Original subtitles

In a time of kings and princes, power was in the hands of the few. Then one man broke through.

This is extortion! Challenging an empire with little more than an idea. You are murderers,

traitors, liars. It was a protest born in a thunderstorm and announced with a nail.

The time for silence is over. The time to speak has come. spread faster than anything before,

thanks to the newest technology and the oldest truths. We should reject both Pope and council.

The man at the centre had no desire to be king, but his story would engage millions and inspire

generations in the quest for truth. I am bound to defend the truth with my blood and death.

I cannot and I will not retract anything. Few have played a greater role in shaping our

modern world. If I am shown my errors, I will be the first to throw my books on the fire.

His name, Martin Luther.

cannot and I will not retract anything.

The brash young monk named Martin Luther had just infuriated the most powerful leader in

Europe, Emperor Charles V. And Charles now wanted Luther dead.

Luther had no army to shield him. Instead, he had a different kind of protection, popular

support. Thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, Luther's protest against

the church had transformed him into Europe's first celebrity. He is the first theologian

who had mass media behind him. Burning Luther's writings would not stop the inevitable showdown

of the old against the new. The medieval versus the modern. The thing about gigantic personalities

is when they get things correct, they're able to achieve good that nobody else can achieve.

When they get things wrong, they tend to do damage that nobody else would have done. And

Luther is a classic example of that. His notoriety made him a figure you couldn't just dismiss

or get rid of. Getting rid of Martin Luther would now preoccupy the most powerful people

on earth for decades. The stage was set for one of the biggest battles of the millennium,

featuring a boisterous, media-savvy monk against the Emperor, the Pope, even Henry VIII.

The origin of the conflict flowed from a deceptively simple question, a riddle of sorts, that Luther

had wrestled with for years. question goes like this. Am I a good person?

Even children understand the difference between good and evil. Regardless of age, most every

person recognizes they have sometimes strayed away from the good and toward the bad. The

natural response is to work a bit harder in the hope that one's good deeds outweigh the

bad. It follows that if there is a heaven, most people assume they'll get in. because

they believe they've been good enough to earn whatever reward is out there. Martin Luther

did not. To him, being good enough for God made no sense at all.

Instead, his conscience would convict him as an unworthy sinner.

We all do our best. Well, most of us think we do our best most of the time. Luther didn't.

What was his struggle? His struggle was, in a way, the same thing we all are going through.

How do I get God's love? How do I get salvation? How can I, a big, ugly, wretched sinner,

be saved? For decades, Martin Luther felt his guilt so deeply he couldn't imagine a way

out. In his mind, good deeds could never save him. He fell into despair. Then Luther found

an opening. An idea so unexpected, so revolutionary, it would upend the church and reframe history

going forward. The very fact that we're still talking about it 500 years after the fact says

that Luther was on to something.

Daily life in 15th century Europe wasn't easy. Half of all children would not live to see

adulthood. Disease was rampant, food often in short supply. For the poorest and most desperate,

there was no safety net, other than the occasional gift from those with something to spare.

was slightly better in the city of Mansfeld, thanks to a thriving copper industry, where

a manager named Hans Luther was moving up the ranks. Hans came to realize he'd need a solution

to the constant stream of legal arguments that slowed his operation. In the early 1490s,

he saw the answer in his son Martin, grooming him for a university education with an eye

toward a career as a lawyer. There were conflicts, frequent conflicts between the miners and the

smelters. And I think Luther's father found it would be helpful to have a lawyer in the

family to help resolve some of those kinds of problems.

By his early 20s, Martin Luther had fulfilled his father's expectations to the letter, earning

bachelor's and master's degrees in record time. But as he began law school, something wasn't

right. Father.

Luther left school suddenly midterm and traveled home to meet with his father.

Han's hope for a lawyer in the family was about to be dashed. Who do you want to be? Martin

wanted to please his father, but his law courses seemed trivial.

Especially in light of Martin's deeper concerns, fears that we're about to reach a breaking

point. Get out.

Like most people of the era, Luther saw acts of nature as acts of God. For Luther, the

intensity of this storm brought his conscience to the surface.

made a promise if his life was spared he would become a monk man must first cry out that he

sees no hope in this disturbance salvation begins when man believes himself to be utterly lost

the light breaks

Within days, Luther arrived at an Augustinian monastery, casting off law school and all

the expectations of his father.

Hans believed Martin was throwing his life away. Plus, a vow of celibacy meant no grandchildren.

His father was not happy about his decision to go into the monastery and made no bones

about it. The decision to become a monk wasn't likely a spur of the moment choice.

Martin Luther's heart was already heavy, fearful of an all-powerful God with impossibly high

standards. For Luther, his feelings of guilt foster tremendous feelings of fear. He was

scared stiff before a wrathful God. Luther hoped that punishing himself for his sins would

be pleasing to God. He beat himself, fasted for days. slept outside in the cold. But the

extreme austerity just didn't seem to be working. Luther still felt the guilt of his sin. I

was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never

been created. Love God. I hated him. a monk that was driven, that was able to sleep because

he's saying, I doing everything that the church requires? Am I obeying all the rules of my

religious art or the Augustinian? Uh-oh, have I said the right prayers? Uh-oh, I better

do this or I'm going to hell. His problem was that he didn't believe any of what he was doing

as a monk was really helping him to escape God's judgment.

Luther's supervisor and friend, Johann von Staupitz, understood that the Church's right of confession

was designed to bring relief to those burdened with guilt, forgiveness for every kind of sin.

Luther confessed, but he found little reassurance.

While some monks might make their confession in a few minutes, Luther could go on and on

for hours. Fearful that even one unconfessed sin might be his undoing. He went to confession.

He repented. He atoned. And it still dawned on him. But I don't feel saved. I don't feel

happy. I'm not at peace. I'm still agonizing. I feel unable to earn and achieve God's love,

mercy and salvation. This is the angst that he had. of him leaving the confessional after

several hours of pedantically cataloging everything he'd done wrong and then him going straight

back in again because he'd forgotten something. One has to feel sorry, I think, for the person

he was confessing to. was a full-time job. At one point, his confessor told him to go away

and come back when he had something really important to confess.

Despite his internal struggles, Luther was a good student and earned the respect of his

peers. He was an incredibly hard worker. Because of this and because of his native intellect

and because of his passion, he advanced in the monastic community very quickly.

After two years of preparation, Luther was ordained, celebrating his first mass in 1507.

For Martin, this was a moment of raw fear, as he felt the full weight of his unworthiness

before God. Once again, Luther's conscience was condemning him.

Who am I that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? And

shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say, I want this, I ask for that? For I am dust and ashes

and full of sin, and I am speaking to the living, eternal, and the true God.

As a priest, Luther believed he had now reached his highest calling. Luther's father wasn't

so sure. Wondering if Martin's call to the monastery came not from God, but from the

devil.

Luther's friends in the monastery had no such worries. Soon afterward, they chose Luther

to go as their emissary on a journey, the longest Luther would take in his entire life. He walked

800 miles across the Alps to Rome.

Rome was the seat of the Catholic Church, and Luther expected a deeply reverent city, reflecting

wise and pious leaders. What he got instead was disillusionment.

No one in Rome seemed to take God very seriously. The depravity here in the church's holy city

led Luther to wonder if anything the church had told him was true. Where God builds a

church, the devil puts a chapel. Of course, the brothels and the alcohol abuse. Here's

a small town German boy. in the provincial capital. He's outraged by what he sees, but

so's everyone else. There was a lot of sort of open, jesting, almost mockery about the

church in Italy that would not have been common in Germany.

