The following is an excerpt from my notes on the Protestant Reformation for classes I taught on Church History at Bethany University (please see below).
Halloween is a bogus “holiday” that is celebrated this Oct. 31st — but a real history-making event (one of the top ten in human history) also took place on Oct. 31, 1517 — that obliterates the no longer amusing joke of Halloween.
Here is the story (in the next few days, I’ll write about other men not as famous as Luther who paved the way for the Protestant Reformation):
1) Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a Roman Catholic Priest, monk and professor of Theology. He entered the Augustinian Cloister (monastery) in Erfurt in 1505 as a result of a promise He made to St. Anna that if she saved him from a terrible thunderstorm, he would become a monk.
2) He was a worshiper of Mary and highly punctilious over every matter of RCC doctrine and tradition — extremely loyal to the RCC. He also was extremely zealous to be an outstanding monk. Years later he would write that he was “without reproach” as a monk.
3) However, he agonized over his sin and came to despise God, according to his own words (his view of God was that of a fierce judge).
4) It was his supervisor – Johann von Staupitz – who recognized Luther’s many struggles and encouraged him to study the Scriptures to point him to God’s grace.
Von Staupitz also encouraged Luther to become a professor of theology as a practical means to keep him gainfully busy and thus help with Luther’s deep bouts with depression.
5) Speaking of his depression, one remedy for Luther was in his music, which he saw as a gift from God to help him overcome it, to overcome the evil thoughts he battled and as a weapon against the assaults of the devil.
This, in part, was the reason behind Luther writing “A Mighty Fortress is our God.”
6) After becoming a professor, Luther was sent to Rome in 1510. While there, he was appalled at the corruption he saw in the RCC and this began to change his heart against the religious system he saw badly in need of reform.
7) After another five years of anguish about his sin and growing weariness of trying to appease a wrathful God through his own works (and the resulting personal despair), Luther was born-again in 1515 while teaching through Romans – especially 1:16-17.
8) However, Luther, who considered Staupitz to be his spiritual father, also wrote a letter to him in 1518 in which he told him that Staupitz “first caused the light of the gospel to shine in the darkness of his heart.”
9) The next year, he preached against the abuse of the sale of indulgences. The Latin word, indulgentia is a term for amnesty or remission of punishment.
10) It was the RCC that first came up with this damnable heresy to offer the remission of temporal punishment of sin on condition of penitence and payment of money to the Church.
11) Originating with pagans, the RCC adopted it to its religion, beginning with Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (d. 690) and then it spread rapidly in its usage by popes to increase their power. Thomas Aquinas gave it the theological justification the RCC needed and it was the means by which St. Peter’s Basilica was built.
12) In 1517, Albert of Brandenburg, a German aristocrat, appointed Johann Tetzel, a Dominican Friar, to sell indulgences to the German people. One-half of the proceeds went to Albert, who purchased one of the leading church offices in Rome.
13) The other half of the money went to Pope Leo X to build St. Peter’s Basilica. Tetzel’s marketing phrase to sell the indulgences (translated from German): “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs!”
14) On Oct. 31st, 1517 – the day before All Saints Day – when indulgences were to be sold in Wittenberg, Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the church there to protest these and many other abuses of the Pope and the RCC, seeking reform within the RCC.
15) Luther desired a sincere dialogue with Church officials over these 95 theses, but no one responded.
16) Most Church historians mark this date as the official beginning of the Protestant Reformation, especially because the theses were written in German – not Latin – and swiftly began to circulate throughout Germany, which had already had enough of the RCC.
17) The 95 theses were all the more successful due to the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg (another German) in 1456. Up until that time, only a few thousand books were in circulation in Europe, but by 1500, nine million books were in circulation!
18) Luther never argued against indulgences per se, nor did he even refute the heresy of purgatory. Looking back on his life, he wrote in 1545, “I was a monk and mad papist, and so submersed in the dogmas of the Pope that I would have readily murdered any person who denied obedience to the Pope.”
19) Leo charged him with heresy and contempt of church authority in 1518 and commanded him to recant his beliefs and to go to Rome, where Luther knew he would be imprisoned for life or executed.
20) Instead, he appealed to Frederick the Wise, prince of Luther’s part of Germany. Frederick decided Luther should have a hearing on German soil in connection with the diet, or assembly of princes and high-church officials of the Holy Roman Empire.
21) This was the Diet of Augsburg, which was at odds with Rome due to its taking of much German money to finance its own projects, off of German lands.
22) The Pope’s representative, Cardinal Cajetan, tried to get Luther to retract some of his statements, but Luther refused and then told the cardinal that the Pope was in error!
23) In Luther’s debate with Johann Eck at the University of Leipzig in 1519, Luther declared neither popes nor church councils to be infallible, that the RCC had no authority over other churches and that the Bible was (and is) the supreme authority for believers.
