The Monk, the Theses, and the Door (Maybe)

Welcome back to Rooted in the Reformation! Every Sunday this month, I’m walking through a piece of the Reformation story as we head toward Reformation Day on October 31. If you missed last Sunday, we looked at what the church and the world looked like before Luther, and you can catch up here. Today, we finally meet the man himself.

I have a confession. When I first learned about the Reformation, I pictured Martin Luther storming up to a church door, hammer swinging, fire in his eyes. It’s a great image. It is also more complicated than the poster version.

Let’s start with the man. Luther was born in Eisleben in 1483, and his father, a businessman, wanted him to become a lawyer. Martin had other ideas, but they weren’t entirely his own. In 1505, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm and nearly struck by lightning. He vowed to become a monk if he survived, and he walked into an Augustinian monastery weeks later. (Some of us can’t even keep a New Year’s resolution past January.) He went on to earn his doctorate in 1512 and became a professor of Scripture, which matters, because everything that follows came out of a man who spent his days in the Bible.

Here is what we can say with confidence about 1517. A Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel was preaching indulgences nearby to raise money for rebuilding St. Peter’s in Rome. Luther’s parishioners came back from buying them and seemed to think they no longer needed to repent. That alarmed him, so he wrote ninety-five propositions for academic debate, dated October 31, 1517.

Whether he nailed them to the Castle Church door is a question historians still handle carefully. The theses were written in Latin, aimed at scholars, and meant to start a conversation. Luther had no plan to leave the church. Then the printing press got hold of them, and within weeks they were all over Germany.

Before going further, I want to be fair about what an indulgence is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it as the remission of temporal punishment for sins whose guilt has already been forgiven. Rome’s own teaching does not claim an indulgence forgives the sin itself. Even Pope John Paul II acknowledged in 1999 that indulgences are sometimes received with superficial attitudes. Tetzel’s preaching, especially about indulgences for the dead, was criticized in his day, including within the church.

So what was Luther’s problem? It ran deeper than a sales pitch. Luther saw a system that treated sinners as contributors to their standing before God, and he had come to see that Scripture teaches otherwise. Years earlier, wrestling with Romans 1:17, he realized the righteousness of God is not something we produce, but a gift received by faith. That discovery, not the door, is the heart of this story.

The break came over the next few years. Rome summoned him to Augsburg in 1518, and three days of discussion settled nothing. In 1520, Pope Leo X issued a decree declaring his ideas heretical and giving him 120 days to recant. He refused, and he was excommunicated in January 1521.

Then came Worms. In April 1521, Luther stood before Emperor Charles V, with the church’s and the empire’s most powerful figures in the room, and was asked whether the books on the table were his and whether he would recant them. On the first day, he spoke so quietly that people could barely hear him, and he asked for time to think. His opponents were annoyed, but the emperor gave him twenty-four hours. When he returned on April 18, the room was crowded, hot, and lit by torches, and Luther spoke loud and clear. He granted that some of his writings were sharper than they should have been. But he refused to retract what he believed the gospel itself demanded. If someone would show him from Scripture where he was wrong, he said, he would burn his own books. Otherwise, his conscience was bound to the Word of God, and he would not act against it.

Did he add the famous line, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise”? Scholars disagree. It appears in some early transcripts and not in others. One argument in favor is that the room erupted as he finished, so only those near him would have caught his closing words. Another view says friends added it later. I find that debate fascinating, but notice that it does not change the substance. He would not go against Scripture and conscience, and he said so before the most powerful people in Europe.

Charles V ordered his writings burned in May 1521, and Luther went into hiding at the Wartburg castle. There he translated the New Testament into German, published in September 1522, so ordinary people could read it for themselves.

One last note, in the spirit of honesty. Luther was not flawless. In his later years he could be harsh and stubborn, and in 1543 he published a tract against the Jews that was shameful. I love what God recovered through the Reformation, and I can say plainly that the man he used was a sinner, like the rest of us.

Next Sunday, we’ll meet the others who carried the Reformation beyond Wittenberg.