After returning from Rome, Luther's distress grew.

Staupitz long believed the best way to relieve Luther's angst was to keep the young monk busy.

He'd previously persuaded Luther to earn a doctorate in theology. Staupitz also knew

that Luther was the person who had a mind for learning and theology. And he basically forced

Luther into getting this doctorate. Luther protested, did not want to do that. Now a new challenge.

Staupitz arranged a position for Luther in the faculty of the new university in Wittenberg.

Luther's quest continued.

He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul.

you at the back. does this mean?

Anyone?

If it had not been for Dr. Staupitz, I should have sunk in hell. Johan told me I should

become a professor of theology and a preacher. I told him that would be the death of me.

He replied, oh, that's quite all right. God has plenty of work for clever men in heaven.

The city of Wittenberg was something of a backwater and the university wasn't well known. But

that began to change in 1517 when a traveling friar named Johann Tetzel set up his controversial

fundraising scheme nearby. Tetzel told the townsfolk that the documents he was selling,

called indulgences, could erase the consequences of their sins. The appeal was irresistible.

Many from Luther's church in Wittenberg were taken in by Tetzel's claims. A practice that

surely looks an awful lot of the time like something like salvation for sale.

Traditionally, the medieval church saw confession, not indulgences, as the way to address humanity's

moral problem. Sins are unacceptable to God, but confessing to a priest could bring forgiveness

and restoration. Yet even those who confessed regularly still expected many years in purgatory

before they could reach heaven. Until Johann Tetzel's indulgences offered to shortcut the

process for money.

This is extortion. A scheme completely opposed to religion. It's only intent is profit for

unprincipled men. I think he saw a great dishonesty with it, that you were fleecing people, people

who were already struggling. The corruption was not just a local problem. The tentacles

stretched all the way back to Rome. One of the external reasons... and contributing factors

to the success of the Protestant Reformation, everybody knows, was namely the corruption

at the time of the Catholic Church, which we can't deny. St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

In 1517, it had not yet been built. There were plans, but the work was stalled because

Pope Leo X didn't have the funds. He's engaged in trying to kind of update buildings in the

city of Rome itself to transform it into a nicer place to live. So he needs money. They need

money to build St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The very structure tourist see today. We walk

inside and so huge it sucks the breath out of your lungs. And so this is a terribly expensive

building. How are they going to build it? Funds were raised through the sale of indulgences.

and no one sold them more aggressively than Johann Tetzel. As an unabashed salesman, Tetzel

was unmatched. He'd tell peasants that their dead relatives were screaming in pain in purgatory,

begging for relief, which a simple coin could provide. Tetzel was a self-promoter from start

to finish. I mean, this guy was just a... I mean, a fake. Right to the bottom. They would

persuade poor peasants to give their last coins to get mother out of purgatory, this sort of

thing. Well, Luther had a perfect fit over this. From Luther's perspective, the sale

of indulgences was leading people away from God. Before long, all the churches, palaces,

walls, and bridges of Rome will be built out of our money. Why doesn't the pope build St.

Peter's out of his own money? He is richer than creases. He would do better to sell the

basilica and give the money to the poor people who are being fleeced by these hawkers of indulgences.

To address the problem, he invited an academic debate on the issue. He began by writing 95

debate topics, or theses.

then in the most iconic moment of the era. Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in

who believe that through these letters of indulgence they are made sure of their own salvation will

be eternally damned along with their teachers.

Although whether the 95 theses were ever actually nailed to the church door in Wittenberg is

still debated. don't know if they were posted. I tend to think not. I think the theses were

nailed. I think it's hard to make an argument that they were not posted. Most people when

they're going into church on a Sunday morning are not going to stop and read 95 theses in

a language they don't understand. I tend to think personally that he did post them somehow

in Wittenberg and the Castle Church door would be an obvious place to do it. The door of

the Castle Church in Wittenberg was the University Bulletin Board. And the reason things were

posted on that door is because that's where you posted public notices. Whether the 95

theses were nailed or just mailed, the result was the same. Indifference. No one wanted

to debate Luther.

The entire Reformation might have stalled right there, except for a new invention that had

recently arrived in Bittenberg. A game-changing technology called the printing press.

Before the printing press, making books was an excruciating process. Each word was painstakingly

written out by hand. It could take years to create just one copy of a book.

In the mid-1400s, Johann Gutenberg perfected the movable type printing press, a process

that could turn out in seconds what formerly took months. But the printers still had one

problem. Content. They needed material that would go viral, create controversy and boost

sales. Nothing really caught on until they found Martin Luther's 95 Theses. It was perfect.

Without Luther's knowledge, printers began churning out copies by the thousands. It is

a mystery to me how my statements were spread to so many places. They were meant for academic

circles. They were written in such a language that the common people could hardly understand

them. The printers are always looking for stuff that's going to sell. Challenging indulgences

and their validity, that was a topic that I think the printers thought would sell. They

spread like wildfire. know, 10 days they're in Spain. That's incredible. The striking

of a match in 1517, a bonfire, the flames of which are still burning. How shocked he was

that everything he said was suddenly out there. Although the 95 theses were written for academics,

not peasants, one thing was clear to all. The document denounced the sale of indulgences.

Luther had struck a nerve, rousing dormant perceptions that the pope had too much power

and wanted too much money from the German people.

This is mine. Where did you get these? It's everywhere. At first, Luther was unaware his

ideas were propagating. These have been printed. It soon became clear he was something of a

celebrity, the author of an accidental bestseller, a work that boldly proclaimed the corruption

on everyone's mind. There was this suspicion that the whole thing was a kind of spiritual

con. It was a matter of Luther, as it were, simply lighting the tinder that was already

there, and the thing blew. He draws this picture and he says, see them in Rome now drinking

their fine Italian wines and laughing about the stupid beer-drinking Germans whose tax

money is paid for it all. But there are other situations out You have got the rise of nations

who are craving land. At the time of Martin Luther, close to 50 % of the land of what

we call Europe was owned by, who? The Catholic Church. You got kings who will say, I want

that. And all of a sudden, you've got an articulate, masterful writer and speaker who is speaking

out. against this corruption of the church and giving the kings the rationale they need to

go after. When a copy of the 95 theses reached Pope Leo X, he dismissed it, thinking Luther

was a minor player who posed little threat to the Catholic Church. It would rank among the

biggest miscalculations in Church history.

Despite the newfound attention, Martin Luther had no desire to start a revolution in 1517.

He thought the 95 theses would help the Catholic Church, not divide it. He's not intending to

break dramatically with the Catholic Church. I if you'd probably told him in 1517, well,

by the way, 20 years from now, this is going to be the situation, he would have thought

you were crazy. Avoid those who search for your soul in a money bag. In his sermons and

writings, Luther continued to critique what he saw as fixable errors in church practice.

Suppose you say that I will never again buy an indulgence. I reply, good. My will, desire,

plea, and counsel are that no one buy an indulgence. Let the lazy and sleepy Christians buy indulgences.

You run from them.

Some now want to call me a heretic. I consider such blathering no big deal, especially since

the only ones doing this have darkened minds and have never even smelled a Bible. It was

mutiny, was heresy, was revolt, was a revolution. And of course it inflamed opinion and people

wondered how he could stay alive day after day. Before long, the heretic label began to stick.

Church leaders sought to contain Luther, as they had many other insurgents in the centuries

past. It's not that opposition to the church was unimaginable so much as when dissident

movements arose, they were successfully contained. A combination of persuasion, the exertion

of political suppression when necessary, violent punishments for those who refused to capitulate.