24) Thus, from Luther, Sola Fide (“by faith alone”), Sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”), Solus Christos (the priesthood of the believer) became the three hallmarks of the Reformation.
25) And by the priesthood of the believer, Luther meant more than that man needed no human mediator to God, but that all people could read and interpret Scripture for themselves: They did not need the RCC to do that for them.
26) He also rejected transubstantiation (the RCC belief that upon the invocation or blessing of the priest, the elements become the real body and blood of Jesus) but did believe that the bread and wine contain the real body and real blood of Jesus (called consubstantiation).
27) God in His wonderful providence provided great help for Luther through Philip Melanchthon (b. 1497), a professor of philosophy and Greek literature at Wittenberg, who would later become the second leader of the Lutheran Reformation in Germany.
28) Opposite in personality to Luther, Melanchthon was a quiet man and one of the most outstanding scholars of his day, well beyond even Luther’s capability: It could be said that Luther was the reformer and Melanchthon the scholar of the Reformation.
29) In debate with Eck, Melanchthon laid down once and for all that the Scriptures are the supreme rule of faith and that any explanation of doctrine and theology must come from them: Thus, the traditions of the Church must be held up in light of what the Bible taught, not the other way around.
30) Melanchthon knew that he was called by God to support Luther in his reforming efforts and he grew to love Luther so greatly that he wrote that he would rather die than to be separated from him and that “Martin’s welfare is dearer to me than my own life.”
31) In just one year (1520) Luther wrote five major books! In his Treatise on Good Works, Luther argued for justification by faith (the Protestant phrase in Latin known as Sola Fide); he wrote on the priesthood of all believers versus the superiority of the clergy, that the Pope did not have the sole right to interpret Scripture, that he distorted sound doctrine (in a tract he called “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church”), and that Scripture had two – not seven sacraments.
32) In The Papacy of Rome, he accused the pope of being the Antichrist because he prevented the people from understanding the gospel of grace.
33) In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, he called for the leaders north of the Alps to reject Rome’s authority over them in every way: spiritually, politically and economically.
34) The Pope excommunicated Luther in 1521 (in effect telling Luther and everyone else he would spend eternity in hell), and then moved upon Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to punish him at the Diet of Worms, where he came under enormous pressure to recant his writings (by this time, he had such an enormous following that to execute him would have made him a martyr, something the RCC didn’t believe it could risk).
35) It would help us further to understand the pressure Luther was under when we realize that Charles V (only 21 years old) controlled more of Europe than any emperor since Charlemagne.
36) Under the kind of pressure that we cannot imagine from people and the demonic oppression Luther wrote about, he refused to recant, with a speech that has gone down in history as the greatest ever given in modern times (the two others being The Gettysburg Address by Lincoln and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech that brought Virginia into the Revolutionary War with Great Britain).
37) His famous words: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and 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. Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen.”
38) Rumors abounded that Luther would be assassinated; Frederick the Wise hid him in a castle in Wartburg, where Luther then translated the entire NT into German in 11 weeks!
39) By 1534 he had translated the OT into German as well (and thus the entire Bible, a 10 year work, with Melanchthon’s help), reformed education in Germany so that all could be educated (heretofore never done), and strongly pushed for public libraries.
40) His reforms led to breakaway churches from the RCC, with services no longer held in Latin, and with congregational singing (instead of a choir alone).
41) In 1543, three years before his death, Luther made a major mistake in calling for the rulers of Germany to expel Jews and confiscate their wealth.
42) Mark Noll contends that Luther did so because he had heard that Jewish teachers were trying to entice Protestants and Catholics away from Christian faith, yet Noll adds: “the sinfully violent way in which he published his arguments cast one of the seeds into the ground that has been bearing much bitter fruit ever since.”
43) Though correct in his assessment, what Noll (a professor at Notre Dame) failed to mention was that in 1523, Luther protested against the cruel treatment of Jews and counseled kindness and charity as the best means of converting them.
44) Luther’s critics often use his sin against the Jews at the end of his life to attempt to discredit his entire ministry.
45) Should the same standard be applied to Martin Luther King’s womanizing and plagiarism of his doctoral thesis? Should these things undermine the good he did for an entire nation?
46) Similarly, critics attempt to undermine George Washington and all he stood for because he owned slaves (forgetting that he was the only Founding Father to inherit slaves and to provide financially for their provision after his death).
47) Should this also dismiss what he did for an entire nation, not to mention the precedent set for the abolishment of slavery in America?
48) In addition, it should also be kept in mind – as we saw earlier – that Luther was always a devout Roman Catholic and the RCC had long been greatly anti-semitic, as its chief theologian – Aquinas — advocated a policy of non-toleration of the practice of Judaism and may have even implied the death penalty for Jews (he certainly did for heretics).
