When was martin luther born

Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in There, Luther could keep working on the translation of the Bible. Luther took action to cool down the situation. He asked the princes to act and restore civil peace. He wrote out a list of his objections to the practice; he named 95 issues he wished to dispute.

On October 31, , Luther nailed his ninety-five theses, or points of discussion, on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The document was in Latin and invited other scholars to debate the statements set out. This was the normal way to offer topics for formal discussion in a community of scholars, so the act of nailing the paper to the door was not revolutionary. However, the topic was a touchy one. Indulgences were a major method of fund-raising for the Church.

The 95 Theses were translated into German and widely distributed throughout Germany, courtesy of the printing press. There is some question about whether the list was actually attached to the church door. Phillip Melanchthon, Luther's closest ally, described the event in a writing after Luther's death and recently another writing of a contemporary has come to light which also states the theses were nailed to the door.

Luther never mentioned it in his own writings. There is no question, however, that Luther wrote the list and sent a copy of it to Prince Albert of Mainz. The protest against the indulgences set off a conflagration which, step by step, resulted in most of Northern Europe breaking away from the authority of the Catholic Church.

The reaction of the Church initially was to try and suppress the attack on indulgences by suppressing Martin Luther. Pope Leo directed the head of the Augustinians to: "quench a monk of your order, Martin Luther by name". He also allegedly remarked, "Luther is a drunken German.

He will feel differently when he is sober". However, because of the complex politics of the time involving the Holy Roman Emperor, Spain and France, the Pope couldn't afford to alienate the German princes. Some of the princes were sympathetic to Luther and German resentment against sending money to Rome was on the rise.

The Pope, directly and through churchmen supporting him, told Luther he was wrong, but would be forgiven if he backed down. Luther became more adamant and started adding new complaints about the Church.

A flurry of pamphlets and tracts issued from both camps attacking each other. A debate was held in Leipzig, with Luther challenging the authority of the Pope to decide doctrine and maintaining that many church practices, including most of the sacraments, were bogus because they conflicted with Scripture.

It was clear by this time that there could be no coming together on these issues, since the very authority of the Pope was called into question.

Luther had made himself very unpopular with the Church. The Church did act to curb the worst abuses of indulgences, but it was too late. The debate had moved far beyond that. See Protestant Reformation for a list of the doctrinal differences between Luther and the Church. Pope Leo sent Luther a notice that he would be excommunicated unless he renounced his heretical views within 60 days.

Luther responded by publicly burning the letter, or "bull" in Wittenberg, along with a stack of Church writings. Every year or so, the Holy Roman Emperor would call a meeting of the German princes and bishops. These meetings were called Diets and in , Emperor Charles V summoned Martin Luther to the meeting to be held in the old cathedral city of Worms in western Germany. Diet of Worms is pronounced " dee-ate of vohrms ".

Charles V was a very devout Catholic, but about half of the princes were sympathetic to Luther. Luther was given safe conduct to attend the meeting and defend his positions. Besides instruction and study, however, Luther had other duties. From he preached in the parish church; he was regent head of the monastery school; and in he became the supervisor of eleven other monasteries.

The doctrine of justification, taking shape in Luther's thought between and , drew him further into theological thought as well as into certain positions of practical priestly life. The most famous of these is the controversy causing opposing viewpoints over indulgences. A person who committed a sin would buy an indulgence from the church to avoid punishment—especially punishment after death.

In a great effort to distribute indulgences was proclaimed throughout Germany. In Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses for an academic debate on indulgences on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg. This was the customary time and place to display such an article.

They were given widespread fame and called to the attention of both theologians and the public. News of Luther's theses spread, and in he was called before Cardinal Cajetan, the Roman Catholic representative at Augsburg, to deny his theses.

Refusing to do so, Luther returned to Wittenberg, where, in the next year, he agreed to a debate with the theologian Johann Eck — The debate soon became a struggle between Eck and Luther in which Luther was driven by his opponent to taking even more radical theological positions, thus laying himself open to the charge of heresy believing in something that opposes what is formally taught by the Church.

