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Martin Luther

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Augustinian friar and professor of biblical studies at Wittenberg whose objection to the sale of indulgences in 1517 became, within four years, a break with the Roman church that reshaped western Christianity. His central claim is that a person is justified before God by faith alone, received as a gift, and not by anything done to deserve it, and that scripture rather than the church's teaching office is the final authority. He did not set out to found a church and disliked the use of his name for one. He translated the Bible into German, wrote hymns and catechisms for ordinary use, and left a body of writing so large that its collected edition runs to more than a hundred volumes.

Facts
Identity
Also Known As
Luther 1
Gender
Male 1
Attestation
Historicity
Historically attested 1
Historically attested in exceptional detail, including his own correspondence, the imperial records of the Diet of Worms and the bull of excommunication. His writings of 1543 against the Jews have been formally repudiated by Lutheran churches, including the Lutheran World Federation and member bodies, in declarations issued from the 1980s onward. The words here I stand appear in the printed report of his answer at Worms and not in the earliest transcripts. Whether he posted the theses on the door of the Castle Church is uncertain: he never mentions it, and the earliest account is Melanchthon's, written after Luther's death
Life
Lifespan or FloruitSourced to the subject's own account
1483 to 1546 2
Office Held
Augustinian friar and professor of biblical studies at Wittenberg. 1
Place of Activity
Wittenberg, where he was professor of biblical studies, and the Wartburg during his outlawry 1
Origins
Place of Origin
Eisleben, in Saxony 1
Position Profile
Key Text
His German translation of the Bible, alongside his hymns and catechisms for ordinary use, is the body of writing that reshaped German religious language; his collected works run to more than a hundred volumes. 1
Status
Status Within the Tradition
Central to his theology is justification by faith alone, sola fide, that a person is reckoned righteous before God through faith received as a gift rather than through merit earned by works, a position his followers formalized against Rome's teaching in the 1530 Augsburg Confession. 1
Publications
Notable Publication
His German Bible, the New Testament in 1522 and the complete text in 1534, whose influence on the German language is compared to that of the King James Version on English 1
Notable Publication
The Ninety-Five Theses of 1517, a Latin disputation against the preaching of indulgences 3
Learn More
The Ninety-Five Theses, and What They Actually Said

On 31 October 1517 Luther sent a letter to Albrecht of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz, objecting to the preaching of an indulgence in his territories, and enclosed a set of propositions for academic debate. The indulgence in question was being preached by the Dominican Johann Tetzel; half the proceeds were going to the building of St Peter's in Rome and half, unknown to those buying, to repaying the enormous debt Albrecht had incurred to acquire his own archbishopric.

The theses are in Latin and are a scholarly disputation rather than a manifesto. They do not deny purgatory, and they do not deny the pope's authority to remit penalties he himself has imposed. What they attack is the claim that a payment can release a soul from purgatory, the effect of that claim on ordinary people, and the confusion of penance with a transaction. The first thesis sets the tone: when Christ said repent, he meant the whole life of believers to be one of repentance, which is a statement about the interior life and not about money at all.

The famous nailing to the door of the Castle Church is uncertain. Posting a disputation on a church door was the ordinary way of advertising one, so it is entirely plausible, but Luther never mentions doing it, and the earliest report comes from Melanchthon after Luther's death. What is certain is what the printers did. Within weeks the theses had been translated, printed and circulated across Germany, and an academic exercise had become a public argument.

Worms, a German Bible, and the Hard Parts of the Record

By 1520 the argument had moved well past indulgences. In three treatises of that year Luther denied that the pope alone may interpret scripture, reduced the sacraments from seven to two or three, and set out the freedom of the Christian: perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and at the same time perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to everyone. He was excommunicated in January 1521.

In April he was summoned before the emperor and the imperial diet at Worms, shown his books, and asked whether he would recant. He asked for a day to consider, and then refused, saying that unless he were convinced by scripture and plain reason his conscience was captive to the word of God and that it was neither safe nor right to go against conscience. The words here I stand appear in the printed version and not in the earliest transcripts. He was declared an outlaw, and was taken into protective custody at the Wartburg by his own prince, where in eleven weeks he translated the New Testament into German. The complete Bible followed in 1534, and its effect on the German language is usually compared to the effect of the King James Version on English.

Two parts of the record are ugly and the atlas states them rather than passing over them. In 1525, when the peasants rose citing his own writings, he published a pamphlet urging the princes to strike them down without mercy. And in his last years he wrote violently against the Jews, in terms later put to use by others; Lutheran churches have since formally repudiated those writings.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Martin Luther directly: "Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Amos 5:24, Passages

This source names Martin Luther directly: "set against worship, not alongside it. Martin Luther King quoted it repeatedly, which is how most English speakers now meet it."

