Martin Luther
(Eisleben, Thüringen, 1483-1546) German theologian. Martin Luther’s harsh criticism of the moral demise of the Roman Church, first focused on the bull trade, gave him a swift excommunication in 1520, but also made him the visible leader of the Reformation, a religious movement that rejected the authority of the papacy and sought a return to primitive spirituality.
Throughout the 16th century, through Luther and other reformers, and with the support of princes and monarchs eager to increase their power and independence, the Reformation would lead to the establishment of several Protestant churches in northern Europe and the so-called “War Religious”. between Catholics and Protestants. With this last of the great Christianisms the Protestant schism ceased, the hegemony of the Catholic Church in the old continent ceased and the religious map was configured as it usually happens today: independent national churches of Rome in the northern countries and survival. of the Catholic Church in southern countries.
Biography
Contrary to what his parents wanted, Martin Luther became an Augustinian monk in 1505 and began studying theology at the University of Wittenberg, where he received his doctorate in 1512. As a professor, he began to criticize the situation encountered by the Catholic Church. himself: Luther protested against the frivolity of much of the clergy (especially the higher hierarchies, which he might have considered during a visit to Rome in 1510) and also criticized the bulls of the church (documents that theoretically gave forgiveness to believers for the sins committed) was subjected to purely commercial trafficking.
Luther’s criticism reflected a fairly widespread climate of dissatisfaction with the deterioration of the church, expressed since the late Middle Ages by other reformers who can be considered precursors of Lutheranism (such as the English John Wyclif (15th century) or the Bohemian Jan Hus (XV century)). Luther’s protests escalated until, as a result of a campaign to sell church bulls to repair the Church of San Pedro, he decided to publish his protest by writing his famous ninety-five theses, which he nailed to the church door in Todos . Santos de Wittenberg (1517) and soon to be printed with the title De questioning the power and efficiency of abundance.
The Church made Luther appear several times to withdraw these ideas (1518 and 1519); but in each controversy, Luther went further, rejecting the authority of the pope, the council, and the “church fathers,” referring instead to the Bible and the use of reason. In 1520, Luther completed the cycle of his break with Rome by developing his ideas in three important “reformist writings”: Appeals to the Christian nobility of the German nation, the Babylonian captivity of the Church, and Christian freedom. Finally, Pope Leo X condemned and hastened him as a heretic in a bull that Luther publicly burned (1520); and the new emperor Carlos V declared him outlawed after learning his reasons at the Diet of the Worms (1521).
Luther remained in hiding for a year under the protection of the electorate Frederick of Saxony; But his ideas had found an echo among the German people, and also among some princes who were eager to assert their independence from the pope and the emperor, so Luther soon received support that made him the leader of the religious movement, known as the Reform. .
Lutheran theology
Detached from Roman obedience, Martin Luther undertook the reform of the ecclesiastical sectors that followed him and that formed the first Protestant Church, which he endowed with a theological basis. Lutheranism is based on the doctrine (inspired by the writings of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine of Hippo) that man can only be saved by his faith and the grace of God, without good works being necessary, much less sufficient to achieve the Salvation. of the soul; consequently, files like the bulls sold by the Catholic Church were not only immoral but also useless.
Luther defended the doctrine of the “universal priesthood”, which implied a direct personal relationship of the individual with God in which the mediating role of the Church disappeared, depriving it of its traditional justification; The interpretation of the Holy Scriptures did not have to be the exclusive monopoly of the clergy, but that any believer could freely read and examine the Bible, which therefore had to be translated into languages that all believers could understand. Luther himself translated it into German, creating a literary monument of great impact on the written language in Germany in later centuries.
He also denied other ideas assumed by the Church throughout the Middle Ages, such as the existence of Purgatory or the need for clerics to remain celibate; To set an example, he himself married a former nun who had converted to Lutheranism. Of the Catholic sacraments, Luther only considered valid the two that he found reflected in the Gospels, namely, baptism and the Eucharist, rejecting the others.
By rejecting the centralizing authority of Rome, Luther proclaimed the independence of the national Churches, whose head would be the rightful prince of each state; the possibility of taking control of the local Churches (both in the patrimonial aspect and in the propaganda apparatus for the control of consciences) attracted many German princes and facilitated the extension of the Reformation. All the more so since Luther insisted on obedience to civil power, helping to reinforce monarchical absolutism and repudiating popular movements inspired by his doctrine, such as the one that unleashed the “peasant war” (1524-25).
The spread of Lutheranism gave rise to the “religious wars” that Catholics and Protestants faced in Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, although religious differences were little more than a pretext to channel power struggles in which interests were mixed. political, economic and strategic. Protestantism eventually established itself as a separate Christian religion from Roman Catholicism; But, in turn, it also divided into multiple currents, when radical dissidents appeared in Germany itself (such as Thomas Münzer) and Protestantism spread to other European countries, where local reformers appeared who created their own Churches with differentiated theological doctrines ( as in the England of Henry VIII or the Switzerland of Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin).
Death
Three years before his death, he wrote a treatise on Christian anti-Judaism, called On Jews and Their Lies, in which he called for the murder of Jews to burn their properties and synagogues. His rhetoric was directed not only at Jews, but also at Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, and non-Trinitarian Christians. Luther died in 1546 with the expulsion of Pope Leo X still in effect.