Martin Luther (born November 10, 1483, in Eisleben, House of Mansfeld; and died on February 18, 1546, in Eisleben), was an Augustinian Catholic theologian and friar who began and promoted religious reform in Germany and whose teachings were inspired by the Protestant Reformation and theological doctrine and cultural called Lutheranism.
Luther exhorted the Christian church to return to the original teachings of the Bible, resulting in a restructuring of the Christian churches in Europe. The reaction of the Catholic Church before the Protestant reform was the Counter-Reformation.
His contributions to Western civilization extend beyond the religious realm, as his translations of the Bible helped develop a standard version of the German language and became a model in the art of translation. His marriage to Catalina de Bora on June 13, In 1525, he began a movement to support priestly marriage within many Christian currents.
The Early Life of Martin Luther
Martin Luther was born in Eisleben (today’s Land of Saxony-Anhalt) on the night of November 10, 1483, “11 hours after sunset”, that is, around 5 am in the morning. Luther was the first son of the Hans Luder (1459-1530) and his wife Margarethe Lindemann (1459-1531).
He was baptized the day after the celebration of the feast of St. Martin of Tours, so he was given the name of the saint. In 1484 the family moved to Mansfeld, where his father ran several copper mines. Having grown up in a peasant environment, Hans Luder longed for his son to become a civil servant to give more honor to the family.
To this end, he sent young Martin to various schools in Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach. In 1501, at age 18, Luther entered the University of Erfurt, where he played the lute and received the nickname The Philosopher.
He received a bachelor’s degree in 1502 and a master’s degree in 1505, as the second of 17 candidates. Following the wishes of his father, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law of this university. But everything changed during a lightning storm on July 2, 1505.
A lightning strike struck him as he returned from a visit to his parents’ home. Terrified, he shouted: “Help Santa Ana! I will become a monk!”. He came alive and gave up his law studies, he sold his books except those of Virgilio and entered the monastery Augustinian of Erfurt on 17 July 1505.
Marriage and family of Martin Luther
On April 8, 1523, Luther writes to Wenceslaus: “Yesterday I received nine nuns from their captivity in the Nimbschen convent.” Luther had decided to help twelve nuns escape from the Cistercian monastery in Nimbschen, near Grimma in Saxony, by removing them from the convent in barrels.
Three of them left with their relatives, while the other nine were taken to Wittenberg. Catalina de Bora was in this last group. Between May and June 1523 it was thought that the woman would marry a student at the University of Wittenberg, Jerome Baumgartner, although his family probably denied it.
Dr. Caspar Glatz was the next suitor, but Catherine felt “neither desire nor love” for him. It was learned that she wanted to marry Luther or Nicholas von Amsdorf. Luther felt that he was not a good husband since he had been excommunicated by the Pope and was persecuted by the Emperor.
In May or early June 1525, his intention to marry Catherine was known in Luther’s inner circle. To avoid any objection from his friends, he acted quickly: on the morning of Tuesday, June 13, 1525, he legally married Catherine, whom he affectionately called “Katy”.
She moved into her husband’s house, the former Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg, and they started living as a family. The Luthers had three sons and three daughters:
- Johannes, born on 7 of June of 1526, who later would study laws and get to be an officer of the court, passing away in 1575.
- Elizabeth, born October as December as 1527, prematurely died on 3 August in 1528.
- Magdalena, born on 5 of maypole of 1529, died in the arms of his father on September 20, 1542. His death was very hard for Luther and Catherine.
- Martin, son, born on November 9, 1531, studied theology but never had a regular pastoral call before his death in 1565.
- Paul, born on January 28, 1533, was a doctor, father of six children, and died on 8 of March of 1593, continuing the male line of the family of Luther by Juan Ernesto, who would die in 1759.
- Margaretha, born on 17 of December of 1534, married with the Prussian nobleman George von Kunheim, but passed away in 1570 at the age of 36; it is the only lineage of Luther that remains to this day.
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Luther’s Theology of Grace
The desire to obtain academic degrees led Martin Luther to study the Scriptures in depth. Influenced by the humanistic vocation to go ad Fontes (“to the sources”), he immersed himself in the study of the Bible and of the early Church.
Because of this, terms such as penance and probity took on a new meaning for Luther, now convinced that the Church had lost sight of several central truths that Christianity taught in the Scriptures, one of the most important of which is the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
Luther began to teach that salvation is a gift exclusively from God, given by grace through Christ and received only by faith. Later, Luther defined and reintroduced the principle of the proper distinction between the Law of Moses and the Gospels that reinforced his theology of grace.
Consequently, Luther believed that his principle of interpretation was an essential starting point in the study of the Scriptures. He noted that the lack of clarity in distinguishing the Mosaic Law from the Gospels was the cause of the incorrect understanding of the Gospel of Jesus in the Church of his time, an institution that he blamed for having created and promoted many fundamental theological errors.
Martin Luther reformation
The reformation was initiated in Germany by Martin Luther, in Switzerland by Huldrych Zwingli and Johannes Calvin, if not intended. Its beginning is generally dated 1517 when Martin Luther is said to have knocked his 95 theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, but its causes and forerunners go back further.
The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 is generally regarded as the conclusion. The movement was initially an attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church. Many Catholics in Western and Central Europe were troubled by what they saw as false teachings and abuse within the Church, especially regarding the letters of indulgence.
Another point of criticism was the buying ability of church offices (Simone), which brought the whole clergy into suspicion of corruption. The reform movement split into different Protestant churches due to different teachings.
The most important denominations that emerged from the Reformation are those of the Lutherans and the Reformed (including Calvinists, Zwinglians, and Presbyterians). Then there are the radical Reformation Baptists. In countries outside of Germany, the Reformation was sometimes very different.
This is how Anglicanism emerged in England and Unitarianism in parts of Eastern Europe. The Reformation in Transylvania is regarded as a “special case in church history”. In countries that remained loyal to the Roman Church, some concerns of the Reformation were expressed in the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic reform.