Martin Luther

A Spiritual Biography

Herman Selderhuis

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781433556944
• eBook ISBN:
  9781433556975
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

Famous for setting in motion the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther is often lifted high as a hero or condemned as a rebel. But underneath it all, he was a man of flesh and blood, with a deep longing to live for God.

This biography by respected Reformation scholar Herman Selderhuis captures Luther in his original context and follows him on his spiritual journey, from childhood through the Reformation to his influential later years. Combining Luther's own words with engaging narrative designed to draw the reader into Luther's world, this spiritual biography brings to life the complex and dynamic personality that forever changed the history of the church.

1

Child (1483–1500)

Devils Everywhere

God, the Devil, and death were everyday topics in the world into which Martin Luther was born. As a child, Luther learned that God was a Judge more righteous than merciful. The Devil was out to snatch your soul and turn women into witches. Death was not the end of life, Luther was taught, but instead it was the moment you appear before God and enter purgatory. With these dour lessons firmly in his head, is it any surprise that years later Luther would say that every mention of God was “as a clap of thunder in [his] heart”? The god that Martin Luther was told to believe in as a child was a god who signaled his righteousness chiefly through punishment.1

The presence of devils and witches certainly did not make life more pleasant. Luther grew up regularly hearing and thinking about Satan. In Luther’s time, stories from the Bible and folklore had been blended together to create many terrifying representations of the Devil and his cohorts. Miners, who worked in darkness deep underground, were terrified at the thought of meeting an evil spiritual being.2

Among other things, Luther was taught that the pealing of the church bells would drive out demons, that the Devil influenced the weather, and that he could command the cattle. Luther also believed that a witch had poisoned his brother, almost certainly following the beliefs of his mother, who was convinced that a neighbor was secretly a witch, preying on the Luther children. The neighbor appeared again in a 1533 comment recorded in Luther’s Table Talk:

Doctor Martinus told us a lot about sorcery, about anxiety, and about elves, and that his mother had had so many problems with a neighbor who was a sorceress. Therefore, his mother had to do her utmost to remain on good terms with the neighbor by being friendly and forgiving. Whenever the neighbor took one of her children onto her lap, she screamed bloody murder. This woman punished a preacher without even mentioning his name and cast a spell on him so that he had to die. He couldn’t be helped with any medicine. She had taken dirt from the ground where he had walked, threw it in water, and bewitched him, because without that earth he could not become better again.3

The accusation of witchcraft devastated many women in Luther’s day, and some paid for the rumors with their lives. In the culture in which Martin Luther was raised, the Devil was everywhere and behind everything. Luther relates,

When I was still a boy, a story was told that there was no way that the Devil could cause a quarrel between a man and his wife who really loved each other. Nevertheless, he managed to make it happen using an old woman who put a razor under both their pillows and then told them that they were there. The man found it and murdered his wife. Then the Devil came and, using a long stick, gave the old woman a pair of shoes. When she asked why he wouldn’t come near her, he answered her, “Because you are worse than I am, because you accomplished something with that man and woman that I couldn’t.” In this way we see once again that the Devil is always the enemy of everything that the Lord God brought about.4

Luther had difficulty throwing off such superstition, but over time he eventually gained a more theologically responsible view of spiritual warfare. Luther would write that he viewed his frequent stomach ailments as direct attacks from the Devil. According to Luther, that struggle happened especially when he was sitting on the latrine, where he spent quite some time due to his intestinal issues, alternating between constipation and diarrhea. Luther experienced many physical struggles in that place, and he saw those struggles as attacks of Satan on his work. Moreover, the Devil likes nothing more than to envelop people in a noxious stench, and he manages that especially on the latrine. A person tries his utmost quietly and privately to have his bowel movement, but subsequently, Satan begins to stir in it so that everyone, especially God, will notice that there is a bad smell hanging around him.5 The imagery of the latrine as a place where Satan does his filthy work and where a person experiences his lowly position was not new and was already present in a medieval song. What was new was Luther’s discovery that this was also the place where the Holy Spirit taught him to combat Satan by trusting in Christ.6 Before he would come that far, however, much would still have to take place in Luther’s life.

Few Details

Little can be said about Luther’s earliest years, simply because we know little about them. Here is what Luther wrote in a letter about his first years:

I was born in Eisleben and also baptized there, namely, in St. Peter’s Church. Of course, I cannot remember anything about this, but I believe my parents and the other people from my native town. My parents moved to the neighborhood of Eisenach because most of my family live in Eisenach, and they all knew me and still know me because I went to school there for four years, and no other city knows me as well as this one. . . . The time after this I spent at the University of Erfurt and in the monastery there, until I came to Wittenberg. I also went to Magdeburg for a year, but I was fourteen then. Here you have my life story and where I came from.7

Fortunately, we know more about the young Luther than these few sentences indicate. He recounted a lot in his letters but also in his so-called Table Talk, which is as famous as it is notorious. Luther did leave us some memory of his earliest years, though it is debatable how much of what he says about himself is accurate.

Name and Face

In Luther’s time, surnames varied more in spelling and pronunciation than they do today. Luther’s father, Hans, wrote his surname as Lüder, Loder, Ludher, Lotter, Lutter, or Lauther, reflecting the cultural habit of spelling names as they sound. When Martin Luther himself began publishing, it was more important to have a consistently spelled name; thus, from 1517 onward, he used Luther exclusively, save for a brief time in which he indulged a mildly elitist habit of using a pen name, Eleutherios, a wordplay on the Greek for “free man.”

In time, Luther would feel the need to distance himself yet again from his name. He was bothered that he had become synonymous with the Reformation. Luther wrote that everyone who realized that he was bound to the rediscovered Christian truth

must be silent concerning my name and should not call himself Lutheran but Christian. What is Luther? Does the doctrine belong to me? I have not been crucified for anyone. . . . How would I as a poor, sinful bag of maggots [this is the way Luther viewed his body] allow people, the children of Christ, to bear my unwholesome name? I am no master and don’t want to be one either. Together with the congregation I share in the universal doctrine of Christ, and he alone is our master.8

Regardless of Luther’s sentiment, those who followed in his theological legacy would continue to bear his name: Lutherans.

What did Luther look like? In a time in which we are awash with photographs, it’s almost unimaginable that someone would reach thirty-seven years of age before appearing in his first portrait. In Luther’s time, however, most people were never painted. The images we have of Martin Luther were all made by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), the famous court painter of the elector. The first shows us a scrawny monk with tonsure and serious-looking eyes (see fig. 1.1). This is an image with a message: here stands a serious man and not a heretic with wild plans. Then as now, portraits and images were part of the public relations division. Gradually, Luther becomes fatter. It seems as if the insight that a person cannot earn his way into heaven by means of fasting had convincingly tempted Luther into a calorie-rich lifestyle. It would also become evident that his innards would have difficulty adapting to these foods. He continues to look serious in the portraits,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Newsletter Signup
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Timeline of Luther’s Life
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Child (1483–1500)
• 2 Student (1501–1505)
• 3 Monk (1505–1511)
• 4 Exegete (1511–1517)
• 5 Theologian (1517–1519)
• 6 Architect (1520–1521)
• 7 Reformer (1521–1525)
• 8 Father (1525–1530)
• 9 Professor (1530–1537)
• 10 Prophet (1537–1546)
• Primary Sources and Literature
• Notes
• General Index
• Scripture Index