Martin Luther

Born in 1483 in Eisleben, Luther became an Augustinian friar and professor of theology at Wittenberg. Tormented by the question of how a sinner could be right with God, he found his answer in Paul: justification by faith alone. In 1517 his Ninety-Five Theses against indulgences, spread by the new printing press, ignited a movement he could not control. Excommunicated and outlawed, he defied the emperor at the Diet of Worms (1521), translated the Bible into German, married, and led the new evangelical church until his death in 1546.

Luther's early struggle was spiritual — a crippling sense of his own sinfulness that drove his theological breakthrough. Thereafter he lived under sentence of death as an outlaw, sheltered by sympathetic princes, and watched his reformation splinter: into the violence of the Peasants' War (which he condemned savagely), into conflict with Erasmus over free will, and into division with other reformers such as Zwingli over the Eucharist. He was plagued by illness and by a conviction that the end of the world was near.

Luther's core teachings — justification by faith alone (sola fide), the authority of scripture alone (sola scriptura), and the priesthood of all believers — overturned the medieval Catholic order. He insisted that ordinary Christians should read the Bible in their own tongue, and his German translation shaped the language itself; his hymns, including "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," gave congregations a voice. He dignified secular vocation and marriage against monastic ideals.

Luther was a theologian, not a soldier, and he lived and died before the wars of religion his movement helped unleash. But his career was inseparable from violence: the Peasants' War of 1524–25, which invoked his ideas and which he denounced; and the political-military struggle between Catholic and Protestant powers in the Empire that his reformation set in motion, culminating decades later in the Thirty Years' War. His weapons were the pamphlet, the sermon, and the translated word.

Luther is revered and reviled, and as a reformer can be weighed directly. His break with Rome is celebrated by Protestants and long condemned by Catholics as schism. His ferocious pamphlet against the rebelling peasants, urging the princes to slay them, has been widely criticized. Gravest of all are his late writings against the Jews — On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) — which called for burning synagogues and expelling Jews, and which were later exploited by the Nazis; modern Lutheran churches have formally repudiated them. Historians debate how central this hatred was to his thought; it is recorded here without extenuation.

Luther permanently divided Western Christianity and founded the Protestant tradition, reshaping the religion of much of Europe and, later, the world. His insistence on scripture in the vernacular and on individual conscience fed into modern ideas of literacy, dissent, and selfhood, and his German Bible is a monument of the language. His legacy is double-edged: a liberator of conscience to his heirs, and, in his writings against the Jews, a source of lasting shame that the churches bearing his name have had to confront.