Luther's Biography
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Martin Luther was born in 1483 at Eisleben, a mining town in Saxony, and grew up in a world where fear of sin and longing for grace sat side by side. His father intended him for the law, but a sudden storm on the road to Erfurt altered the course of his life. In fulfilment of a vow made in terror, he entered the Augustinian monastery. There Luther struggled earnestly to find peace with God, observing the discipline of his order with great seriousness. Yet nothing in the rigour of monastic life eased his conscience. It was in the study of the Psalms and of Paul’s letter to the Romans that he found what outward works had not given him. God’s righteousness, he concluded, was not a standard by which humanity was condemned, but a gift by which the sinner was made right with God. Grace, faith, and scripture stood at the heart of this discovery.
The house in which Luther was born in Eisleben, now in Saxony-Anhalt.
This conviction soon brought Luther into conflict with established practice. The sale of indulgences, which promised the remission of sin for money, seemed to him a distortion of the Christian message. In 1517 he set down his Ninety-Five Theses, not intending a public rupture but a debate among scholars. Events, however, moved swiftly. Luther maintained that the Church could not bind the conscience where scripture was silent, nor remit guilt by financial means. The authority of councils and popes, he argued, must be tested by the Bible itself. His writings spread rapidly, reaching far beyond the university town where he lectured. Through sermons, tractates, and ultimately his translation of the Bible into German, Luther gave the Reformation both its voice and, in some measure, its language.
Luther’s insistence on the primacy of scripture and the freedom of the Christian challenged long-standing structures, and not all who shared his concerns agreed with him in every particular. The dispute with Zwingli over the Lord’s Supper revealed that the Reformation was not a single movement but several, often divergent in their emphases. Yet Luther’s role was unmistakable. With other leading figures of his age, he helped set in motion changes that reshaped the religious life of Europe.
Gustav Spangenberg’s fanciful depiction of Luther making music with his family, illustrating the Protestant ideal of the reformed clerical household.
In 1525 Luther married Katharina von Bora, a former nun who had fled her convent with other women seeking a new way of life. Their home in Wittenberg became a place of lively conversation, pastoral care, and family life. They raised six children. Luther continued to teach and to write until his death in 1546, when he returned to Eisleben, the town where his life had begun. He was sixty-two.
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