One hundred years earlier, a priest named Jan Hus, like Luther, had criticized the Catholic

Church. It was an era when the Church believed it necessary to physically stop those who might

lead people away from God. Jan Hus was declared a heretic and burned at the stake. As they

said at the time, know, things like, for example, murderers kill bodies, But heretics kill souls.

Luther would express a kinship to Hus's ideas publicly. I have been teaching and holding

all the things taught by Hus. We are all Husites, including the apostle Paul. Luther's friends

suggested he keep quiet, but Luther didn't see the danger at first. Luther assumed that

when Tetzel's corrupt sale of indulgences was brought to the Pope's attention, the church

would take corrective action. But unlike modern Popes, Leo wasn't overly concerned with the

details of theology. In this era, Popes focused more on political matters. They're chosen

because they will be effective administrators of a giant, wealthy, complicated institution.

So they're chosen because people think hmm, this person would be a really good CEO. They

are a CEO of the largest institution in Western Europe. A member of the powerful Medici family

of Florence, Leo enjoyed the luxury the papal coffers could provide. And Luther's opposition

to the sale of indulgences threatened the flow of money to the Vatican. If you're talking

about the church as the leadership of the church, the bishops, especially the bishop of Rome,

who's the pope, they would have found him to have been Troublemaker, a loudmouth, a know-it-all,

a dead wrong monk. Leo wanted Luther brought to Rome for trial. But the extradition was

blocked by Luther's powerful prince, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who wanted to protect his

star professor. If he had been sent to Rome, we may have never heard of Luther again.

Luther would now be questioned on German soil in the city of Augsburg. Now I must die.

What a disgrace I will be to my parents. Luther's questioner was Cardinal Cayetan, one of the

most skilled theologians of the era.

For Luther, Cayetan had all the authority and power of the Pope himself.

and he once described it as kind of the bad cop. He's trying to break him, kind of bring

the big man in, bring the interrogator in, and sort of break Luther if you can. But when Cayetan

asked Luther to retract his statements about indulgences, Martin would not. Cayetan produced

the official papal pronouncements that allowed for the sale of indulgences. Catholic Church

law was on Cayetan's side. Luther was cornered, and he knew it. His reply was both disrespectful

and obtuse. Yes, you said that the merits of Christ are a treasure. This says that he acquired

a treasure. To be and to acquire do not mean the same thing. Do not think we Germans are

ignorant of grammar. Luther then grounded his position in an even more outrageous statement.

His holiness abuses scripture. I deny that he is above scripture. The conversation more

quickly turns to, do you accept the authority of the pope? And so, in many ways, the condemnation

of Luther was first and foremost for his unwillingness to accept the authority of the Church. Cayetan

was appalled by Luther's blatant contempt for papal authority and his rudeness. Cayetan

is not a clear Christian thinker. He is about as fit to deal with this situation as a donkey

is to play the harp. And indeed, some of Luther's friends will be... concerned that he showed

such great disrespect for such important personages. If he didn't like you, I think he'd tell you

to your face. He was a very, very straightforward person. Luther's friends believed his scandalous

statements put him in grave danger. They persuaded him to escape the city, slipping past the

guards, scurrying back to the relative safety of Wittenberg.

A more cautious man might have laid low, but Luther did the opposite, agreeing to a very

public debate in the city of Leipzig. The event captured the popular imagination like a heavyweight

prize. Between rounds there was even a jester to entertain the crowd.

Luther's opponent, Johann Eck, scored points as a debater, but his performance was not a

crowd pleaser. Many saw Eck as vain, seeking only to enhance his reputation.

Luther, in contrast, knew exactly how to connect with his listeners.

you

I am being misunderstood by the people. So let me be clear in my own life. I simply assert

that a simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without

it. It's a sparring match. The great debaters of the day would have been akin to the rock

stars and movie stars of our day. As for the pope's decree on indulgences, I say that neither

the church nor the pope can establish articles of faith. These must come from scripture.

God once spoke through the mouth of a donkey.

I will tell you straight what I think. I am a Christian theologian. I want to believe

freely and be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university or pope.

One thing was clear. Luther had rejected the Pope and the Church as the ultimate source

of authority. Instead, he hangs everything on the Bible. At the time Luther I think is

sort of astounded that he finds himself saying this, but later on he actually gives that credit

for in a sense helping him to see the implications of his own ideas more clearly. In a way I

think that forced admission frees him to articulate ideas that he's had for a while. It frees him

to put himself forward as a reformer.

Luther's rejection of the Pope's authority remains the central difference between Protestants

and Catholics to this day. The Catholic perspective, even today, I think, would say, let's not confuse

particular misuses of authority with the notion of authority proper to itself.

Pope Leo wasn't happy about Luther's statements, but he measured his response, hoping to stay

on the good side of Luther's prince and protector, Frederick the Wise. Frederick had something

Leo desperately wanted, influence on the choice of the next emperor. In the early 1500s, Germany

didn't exist as a nation. The German people lived in a patchwork of separate fiefdoms,

free cities and principalities. These German states and others were cobbled together to

form a loose union called the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the aging Emperor Maximilian. His

death in early 1519 triggered the election of a new emperor and just seven powerful men.

called Elector's, had a vote. Frederick was one of the seven. Pope Leo, who had no vote,

nonetheless wanted to influence the outcome. So, rather than alienate Frederick, the Pope

kept his hands off Luther for a time.

As part of the arrangement, Luther agreed to stay quiet. He tried.

But when the opposition derided his ideas, Luther went on a writing spree in 1520, churning

out some of the most significant works of his career, bestsellers that were the talk of

Europe. The first, titled To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, laid out Luther's

ideas for church reform and addressed a particular injustice that Luther found disturbing and

unchristian. The Catholic Church had long considered priests, monks and nuns as having a higher

calling than regular Christians. To Luther, this was all wrong. He saw the Bible leveling

the playing field. Priests, bishops or popes are not superior to other Christians. A cobbler,

a smith, a farmer, each has the work of his trade, like priests and bishops, and everyone

must benefit and serve every other. And so Luther's views on this were radical. They revolutionized

society. When we look to Luther, I think that he is valuing all vocations, all things that

people do, that they have importance. So a maid who cleaned a room was not simply cleaning

a room. She was doing God's work. He said the farmer out in the field pitching dung. is doing

a greater work for God than the monk in a monastery praying for his own salvation. Luther is the

one who has said it is the attitude with which you pursue your calling that makes it godly

and holy, not the calling itself. Luther's assertion that, in God's eyes, peasants were on equal

footing with monks and priests was radical. Soon, commoners demanded more from their princes,

and many monasteries emptied out, their purpose no longer clear. It was the kind of message

the public was ready to hear, and Luther, the writer, knew just how to grab their attention.

Printers sold every copy of the treatise they could print. Luther's fame grew. The things

that one might say about the church in the pub, but you wouldn't say it too loudly, Luther

puts it in writing. There's a freshness to Martin Luther's writings that's unmistakable.

A very fun and interesting writer to read. That kind of social media savvy was something that

got Luther a great hearing and became one of the most published men in Europe at the time.

In his other writings in 1520, Luther attacked the supremacy of the pope and challenged the

Catholic view of the sacraments. He's certainly one of those personalities that's sort of bigger

than life. Sometimes, at least when I read him, and others may disagree about this, but

I'm like, good Lord, what must it be like to be so sure you're right? Had he not been an

arrogant, stubborn, bombastic, bullheaded figure, he would not have been able to oppose the church

corruption. in the way that he did. Luther fueled the controversy by using especially

extreme language. Moderation was nearly impossible for him. He saw himself engaged in an epic

struggle for souls, a battle that called for strong words, not polite talk. You are murderers,

traitors, liars, the very scum of all the most evil people on earth. You are full. all

the worst devils in hell, so full that you can do nothing but vomit and out come devils.