This source names Martin Luther directly: "to recant views sympathetic to Martin Luther under threat of execution."

This source names Martin Luther directly: "in 1974 and renamed in 1978 to honor Martin Luther King Jr., its pastor from 1954 to 1960 during the Montgomery Bus Boycott."

Source Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist ChurchEncyclopedia of Alabama

This source names Martin Luther directly: "Martin Luther's Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly known as the Ninety-Five Theses, is a primary source of the first order, the actual document Luther is traditionally..."

This source names Martin Luther directly: "Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names Martin Luther directly: "This is Martin Luther D'Ooge's 1926 Macmillan translation of Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic, composed in Greek around 100 CE and long treated as the standard textbook that carried..."

Source Introduction to ArithmeticNicomachus of Gerasa
James 2:17, Passages

This source names Martin Luther directly: "The verse that made Luther call James an epistle of straw."

His wife from 1525; her escape from her convent and their marriage made clerical marriage a lived reality for the Protestant Reformation rather than only a theological argument.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

This source names Luther directly: "Cranach probably drew on input from his lifelong friend Martin Luther in designing the composition, which functions as a Lutheran Merkbild, a simple didactic image built to instill Reformation..."

Source Wikipedia, "Law and Gospel (Cranach)"Wikipedia contributors

This source names Martin Luther directly: "Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on indulgences at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, an academic challenge to a debate that instead set off a movement he could no longer contain."

Marburg, Cities

Luther came to Marburg in October 1529 and left having agreed fourteen articles with Zwingli and refused the fifteenth.

Source Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700Diarmaid MacCulloch

This source names Martin Luther directly: "of Art's own collection record for "Martin Luther (1483-1546)," a small oil-on-wood portrait attributed to the Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, probably 1532."

This source names Martin Luther directly: "A Wikipedia article on Martin Luther, the German Augustinian friar and theologian whose 1517 Ninety-Five Theses began the Protestant Reformation."

This source names Martin Luther directly: "This is the Martin Luther King, Jr."

Source Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Historical BiographyThe Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

This source names Martin Luther directly: "Martin Brecht's Martin Luther, His Road to Reformation, 1483 to 1521, published by Fortress Press in 1985 as the first volume of a major three-volume biography, is a scholarly biography of the..."

Colleague at Wittenberg from 1518 and the systematiser of what Luther preached; he drafted the Augsburg Confession and Luther praised the Loci Communes extravagantly.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

This source names Martin Luther directly: "the traditional account that Martin Luther posted his Ninety Five Theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg on this date in 1517, an act of protest against the sale of indulgences..."

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Summoned before the emperor and the imperial diet in April 1521, shown his books and asked to recant, he refused and was declared an outlaw.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

This source names Martin Luther directly: "National Baptist Convention, USA; Martin Luther King Jr."

The movement is conventionally dated from his objection to the preaching of indulgences in 1517, though he neither intended nor controlled what followed.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

This source names Martin Luther directly: "Sankt Marien, the town church where Martin Luther once preached, to sign the Communion's own Association with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the 1999 statement on..."

This source names Martin Luther directly: "We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 book from Harper and Row, is King's own final full length work, setting out his assessment of the civil rights movement's..."

Source Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?Martin Luther King Jr.

Belongs to Tradition

Contrasts With

They agreed on fourteen of the fifteen articles at Marburg in 1529 and deadlocked on the eucharist, and the Lutheran and Reformed traditions have been separate ever since.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Critiqued By

Henry VIII, Historical Figures

Henry VIII's Assertio Septem Sacramentorum of 1521 was written against Luther, and earned the king the title Defender of the Faith. Luther replied in kind and considerably more coarsely.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Depicted In

The portrait's directly named sitter per the museum's own title and its own subject-tag identifier, attributed by the museum to the Cranach workshop convention the corroborating Wikipedia record independently names as the primary source of Luther's likeness in his own lifetime.

Additional Source Martin Luther (Wikipedia)

Succeeded By

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Traditions Founded

The confession, the catechisms and the name are his, though he objected to the use of his name for a church and preferred that believers be called simply Christian.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Works Attributed

Martin Luther wrote both words and melody of Ein feste Burg around the late 1520s.

Source A Dictionary of HymnologyJohn Julian (editor)
Sources
1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005View the Source
2. Martin Luther (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, 2026View the Source
3. Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences (the Ninety-Five Theses)
Martin Luther, 1517
Martin Luther (Wikipedia)
WikipediaDepicted In: Martin Luther (Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 55.220.2)
Quote, Depicted In: Martin Luther (Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 55.220.2)
Lucas Cranach the Elder painted the standard portraits of Martin Luther during his own lifetime, establishing the likeness by which he was recognized.
View the Source
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