The Role of Martin Luther King in the German Reformation

The Role of Martin Luther King in the German Reformation

Martin Luther was born in Saxony. His father was a well off copper

miner. Martin Luther was well educated and very intelligent. He was a

highly nervous child as his parents were very strict. He was beaten a

lot at home and in school. Once when Luther was out he got caught in a

thunderstorm and was terrified. He was so terrified that he made a

promise to St. Anne that if he survived he would become a monk. He

did.

He became a professor of theology in Frederick the Wise’s university

in Wittenberg. Luther was obsessed with the idea of being saved when

he died (heaven). He was permanently unhappy and unknown. He lived out

of the way and was continuously confessing, praying trying to figure

out how he was going to be saved. One day Luther was praying in his

cell when the answer to his question came to him. You don’t have to

pray and confess all the time just do nothing and believe and God will

look after everything. Luther called this “Salvation by faith alone”.

Suddenly, he was a happy man and that should have been the end of that

for Luther.

But at this time Pope Leo X was rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica in

Rome. He invented “indulgencies” to raise the money. The indulgencies

said that when you died you didn’t go to heaven or hell; you went to

place called purgatory which was in between the two. There you had to

wait until God decided were you went but if you paid the pope to pray

for you, you would go straight to heaven. Indulgency sellers were sent

all over Europe and one of them arrived in Wittenberg, where Luther

lived.

John Tetzel was the indulgency seller that arrived in Wittenberg.

Luther was horrified at the idea that you could buy salvation like you

would buy a sack of spuds. Luther believed that the pope was selling

salvation. When Tetzel arrived Luther called him a donkey from Rome