It was quite common on all sides of the Reformation debates to make personal attacks on your opponents

and to say absolutely awful things about them and their mother and all sorts of other relatives.

He is a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder. A lying buffoon, a mad fool with

a frothy mouth and a whorish face. He had outbursts of anger and that expressed itself in a language

that was crude sometimes. I beg you, blow your nose a bit and make your head lighter and the

brain clearer. He still talked like a firm, or like a minor, you know. So his language

was colorful and excessive. We are permitted to laugh and have fun with and embrace our

wives, whether they are naked or clothed. Yeah, Luther's fun to read, in part because he expresses

himself in a very, how would you put it, earthy way. Sometimes in a, what would you say,

scatological way. I mean, he's crude at times. So he will regularly say, when the devil troubles

me at night, I fart in his face and say, be gone, devil. It sounds, again, crude, it's

an expression of sort his disdain for the ultimate claims of evil, his disdain for anyone that

would try to claim authority over God.

By now, Luther's understanding of the relationship between God and people was coming into focus.

The central question Luther was answering is one that nearly everyone asks. What makes

me a good person? A righteous person in God's eyes? The normal way in religious rhetoric

is you say, well, God does this, but you have to do this. There was a mentality and sense

that you are taught that there are certain things you can do. to make yourself better. And when

you fail, it's all on you.

Luther had long been tortured by his feelings of unworthiness, tormented by the guilt of

his failings, that even his devotion as a monk could not...

The lives by faith alone. The righteous person lives by faith alone. All at once, I felt

I had been born again. Immediately, I saw the whole of scripture in a different light.

I ran through the scriptures from memory and found that other words had similar meanings.

The work of God, that is what God works in us. The power of God by which he makes us

powerful. The wisdom of God by which he makes us wise. The strength of God, the salvation

of God, the glory of God. This sweetest phrase of Paul was now for me the very gate of paradise

itself. Luther's breakthrough, triggered by a passage in the Bible's Book of Romans, was

his understanding that God's favor could not be earned, even partially, by doing good deeds.

Instead, he saw righteousness as a gift, given by God to those with faith in Jesus.

To him, this is astoundingly good news, and it's not the news that people have been getting.

It was a change that took us away from focusing on what we could do to put us in good standing

with God. That change was monumental. He now has what he considers to be good news to proclaim

to his people, rather than merely burdening them with more and more things that they have

to do and more more standards that they have to meet. From the Catholic perspective, where

Luther goes a little bit wrong is by separating faith and good works and saying that faith

alone is enough. Christ's suffering, death and resurrection has accomplished everything.

Your good works do not earn your salvation, not in the least. No. Grace is a gift for you

from God. To many hearers, Luther's ideas sounded ridiculous, too good to be true. It seemed

more logical that God would judge people by their deeds. But Luther was frightened by

that view of God. because he saw himself as a man who could not stop sinning. We are all

sinful and we all need God's grace. Now the problem is that some of us don't realize that

we are all sinful and that we all need God's grace. Luther's ideas then faced an obvious

follow-up. If God frees people from the need to do good works to earn heaven, then what

should Christians do with that freedom? Again, Luther saw the answer clearly. Here is the

truly Christian. when a man applies himself with joy and love to serving others, voluntarily

and for nothing, doing only what is helpful, advantageous, and wholesome for our neighbor,

since by faith we already abound in all good things in Christ. The more you read Luther,

the more you begin to hear Luther say, look. You now are living a life in this world, on

this earth, and God has given you a rich field in which to be a useful person to your neighbor.

And so I want you to serve your neighbor as you are now free. to serve your neighbor and

to love your neighbor. So when you didn't have to worry about your future, you were free to

care for the futures of others. If you were caught all the time, as Luther put it, turned

in on yourself and life is just about you and what you and what, what a pitiful life when

you don't have the eyes to see others. you know, whom you could love. So now you can leave

who you really are, a loving person, to love your neighbor. We're free to love our neighbor

and free to care for our neighbor and we do that as a response to God. That's what the

Reformation is about, the whole thing. Everything is hinged on that. Luther's point of view

is, don't just sit there, do something. If it turns out to be the wrong thing, God will

forgive you. And your neighbor's need became the measure of what you did. Rather than some

eternal calculus that said you've got to do so many good works in order to get in good

with God. You are free. Well, that's a lot of fun. It's about as countercultural as it

gets. Back in Rome, Pope Leo was not overly concerned about Luther's view of freedom or

salvation. But he was increasingly annoyed at Luther's questioning of church authority.

To a large extent, the Catholic Church doesn't want to dispute about doctrine. As far as

they're concerned, doctrine is not an issue. The issue is how to control one and another

of a long line of medieval heresies. all good things in Christ. Leo tried controlling Luther

by issuing a papal bull, a formal document that required Luther to disavow his writings.

But then he has got to take him.

The time for silence is over. The time to speak has come.

The delivery of the papal bull stirred up unrest among Luther's supporters. Luther himself

took his boldest step yet, burning the bull. As they excommunicated me for the sacrilege

of heresy, so I excommunicate them in the name of the sacred truth of God. Christ will judge

whose excommunication will stand.

Amen.

there was no turning back now. When he heard that Luther had burned the bull, an incensed

Pope Leo renewed his demand that Luther appear in Rome for a hearing. Luther's luck seemed

to have run out until his supporters arranged for one last option, an appeal to the most

powerful man in the Western world, the emperor.

When Emperor Maximilian died in 1519, his grandson Charles was elected to replace him. He was

only 19 years old. He was raised to be a king, but he was still 19 years old. Charles was

now in charge of a collection of semi-autonomous territories and states, which all wanted their

say. He was very frustrated and he has people opposing him on every side. I mean, he's just

constant conflict. This is the life of a Habsburg emperor in the 16th century. It's not a good

time to be emperor of anything. The needs of the German people were not important to Charles,

but he did want to keep his empire united. And he believed the key to cohesion was a

unified religion, a policy that made Martin Luther an unwelcome thorn in his side. But

Charles had to tread lightly. Public support for Luther was enormous. So, in an attempt

to appear fair-minded, Charles agreed to a formal hearing on German soil. in the city

of Worms in 1521. Because people knew that Luther was going to be there, he was a media

star by this point, and so lots of people came. And when he got there, it turns out that this

guy is called the German Hercules. Luther probably had 90 % of Germany behind him when he entered

Worms. Anticipation ran high for this showdown between the powerful emperor and the lowly

but popular monk. And when he finally got to the gates of arms, the crowd went wild.

Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Verms as tiles on its roofs, I would

enter. I will have a debate. I must.

As he approached the hearing, the gravity of the situation began to sink in. Many assumed

Luther would be burned at the stake before the day was over. Burning at the stake, it's

terror violence exercised by the state in order to maintain social control. And it's very

powerful, very disturbing.

In the centre of the room was a collection of books written by Luther. He was asked to disavow

all his writings, to publicly retract his statements, and so spare himself.

Silence!

This affects the salvation of souls. Of this Christ said, He who denies me before men,

Him will I deny before my Father. To say too little or too much would be dangerous. I beg

you, give me time to think it over.