By Eck secured a papal bull decree condemning Luther, and Luther was summoned to the Imperial Diet at Worms meeting of the Holy Roman Empire held at Worms, Germany in to answer the charges against him. Luther came face to face with the power of the Roman Catholic Church and empire at Worms in He was led to a room in which his writings were piled on a table and ordered to disclaim them. He replied that he could not do this. Luther left Worms and was taken, for his own safety, to the castle of Wartburg, where he spent some months in privacy, beginning his great translation of the Bible into German and writing numerous essays.

In Luther returned to Wittenberg and continued the writing that would fill the rest of his life. In he had written three of his most famous tracts written piece of propaganda, or material written with the intent of convincing people of a certain belief : To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation; On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church; and Of the Liberty of a Christian Man. In Luther married Katherine von Bora, a nun who had left her convent.

Thomas Aquinas embodied it. It survived until the acids of war, plague, poverty, and social discord began to eat away its underlying presupposition — that the world rested on the being of God. All of life was grounded in the mind of God. In the hierarchy of Being that establishes justice, the church was understood as the connection between the secular and divine. However, as the crises of the late middle ages increased, this reassurance no longer assuaged.

In its place, Occam posited revelation and covenant. The world does not need to be grounded in some artificial, unknowable, ladder of Being. We are contingent upon God alone. He can make a lie the truth, he can make adultery a virtue and monogamy a vice. The only limit to this power is consistency—God cannot contradict his own essence.

To live in a world ordered by whim would be terrible; one would never know if one was acting justly or unjustly. However, God has decided on a particular way of acting potentia ordinata. God has covenanted with creation, and committed himself to a particular way of acting. While rejecting some of Thomas, Occam did not reject the entire scholastic project. He, too, synthesized and depended heavily upon Aristotle. This dependence becomes significant in the covenantal piety of justification.

The fundamental question of justification is where does one find fellowship with God, i. How does this happen? All people are born, it was argued, with potential. Even though all creation suffers under the condemnation of the Fall of Adam and Eve, there remains a divine spark of potentiality, a syntersis. This potential must be actualized.

It must be habituated. He answered, no! Therefore you should do the best you can. By doing your best, even as minimal as it is, this will merit meritum de congruo an infusion of grace: facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam God will not deny his grace to anyone who does what lies within him. However, he failed to convince himself.

He might have been contrite, but was he contrite enough? This uncertainty afflicted Anfectungen him for years. He continued to be plagued by uncertainty and doubt concerning his salvation. Acceptance is based on who one is rather than what one does. Justification is bestowed rather than achieved. In St. Paul, Luther finally found a word of hope. He finally found a word of assurance and discovered the graciousness of God.

We do not have to achieve salvation; rather, it is a gift to be received. Salvation thus is the presupposition of the life of the Christian and not its goal. This belief engendered his rejection of indulgences and his movement to a theologia crucis Theology of the Cross.

Why were indulgences rejected? Instead of dependence upon God, they placed salvation in the hands of traveling salesmen hocking indulgences. They embody his rejection of all types of theology that are based in models of covenant. From the author of Hebrews, Luther takes an understanding of Jesus Christ as the last will and testament of God.

God has written humanity in the will as heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ See Romans 8. It is a rejection of any type of a theology of glory theologia gloriae. In other words, one must work to decrease the side of the equation that is bad and sinful.

Now, he begins to speak of righteousness in two ways: coram deo righteousness before God and coram hominibus before man. Instead of a development in righteousness based in the person, or an infusion of merit from the saints, a person is judged righteous before God because of the works of Christ. He argues that God interacts with humanity in two fundamental ways — the law and the gospel.

The law comes to humanity as the commands of God — such as the Ten Commandments. The law allows the human community to exist and survive because it limits chaos and evil and convicts us of our sinfulness. All humanity has some grasp of the law through the conscience. The Good News is that righteousness is not a demand upon the sinner but a gift to the sinner. The sinner simply accepts the gift through faith. For Luther the folly of indulgences was that they confused the law with the gospel.

By stating that humanity must do something to merit forgiveness they promulgated the notion that salvation is achieved rather than received. In rejecting much of scholastic thought Luther rejected the scholastic belief in continuity between revelation and perception. Luther notes that revelation must be indirect and concealed.