Many people live in fear of never being good enough before God. It was this anguish, taken to its extreme, that tormented a young German monk until he found, while reading the letter to the Romans, an answer that would change the history of the church.
Martin Luther was born on November 10, 1483, in the small town of Eisleben, in the Holy Roman Empire, the son of a miner. He was studying law in Erfurt when, in 1505, terrified by a thunderstorm, he vowed to become a monk and entered the city’s Augustinian monastery.
As a monk, Luther was so rigorous that he made himself ill with endless fasting and confession, never finding peace with God. Years later, by then a professor in Wittenberg, studying Romans 1:17 he understood that the righteousness of God does not punish the sinner but is given freely to those who believe.
In 1517, when he publicly questioned the sale of indulgences, he is said to have nailed the famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church, a gesture tradition has enshrined, though historians today debate whether he actually posted them there or simply sent them by letter to the archbishop. Either way, the text spread rapidly through the newly invented printing press, carried the debate across Germany, and led to his excommunication by Pope Leo X in 1521.
Summoned to the Diet of Worms that same year, he refused to recant his writings unless convinced by Scripture. Hidden afterward in Wartburg Castle under another name, he translated the New Testament into German, a work he would complete a little more than a decade later with the translation of the entire Bible in 1534.
In 1525, he married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, with whom he had six children and a domestic life he himself helped make a model for married pastors. That same year, however, he wrote a pamphlet urging the princes to violently suppress the Peasants’ Revolt, an episode that left a dark mark on his biography.
Already old and ill, he still published “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543), a text of virulent attacks that centuries later would be used to justify antisemitism. It is a grave stain, acknowledged and lamented today by biographers and by Lutheran churches themselves.
Luther died on February 18, 1546, in Eisleben, the town of his birth, where he had traveled to mediate a dispute between local nobles. His rediscovery of grace received through faith, not merit, still sustains the faith of millions of Christians around the world today.