He asked for 24 hours to think about it because he realizes how he's going to answer is it

could end up in his death. This might be it for him. So yeah, he's very nervous about what

might happen here. Luther was granted the night to think it over. Now as my mouth opens, swallow

me up. Now small my faith is in you. It's the wisdom of this world.

you

This song belongs to you.

The next day, Martin Luther would face the Emperor Charles V one last time. I do not set myself

up as a saint. Therefore, your most serene majesty, expose my errors. Overthrow them

by the writings of the prophets and the evangelists. If I am shown my errors, I will be the first

to throw my books on the fire. Luther was still deflecting the question, frustrating his questioner,

who finally asked Luther for a simple, straight answer.

Since you desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. I do not

accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other. Unless

I am convinced by scripture or clear reason, my conscience is captive to the word of God.

I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against

conscience.

May God help me.

had a chance to save his neck, but after he had a chance to test his own commitment and

is it what I really believe in, he was willing to die for it and he never changed from that.

The whole meeting just blew up. Late afternoon, April, dark, torches providing the only light

and bang. Thinking about him as a kind of master of drama, he sort of sweeps out of the room

and disappears for a while.

The cheering crowds at Worms gave Luther a few moments of seeming freedom, but he was about

to become the most wanted man in Europe. Charles signed a decree condemning Luther, ordering

that he receive punishment for high treason. Charles realized it would not be politically

wise to arrest Luther in the midst of the adoring crowds, so he honored a previous agreement

to give Luther safe passage. a few precious days of furlough before the sentence would

be enforced.

Luther took the opportunity to head for home, but he never made it.

Martin Luther was dead. That's what most Germans assumed when they heard about the kidnapping.

But Luther's story was not coming to an end. In fact, it was about to enter a whole new

chapter.

Luther's hideout was a secret room at Vardburg Castle. He grew a beard as a disguise, his

code name, Knight George. Martin Luther disliked the isolation of the castle, but it didn't

slow down his work. Here, he embarked on one of the most significant projects of his life,

translating the New Testament into the language of the people. Luther finished the translation

in just 11 weeks. So many people are anxious to have the Bible in German. I wish this book

could be in every language and dwell in the hearts and minds of all. He translated the

Bible into German. He said so every plow boy could read God's word. That the words would

be used that people out there in the fields would understand and relate to. Joseph is

speaking to Mary in the most beautiful German you can possibly imagine.

The translation was an immense success that would unite the German tongue for the next

500 years. To translate, we must listen to the mother in the home, the children on the street,

the common man in the marketplace. We must be guided by their language, the way they speak,

and do our translating accordingly. I sometimes searched and inquired about a single word for

three or four weeks. If anyone does not like my translations, they can ignore them. Luther

would be known for that, if nothing else, as one who brought some conformity to the German

language at the time. Luther never received any money from the printers who published his

Bible or any of his best-selling works. Even a small royalty would have made him rich, given

that he wrote nearly a quarter of all the books sold in Europe.

But Luther wasn't worried about any loss of income because he quickly grasped the power

of the press to spread ideas and that's what mattered to him. interesting thing is how

quickly Luther said, I can get my ideas across if I just make friends with the printers. He

paid great attention to what fonts the printers would use. He was very careful to make sure

that his books looked. as beautiful as he wanted them to look in order to have an impact. When

you think of Martin Luther, you can't just think of him as a church reformer. He was also

the first living, best-selling author. He brings these theological, biblical, sometimes abstract

things down to earth, and he is almost like he transports himself right there in those

biblical texts, and he takes the reader with him. Luther's exile at Wadborg Castle went

on for months. He began to hear stories of how the movement he started was veering off

course badly.

In Wittenberg, anti-Catholic mobs were smashing church windows and destroying art. So-called

prophets were proclaiming they had knowledge superseding the Bible. I think it pained Luther

to see that people that he loved and trusted, while he was gone, his tempering influence

was removed, like the control rods were pulled out of the reactor. There's a lot of confusion

about what this Reformation is really about, to the point where Luther feels compelled

to return. to try to calm everybody down. To quell the unrest, in March of 1522, Luther

ended his exile and returned to Wittenberg. We must do to one another as God has done

to us through faith, for without love, faith is nothing.

And hey dear friends, have you not grievously failed? I see no signs of love among you.

He preached civility, patience and non-violence. Order returned for a time. He came back to

Wittenberg and then started that series of sermons where he said, look, we do not force people

to believe what we believe. and we do not inflict harm on other people because they believe differently.

When he goes back to Wittenberg, he's completely on his own. think if he was not able to impress

himself on the people at that point, it would all have been over. So that's a remarkable

moment.

By the early 1500s, tiny Wittenberg was the seat of the Reformation. Students came here

from all over to study under Luther as well as his fellow reformers like Philip Melanchthon.

And even those who could not come to the university were advancing the cause of the Wittenbergers,

including a Bavarian woman named Argola von Grumbach, a staunch supporter of Luther and

Melanchthon. For a time, her writings outsold every other author in Europe, save Luther

himself. Through sheer force of will, Argula became one of the most influential women of

the Protestant Reformation. What news from Bavaria? Luther encouraged Argula's writing, but the

men in her community tried to suppress her. You want to belittle a woman you call her a

whore, a bitch, a desperate, a crazy woman? Oh, the worst, wrinkly old woman.

Argula didn't have the protection of a leader like Frederick the Wise, and that put her in

jeopardy. These university people and some lords, princes, contemplating the possibility of

strangling her, or just getting rid of her body and all, or cutting her fingers off.

Argula survived and gave Luther perhaps the best advice he ever received. continue. She

encouraged him to get married.

In early 1523, Martin Luther received a secret letter. from nine nuns hoping to escape their

convoy. In most German territories, this would be simple. But these nuns lived in the staunchly

Catholic land of Duke George. Anyone who helped them leave faced a penalty of death. Luther

devised a covert operation. A local merchant would bring the normal delivery of pickled

herring to the nun's cloister. But when he left, the empty wagon wouldn't be empty at

all. The plan worked perfectly. But then Luther had a new problem. What to do with a wagonload

of young women who had no means of support? In time, he would find suitable homes, or

husbands, for all but one. The holdout, Katerina Vombora, didn't like the arrangements Luther

would make for her, eventually rejecting several marriage proposals. But she was willing to

marry Luther.

By this point, Luther was 41 years old and getting pressured by his friends to find a wife. Luther's

friends kind of say, well, how about her? And so he thinks, well, OK. And they convince

him that she would be a good person to become his wife. It seemed hypocritical for him to

avoid marriage because he had long condemned vows of chastity. He also says by vowing chastity,

we're trying to counteract something that's in our basic human nature and we can't do that.

doesn't exclude celibacy by any means and he does see this as a special gift, but that's

his point. It's a special gift. You can't decide to be celibate. Martin finally agreed to marry

Caterina. Although it wasn't because of any romantic feelings, at least not at first.

Luther explained that the reason he married was to please his father and to spite the Pope.

Over time, Martin came to love Katie dearly. She was intelligent, resourceful, and savvy

with finances in ways that Martin was not. We remember her as Catherine von Boer and not

Mrs. Martin Luther for a reason. She stood on her own. She didn't belong to anybody. To be

married to somebody as gruff and bold as Luther could be, she had to kind of match him.

Katie managed orchards, brewed beer, slaughtered pigs, and gave birth to six children. At any

given time, the Luther home, a former monastery, housed more than a dozen guests. Katie managed

it all skillfully. He would sort of turn to her and say, well, by the way, sweetie, we're

going to have 40 extra folks for dinner. Find something for them to eat. Luther invites anybody

to the house he wants to, and he had no problem opening their doors, even when they had no

more room. Good girls. He had this kind heart and jovial hospitality that Katharina had to

keep in check.

