Luther, a miner’s son, was born in Eisleben in 1483. Though of humble birth, he was able to attend the University of Erfurt, where he expected to complete his training for the law. But while there he was driven by circumstances to choose the life of a monk and he entered a cloister of the Augustinian friars in Erfurt. Here he began to study the Bible and saw that the emphasis of the Church upon deeds of merit was false security for salvation and that personal faith in Christ as Savior could alone justify the sinner before God. He secured a position to teach in the new University of Wittenberg, and there became involved after a time in the indulgence controversy. During the next few years, Luther wrote and spoke with increasing independence. He criticized the Church. He wrote pamphlets to prove his points and as a means of popular appeal in a time when there were no newspapers to shape public opinion. At first, the pope was disposed to laugh at a squabble between Augustinian and Dominican friars, but the Augustinian order to which Luther belonged was told to take him in hand. Luther met with his brothers in convention at Heidelberg but gained more there than he lost. He was indicted and summoned to Rome for trial but through the friendship of his prince, Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, the trial was held in German territory at Augsburg where Luther had a hearing before a papal legate. This did not end the matter, and the disturbance was so alarming in Saxony that the pope sent a representative to find out the exact situation. A debate followed with John Eck, a Catholic champion, in which Luther was forced to admit that he agreed with John Hus, who had been condemned by the Council of Constance a century earlier, and Luther was excommunicated from the Church. In 1521 Emperor Charles convened a legislative diet of the empire at Worms on the Rhine. Luther was summoned to attend by an imperial herald. The grave question was whether the German government would carry out the papal condemnation. Before all the dignitaries of the empire, lay and clerical, and before the papal legate, Luther was asked whether he stood by the position that he had taken in his writings. He declared that he took his stand on the Bible as his authority and refused to recant what he had written unless it could be proved false by the Scriptures. The emperor forced an edict of condemnation through the Diet and Luther was made an outlaw. It was then that Luther’s friends seized him under cover of night and carried him for safety to the castle of the Wartburg, where he remained for a year. This gave him the opportunity for further study, and here he commenced his German translation of the Bible. Other vernacular German translations from the Latin Vulgate had preceded it, but Luther used the colloquial language of the people and translated from the original with the help of the best critical texts. The result was a German Bible that became the accepted version of the German Protestants and fixed the form of the literary language of the country. In the years that followed Luther wrote and preached many sermons, he wrote expositions of the books of the Bible, he was the author of hymns that he published for the use of the people, and he had a wide correspondence.
Impact: Much of the history of the Reformation depends on the ideas of Martin Luther. Because of him, the revolt was more ecclesiastical than theological, except in the fundamental difference of Protestant dependence on faith for salvation and Catholic dependence on the sacraments of the Church. The basic principle on which Luther based his reconstruction of theology was that individual salvation from sin and its punishment was to be obtained by personal faith in Christ as a sufficient Savior rather than faith in the priest, the sacraments, and the whole system of Catholicism.