe conduct for Luther to and from the meeting.

Despite pressure from the dignitaries present, Luther refused to recant his writings. On May 25, 1521, the Emperor presented the final draft of the Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw, banning his writings, and requiring his arrest. It also made it a crime for anyone in Germany to give Luther food or shelter. It equally permitted anyone to kill him without legal consequence.

         While returning to Wittenberg, Luther escaped with the aid of some friends. He was snatched by some men dressed as robbers and escorted to Wartburg Castle at Eisenach. During his stay at Wartburg, which he referred to as “my Patmos”, Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German. He also expounded the principle of justification to Jacobus Latomus, an orthodox theologian from Louvain. In this work, one of his most emphatic statements on faith, he argued that every good work designed to attract God’s favour is sin. All humans are sinners by nature, he explained, and God’s grace (which cannot be earned) alone can make them just.

         While Luther was holed up at the castle, the reformation assumed a life of its own. In particular, most of the common people that were hitherto exploited by the elite capitalized on the situation to fight for their freedom. Some of them took the law into their hands, resulting in widespread violence in certain provinces. The authorities responded with high hand, arresting and jailing some of the trouble makers.

This prompted Luther to return to Wittenberg on March 6, 1522. He wrote to Frederick the Elector, “During my absence, Satan has entered my sheepfold, and committed ravages which I cannot repair by writing, but only by my personal presence and living word”. For eight days in Lent, he preached eight homilies, which became known as the “Invocavit Sermons”. In these messages, Luther hammered home the primacy of core Christian values such as love, patience, charity and freedom. He charged the people to trust God’s word rather than violence to bring about the necessary change.

         The effect of Luther’s intervention was immediate as the violence stopped in Wittenberg and the misguided folks were brought back into the way of truth. Despite his victory in the city, Luther was unable to stifle radicalism further afield where revolts continued. Although he sympathised with some of the peasants’ grievances, he reminded them to obey temporal authorities. Without his backing, most of the rebels laid down their weapons while others felt betrayed. However, the radicalism was sustained under the umbrella of the Anabaptist movement, while Luther’s Reformation flourished under the wing of the secular powers in parts of Germany.

         In April 1523, Luther assisted twelve nuns o escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian Convent. He later married one of them named Katharina von Bora on June 13, 1525. Thereafter, Luther and his wife moved into a former monastery, ‘The Black Cloister’, a wedding present from Frederick the Elector. Katharina gave birth to six children, two of whom died in within a few months. She helped the family earn a living by farming and taking in boarders.

          Within this time, Luther was increasingly occupied with organising a new church. From 1525 to 1529, he established a supervisory church body, laid down a new form of worship service, and wrote a clear summary of the new faith in the form of two catechisms. On his part, Frederick authorised a visitation of the church, a power formerly exercised by bishops. In response to demands for a German liturgy, Luther wrote a German Mass, published in early 1526.

He based his order on the Catholic service but omitted everything that smacked of sacrifice. Under this arrangement, the Mass became a celebration where everyone received the wine as well as the bread. In 1522, he published his German translation of the New Testament, while the translation of the Old Testament was completed in 1534 in collaboration with other scholars.

          From 1531 to 1546, Luther’s health deteriorated. He had all along suffered from ill health, including Meniere’s disease, vertigo, fainting, tinnitus and cataract in one eye. In 1536, these were compounded by kidney and bladder stones, arthritis, and an ear infection which ruptured his ear drum. In December 1544, he began to feel the effects of angina. His last sermon was delivered at Eisleben, his place of birth on February 15, 1546. He suffered a stroke on February 18, 1546 which claimed his life at age sixty-two.

          There are many things to learn from the life of this servant of the Most High God. Luther gave his all to God and was used to bring the church back from the brink of destruction. The Reformation was a key milestone in the battle against satan and his evil hordes. Sadly, many Protestant leaders are trying to undo the great work done by Luther by embracing the heresies propagated by Babylon the great harlot.

     *** Materials sourced from God’s Generals by Roberts Liardon; Martin Luther- Wikipedia, https://www.en.m.wikipedia.org.