Think of all the squabbles Adam and Eve must have had in the course of their 900 years.

Eve would say, you ate the apple. And Adam would retort, you gave it to me. Thank you.

It's impossible to keep peace between husband and wife if they do not overlook each other's

faults. I wouldn't give up my Katie for France or for Venice. In an era when it was illegal

for a man to will his estate to his wife, Luther did it anyway. So great was his respect for

Caterina. He was not a feminist, but his view of humanity is about as inclusive as you can

expect from a 16th century man. It had been many centuries since any clergy in the Western

Church had a wife and children. The Catholic hierarchy had long declared chastity superior

to sexuality. But Luther championed sex within marriage as a gift from God. His family life

was a daily expression of his belief that spouses and children are a blessing, a school for

character that far surpassed the celibate life. What happened in a bedroom with Katerina and

what happened at the dinner table with Katerina, what happened when he saw Katerina nursing

and when he was changing the diapers. something clicked and he saw God everywhere. Part of

the reason Luther waited so long to marry and have children was that Emperor Charles V had

put a bounty on his head, and Luther feared his end could come at any time. But by 1522,

Charles wasn't focused on Luther's arrest. He had a much bigger problem, war. Charles

fought off the French in the Netherlands and revolts in Spain. But his biggest threat came

from the East. Muslim leader Suleiman the Great, whose armies were approaching Vienna. Charles

had his hands full. He's trying to deal with hugely far-flung territories and so forth.

This is just one problem among many. He's only 19 years old when he's elected the Holy Roman

Empire. He's got a lot of other things to worry about besides just this troublesome Augustinian

friar.

Meanwhile, Luther had his own war to deal with, and he didn't handle it well. See, dear friends,

I fear some prophets of murder have come among you. By the 1520s, the German peasants were

restless. Luther's stand against the church hierarchy had emboldened many to stand up to

their princes and lords, sometimes with violence. Luther was the only person in Germany with

the status and respect... negotiate a peaceful resolution. The devil has sent false prophets

among you. He tried, but diplomacy was not in his skill set. His overriding concern,

avoiding chaos. Luther fears anarchy. He fears the kind of thing that may burst out. Luther's

worst fears were realized as the peasants' looting and killing escalated. He then overreacted,

encouraging the nobility to crush the rebellion. Brutally. They did. The Peasants' was a

horrible event. had 50, 60,000 peasants slaughtered. Afterwards, he's mortified to see how terribly

it actually all turned out. In 1527, Luther fell ill. Sickness was no stranger. In the

past, he'd suffered debilitating kidney stones, gout, insomnia, dizziness, and ringing in

his ears. But the most challenging of all hit hard this year, a recurrence of his deep bouts

of depression. At times, he would lock himself in his room for days. There's a specific word

that he basically coined. It's anfechtung. That is an... Some people translate it as anxiety

or something like that. It is spiritual attack. Luther was depressed for a long period of time,

and he just couldn't get out of this depression. In this, his most severe attack, Luther felt

utterly abandoned, full of doubt, alone in the universe, as if God had died.

By late summer 1527, it might have seemed like God had died, as grotesquely masked plague

doctors arrived in Wittenberg to try and stop an outbreak of the plague. The needs of others

were enough to finally break Luther's malaise, and he began to minister to the sick and console

the dying. Many evacuated the city, but Martin and Katie stayed, even though Katie was several

months pregnant. Her child, Elizabeth, would die a few months after birth. Suffering, which

was such a thing to fear and to be avoided in Christian spirituality, now for Luther became

an opportunity to love the neighbor. Luther's advice during the hard times, is to reinterpret

those hard moments as occasions for beauty and occasions for love. In these most dire times

of death and abandonment, Luther wrote his most powerful hymn, A Mighty Fortress.

The title might suggest a hymn about battle, but for Luther, a mighty fortress was about

comfort and hope in times of trial.

Luther restructured worship gatherings to include more music, lively songs sung by the congregation.

They could sing while they were plowing the fields or making shoes and those hymns then

did sink deeply into the religious consciousness of people across Germany. Incorporating more

hymns was just one part of Luther's larger strategy to revitalize the church service or mass. He

advocated the mass be conducted in German as well as Latin so that the common people could

understand it. And Luther placed new emphasis on the sermon as a method of teaching lay people

who had much to learn. And so the sermon also becomes a way in which Luther instructs people

on how to find the right things about God and life in the scriptures. Now he's the leader

of a reform movement that has to figure out a way to really make itself a real thing, a

real force, and not then to simply hand the Bible to every person and say, make of it what

you will.

Luther's plan to reform local congregations faced a major setback in 1528 when he visited

nearby churches and learned just how poorly trained the priests were. Some didn't even

have a Bible.

Please tell me how church attendance has been. How many pastors are altogether incompetent

and live like dumb brutes and irrational hobs? The common people have no knowledge whatsoever

of Christian doctrine and yet, now that the gospel has come, they have nicely learned to

abuse it like experts. Good God, Have you done anything to rectify church attendances?

Please, may I see inside? I think Luther initially is a bit naive in how things are going to play

out. What he realized after they went around and visited these churches is that nobody really

knew anything about the Christian church or the things that they knew were just strange

and odd. And he said, now that they've heard about Christian liberty, they've mastered the

fine art of abusing it. For God so loved the world. gave his only son. Luther thought parents

should teach their children about the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and other fundamentals of

the faith. With his own children, he often turned teaching into a game. A coin in the

correct sleeve meant a reward for the right answer. Who's next? By far the most important

of all is namely the command of God, who urges parents so often to instruct their children.

Indeed, for what purpose do we older folks exist other than to care for, instruct and

bring up the young? have a little something for you. Ta-da! Part of Luther's response

was to create an educational tool, a basic textbook of the faith called ecatechism. His

ability to be succinct and to come to the heart of it all is just remarkable.

Long before comic books, Luther understood the power of images to communicate to young

people. His catechism was richly illustrated with explanatory woodcuts. So the image kind

of ties everything together and helps us not only to know it and to have that information,

but to feel it. Luther tapped artist Lucas Cranach to illustrate the catechism and many of Luther's

other works. New, inexpensive printing methods meant that for the first time in history,

storytelling images could be widely disseminated as a new kind of educational tool, a tool

Luther embraced. For example, the very first version of Luther's Small Catechism, published

in 1529, was actually published on large sheets of paper. And these were really kind of designed

as posters. You could pin them up on a wall and people could come by and see the pictures

and see the message that's conveyed there in the text. In more and more homes across Germany,

the sheets of the catechism hung side by side with images of Luther. Luther's picture hung

in people's houses because they loved him. And they thought that he was doing something great

and good for them. And they had a passion to see, even if they didn't understand the theology.

They thought that he was helping take down the corruption of the church, and that was a very,

very attractive thing. By late 1529, Luther's reforms had spread to nearly two dozen German

territories, now labeled with the new term Protestant. Despite growing popular support for Luther's

ideas, the Protestants faced a renewed military threat from the emperor.

To strengthen their position, a meeting of Protestant leaders was held in the city of

Marburg. The was to iron out theological differences and build solidarity.

