Reformation

Martin Luther: People In History

Martin Luther was born in 1483 in Saxony. His father was a wealthy and ambitious copper miner and wanted his son to study the law. Martin, however, was a very religious man and instead joined the Augustinian order of monks and trained to be a priest. He became a teacher at the University Of Wittenburg. Luther was a deeply troubled man. He saw himself as a sinner. He worried about going to hell and studied the bible for a way for sinners to get to heaven. The answer he found was called 'Justification by Faith Alone'. The only way to get to heaven, Luther said, was to possess a genuine faith and belief in God. The purchase of Indulgences could not make is easier to get to heaven. This opposition to the Church's teaching was the catalyst for his clash with the Pope, and for the entire Protestant Reformation. In 1517, Pope Leo X issued an indulgence to try to raise money to pay for the construction of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The Pope said that anyone who donated money to the collection would have his or her sins forgiven. A Dominican friar named John Tetzel was sent to Germany to sell the indulgences for the Pope. Luther thought this was terrible, as he believed the Pope was taking advantage of the fears and the faith of the uneducated poor. Further evidence of the corruption in the Church appeared when it was revealed that the Pope was to give half of the money collected to the Archbishop of Mainz, Luther's Archbishop. In return the Archbishop gave Tetzel permission to sell the indulgences in his diocese. Luther was appalled and was determined to protest against what he saw as a terrible and sinful act. Martin Luther wrote down 95 arguments or theses against the sale of indulgences and nailed them to the door of a church at Wittenburg Castle. The 95 points he made objected to the idea that money could buy salvation. They also objected to the building of great churches like St. Peter's Basilica in the first place. He thought the Church only built these great churches to make the bishops and cardinals and popes look good. The Pope expected nothing less than absolute obedience from his clergy. At first, a public act of protest from an unknown German monk must have seemed a most unimportant matter. However, Luther's ideas had been translated into German and thanks to the printing press, were quickly spread all over Germany. His ideas struck a chord with many ordinary Germans, fed up with the years of open corruption in the church. Luther was instructed to recant. Put simply, he, like Galileo (Italian astronomer who supported Nicolaus Copernicus's theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun), was told to take back his ideas or face punishment. Luther, sure he was right, refused. In 1519, he debated his ideas with the Pope's representative John Eck and his refusal to back down won him more and more support among Germans. In 1520 the increasingly frustrated Pope sent out an official papal bull, warning Luther to back down. Luther burned the letter publicly. Leo then excommunicated him from the church. This was a terrible punishment for any Christian at the time, as it damned Luther to hell. However, by this time, Luther was confident that it was the church itself that was corrupt, so to be excommunicated could only be a good thing. Luther's argument with the Pope was not just a personal and spiritual matter. It was a very serious political issue and, as it went on, supporters of the Pope and of Luther became more and more agitated and angry. In an attempt to solve the crisis, Charles V, the Emperor of Germany and a supporter of the Pope, called a meeting or Diet of all the German princes at a town called Worms. Luther was called before the Diet and again told to recant. He refused and was declared an outlaw by the Edict of Worms. However, many German princes supported Luther. Among these was Frederick, Elector of Saxony. He brought Luther to his castle in Wartburg where he was protected from his enemies.