But if the goal was mutual agreement, Martin Luther should have stayed home. Nothing in

his personality would suggest an ability to compromise on matters of theology, especially

with his Swiss counterpart Ulrich Zwingli. He was capable of great friendship, but he

was also capable of, I don't want to say cruelty, but real unfairness to his opponents. He didn't

want to go. I mean, he wasn't going to go. because why would I go? He's wrong, I'm right. The

sharpest difference between Zwingli and Luther centered on the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

Zwingli saw the bread and wine as a symbol of Jesus' body and blood. Luther believed the

body and blood were actually present in a mysterious but very real way. As the meeting wore on,

Luther wrote the relevant scripture in chalk and covered it up. Then he lifted the tablecloth

and revealed what he'd written. This is my body. Here is our scriptural proof. You have not

yet moved us. To Zwingli, this was another example of Luther's condescending attitude.

To Luther, it was an illustration of how he would never retreat from what he believed to

be a clear teaching of the Bible. These are the words of my Lord Jesus Christ. Hock est

corpus maem. So I must believe the body of Christ is there. Zwingle, he hated Zwingle.

Like Zwingle is like the stupidest man that lived on this earth because trying to figure

out something that cannot be figured out. Zwingle was quoting a text he thought would really

make Luther stumble and Luther said, Zwingle, you're in Germany, not Switzerland, and necks

don't break so easily here. Germany. I think he thought Swingley was a rank skeptic when

it really came down to it. Not really a real believer. As a result, there would be no grand

alliance of the Protestants against the Emperor. Luther didn't care at all. His concerns were

theological, not political. I pray God you come to the right understanding.

That's a tradition dividing disagreement. When they disagree at Marburg in 1529, it's the

fountainhead of the still existing distinction between Reformed and Lutheran Protestantism.

It is the point at which the Lutheran tradition and the Reformed tradition diverge. So today

we have Lutheran churches and we have Reformed churches and they are separate entities. And

that separation finds its historical origin in the failure to reach agreement on half a

point. at the colloquy of Marburg in 1529. By 1530, Emperor Charles V had a break in his

many wars and once again returned to the matter of the territories aligned with Luther, summoning

leaders to Augsburg, promising to weigh their opinions.

Luther couldn't attend because he was still an outlaw, a condemned heretic in the eyes

of the Catholic Church. He got as close as safety would allow, the castle at Coburg,

120 miles away. The event stretched on for months, frustrating Luther as he sat on the

sidelines, waiting for updates.

In Augsburg, the Protestants submitted to Charles a statement of their faith called the Augsburg

Confession. In effect, they were asking Charles to accept their terms to reunite the Christian

world.

Back at Coburg Castle, Luther's frustration turned to grief when he received a letter announcing

the death of his father. My beloved father departed this life at one o'clock on Sunday.

This death has cast me into deep mourning. Although it is consoling to me that he fell

asleep softly and strong in his faith in Christ, yet his kindness and the memory of his pleasant

conversation have caused a deep wound in my heart.

Charles rejected the Protestants and gave them an ultimatum.

return to the Catholic Church or face a military invasion. Charles' move backfired badly.

His threat solidified the Protestants and led to preparations for war.

Despite the saber-rattling, no one really wanted war in the early 1530s. The Protestant princes

could not match the Emperor's army, and Charles V now had a new preoccupation, the fate of

his aunt, Catherine of Aragon, who was the first wife of Henry VIII. Henry wanted an

annulment of his marriage to Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn, but the Pope would

not allow it. More precisely, it was Catherine's nephew. Emperor Charles V, who was pulling

the strings, pressuring the Pope because he wanted to keep the English throne in his family.

The Pope does not want to upset Charles V, so the Pope refuses to grant Henry a divorce.

Furious that he could not get an annulment from the Pope, Henry appealed to theologians

across Europe, hoping to gain a consensus in opposition to the pontiff. Henry even tried

to enlist Luther. an odd request given Henry's previous statements declaring Luther a heretic.

Unsurprisingly, Martin did not support Henry's quest. Henry's next move was more drastic,

splitting from the Catholic Church, starting a new strand of Christianity, the Church of

England. It was one of dozens of new forms of Christianity to grow out of the church tumult

of the era. Another strand, called Anabaptists, sought to separate themselves from the broader

culture and live more simply. Their modern-day descendants are the Amish and the Mennonites,

the latter named for the 16th century leader Menno Simons. A much larger group subscribe

to the teachings of John Calvin, a second generation reformer who ranks behind only Luther in his

continuing influence on Protestantism. Today's Presbyterian denominations are among those

who descend from Calvin's theology. One group of Calvinists felt so strongly about their

faith they left Europe altogether so they could practice their religion unfettered. In America,

They are known as the Puritans. They want to worship in their own way. They want to devoutly

self-conscious Puritan Calvinist lives and come and are willing to make this outrageous, risky

crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in the circa 1630 in order to do it. That's extraordinary.

Luther's Reformation really cracks things open in a way that ultimately leads to the Pilgrim

Fathers in the 17th century and the birth of modern America. Back in Germany, churches

that aligned with Luther's teachings began to call themselves Lutherans, a name Martin Luther

himself detested at first. The first thing I ask is that people should not make use of

my name. They should not call themselves Lutherans, but Christians. For what or who is this Luther?

The teaching is not... nor was I crucified for anyone. How did I, poor stinking bag

of maggots that I am, come to the point where people call the children of Christ by my evil

name? I am no one's master, nor do I wish to be. I simply want to share with all men the

one common teaching of Christ, who alone is our Lord. But by the 1530s, the movement and

the name had become entrenched, bigger than the man himself.

Martin Luther didn't age well. Now in his late 50s, his body seemed decades older, as illness

after illness took their toll.

Luther hoped to hand the reins to his right-hand man, the brilliant Philip Melanchthon. But

in the summer of 1540, Melanchthon suddenly fell ill and seemed near death. Luther visited,

offering a prayer for his old friend.

disaster for us. The entire situation is yours. It cannot be your will for this man to die

in his despondent condition. He's blunt, he's bold, and he doesn't hesitate to talk back

to God. He starts in and he prays just as urgently and compellingly, you you sent this man to

help us and now he's sick with grief. You better make him well. And you know, it's not petitioning,

he's demanding. Melanchthon recovered, lifting Luther's spirits. But not long after, Luther

faced the most devastating emotional blow of his entire life when his 13-year-old daughter

Magdalena fell ill.

I mean, when you love a child and something breaks, it's just, you can just see the raggedness

of his heart.

Raising children taught Luther about patience, love, and now grief. Magdalena would die

with her father at her side. I pray God that I and all of us may have such a death.

Such a life, a bright presence, Rye so full of trust, old and forth our love. And that

event, then, if you read letters that came afterwards, when he's comforting people who lost loved

ones or children or wives, he again and again brings up, know what you're going through.

I still think about my Magdalena. I still think and miss her. Magdalena's death triggered

a dark period for Martin Luther. Within a few weeks, he would pen his most infamous and disturbing

work, a shocking attack on the Jews. He read his Bible through a Christ-centric lens, and

he could not ever compromise on any other kind of reading, which is a problem if you're talking

with a Jewish person. Exceedingly vulgar at times, the document advocates burning synagogues

and expulsion of the Jewish people. Modern Lutheran church bodies have officially repudiated

Luther's anti-Jewish writings, but the book remains a black mark on his legacy. We have

to also take into account that Luther's readiness to engage that issue comes in the context of

societies which are not tolerant. There is no modern notion of tolerance. 20 years earlier,

Luther had written about the Jews in very positive terms. In 1523, he writes a work entitled that

Jesus Christ was born a Jew, in which he argues that it is the duty of Christian neighbors

to be kind to the Jews who live in their towns in order to try to win them over to Christ,

in order to try to bring them into the church. He assumed that when his view of the Bible

was explained to Jewish people, they would convert. Well, of course, this was terribly naive.

They were the product of centuries of medieval persecution and all that. And they did not

come back to Christianity. And this Luther simply could not understand. Towards the end

of his life, he's getting madder and madder and madder about, come on, Jews. You've had

1,500 years to figure this out. Time is gone, probably because he feels that his time is

out. When the Jews did not convert, Luther became increasingly puzzled, perplexed, and

eventually angry. At the time, Luther's writing on the Jews didn't lead to any violence. But

400 years later, Adolf Hitler's regime would dredge up Luther's statements and use them

to justify its campaign against the Jewish people. The Nazis can pull phrases out of Luther to

bolster their opinions. He could put phrases on Luther or most anything. He says all sorts

of things. William Shira's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich famously blamed Luther for

the Holocaust. More recent scholarship refutes that view. William Schar's thesis that Luther

was essentially responsible for the Holocaust is wrong. And it's wrong because it's far

too simple a story. He plays a role. And his works were reprinted by the Nazis and became

part of the living propaganda that paved the way for the Holocaust. I think if Luther had

never lived, something like the Holocaust would still have happened. The Nazis aren't sitting

around reading Luther and coming up with these ideas. Instead, most historians trace Nazi

beliefs in a master race to the philosophy of eugenics, which advocated improving humanity

through selective breeding and the weeding out of undesirables. When things move in that

direction, the stronger are going to pound on the weaker. Hitler then used Luther's words

to justify opinions that were already fully formed. There is clearly a link between 16th

century anti-Judaism and 20th century anti-Semitism, but it's not a straightforward one because

the rise of racial theory in the 19th century does transform the discussion. Certainly the

Nazis go back and use him because he's of course such an important cultural figure, but I think

that that's not viewing those writings in context. Ironically, in the very same decade that Hitler

was beginning to use Luther to justify oppression, an American visiting Germany saw Luther as

an inspiration to do the opposite. The American was so taken by the story of Martin Luther's

bold fight against oppression, he changed his name from Michael King to Martin Luther King,

Sr. When he came from Germany, he said to his son, that we're gonna change our names to Martin

Luther and we're gonna be Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King Senior, Martin Luther King

Junior. So that resonated greatly in the black community. He saw something there in terms

of Martin Luther that he grabbed hold of and said, is who we are. That Luther could elicit

massive social change without a call to arms continues to offer hope to the downtrodden

around the world. So I think Luther becomes a model for how one can stand up on the basis

of their faith against institutions and individuals who are hurting people. that two of the most

influential and opposite men of the 20th century were inspired by the same German monk shouldn't

be surprising. Martin Luther was not a compromiser. He did nothing half way. Right or wrong,

he was all in. For his entire adult life, Martin Luther was simultaneously the most loved

and most hated man in the Western world. We are all beggars before God. This is true.

for it is in the gospel that the righteousness of God is... A righteousness that is by faith

from first to last. Just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith alone.

On February the 18th, 1546, Martin Luther affirmed his beliefs one last time before passing away.

With Luther dead, Charles V finally carried out his long-standing threat to send armies

into territories loyal to the Reformation. His troops marched on Wittenberg and destroyed

the farm Luther had left to his wife.

Charles' military victory belied his eventual failure to reunite the empire under a single

unified religion. Once he came to realize that not even his army could stop the Protestant

tide, Charles resigned as emperor and lived out his last days as a monk in quiet solitude.

In the mid and late 1500s, the many strands of the Reformation would wind together to create

a rope powerful enough to establish Protestant churches across much of Europe, and then the

Americas and the world. Even in death, Luther remained the movement's primary leader. Knowing

what Luther would have said about any issue was never a problem, because no one in history

left behind a more detailed written record than Martin Luther. 130 volumes. When he started,

it just never stopped. And when he wasn't writing, his students were sitting at the table writing

down the things he said at the table. He's not unaware that people are following him around

and writing down everything he says. Of course, it also amazes me that somebody sat there and

wrote it all down, because they clearly didn't feel they needed to edit him.

No Protestant church subscribes to everything Luther wrote and said, but his ideas have

left an indelible mark on the lives of nearly one billion Protestants today. And so we will

claim Luther and we will claim what Luther has to say and teach. At the same time, we will

disagree with Luther. I would suggest that Luther is important because agree with him

or disagree with him, asks some of most basic questions about human existence. Despite its

initial repudiation of Luther, even the Catholic Church would eventually adopt many Luther-like

positions. The common language replaced Latin in the Catholic Mass, Bible reading was encouraged,

and Catholic hymnals now include Luther's signature hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. Luther's

lasting influence extends far beyond even the Church. He unleashed new ways of thinking.

that continue to profoundly shape the secular world. For example, as a vocal advocate for

the education of children, Luther helped pave the way for the now ubiquitous public school

system. That's absolutely true. So there's many more schools opened up, say, in German

cities than in Italian cities or than in Spanish cities. He saw that teaching people to read,

teaching people to write was good for society. Luther was concerned about educating, in particular,

the youth. because he recognized that they were the future of the church. And he runs into

a bit of a problem because the people are more interested in what kind of a job are my kids

going to have, how much money will they be able to make. Materialism is not a 21st century

phenomenon. He was always irritated with people who ran a business and decided that they were

going to take little wufgang right out of school and make him work in the jewelry store. Luther

included the need to educate women at a time when no other prominent figures thought that

worthwhile. Within the 16th century context to advocate that all girls should receive a

basic education was revolutionary.

As an impoverished outsider who stood up against kings and popes, Luther continues to inspire

a belief that individuals can non-violently affect change. From the American civil rights

movement to countless third world protests, Martin Luther still fuels an ideology of hope.

He was speaking boldly. He was just saying the word that needed to be said. And I think

that is what most resonates in the Third World. So it's this freedom and the capability of

saying a word that otherwise was not permitted to be said. Ideas really do matter. And maybe

ideas are more powerful than armies are. Luther likely would not have supported the American

Revolution, but he inadvertently set in motion cultural changes that led to democracy in America

and Europe. He lets the genie out of the bottle in some ways on issues that will ultimately

bear fruit in notions of democracy. You cannot even, I think, see the democratic revolutions

of the 18th century without taking into account Martin Luther's contribution to it. Luther

laid the groundwork for Western democracy in one other important way. He was the first

to prove the power of the media to amplify the marketplace of ideas and to serve as a check

on government. Luther is sort of a media rock star. He recognizes what the technology can

do and he's going to use that technology. to the fullest. He's able to communicate to people

in a way that not only that they'll listen to, but will move them to action. And I think

that's really a gift. Despite his impact, Martin Luther wanted very little to do with politics

or secular life. Luther's focus, always, was the quest for the right relationship between

God and people, and how to show love for others in need. I simply taught, preached, and wrote

God's word. Otherwise, I did nothing. And while I drank beer with my friends, the word

so greatly weakened the paper seat. that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses

upon it. But I, I did nothing. The word did everything. He speaks to the very basic universal

hunger we have to find our ground of being and a fountain orientation that helps us to explain

why am I here, where am I going and that all then has an impact on how we actually live

in this world.

The millions of words Luther wrote, taught and preached all boiled down to one idea. the breakthrough

and understanding that changed his life. Summarized in just two words, God forgives. And a forgiven

person wants to help others.

These were the words young Martin Luther desperately needed to hear. The idea he most wanted to

tell others. 500 years later, he still is.

Hans Luft, the printer, lives in the basement of the monastery. And so there are lots of

writings where Luther starts out and thinks he's gonna do one thing and then changes his

mind halfway but can't change his mind because it's already in print in the basement.