Arend remmers biography of martin luther

Here, Luther was a pioneer in reviving the Hebraic dimension of Christian faith that held that God’s word trumped all else. While demanding obedience to his teachings and his princes, he planted the idea that people are ultimately accountable to God and should glorify him through their work. Martin knew that he would greatly disappoint his parents (which he did), but he also knew that one must keep a promise made to God.

Beyond that, however, he also had strong internal reasons to join the monastery. In 1532, he said that were he Samson, he would give the Turks "something to think about… Every day," Luther said, "I would kill a thousands Turks; in a year this would amount to 350,000 Turks" (Vol 54; 40). In 1518, a meeting at Augsburg with Cardinal Thomas Cajetan ended in heated conflict over Luther's refusal to recant his Theses.

As tensions escalated, on June 15, 1520, Pope Leo X issued an ultimatum, threatening excommunication if Luther did not retract his statements.

Assurance evaded him however. In 1518 at a meeting of the Augustinian Order in Heidelberg, Luther set out his positions with even more precision. ISBN 0895553228.

This Is Luther: A Character Study. His own "evangelical breakthrough" was the result of a series of intense personal encounters with scripture. The University of Erfurt was self-consciously modern, a leading light of the humanist movement in Germany, enthusiastically committed to the study of the Bible and church fathers in the original Greek and correspondingly critical of medieval scholastic theology.

As he expressed it, "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none; a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." Essentially, Luther attempted to show that the doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fides) was not incompatible with Christian love and service. As a consequence, his reform movement lost its mass appeal as the poorer classes tended to funnel into the Anabaptist movement.

As he put it, "If I were a Jew, I would suffer the rack ten times before I would go over to the pope." In words at odds with his earlier and later writing, Luther stated,

What good can we do the Jews when we constrain them, malign them, and hate them as dogs?

Luther’s father knew that mining was a cyclical occupation, and he wanted more security for his promising young son.

Luther is best known for his "95 Theses," which he famously posted on the door of the University of Wittenberg's chapel in 1517.

Despite facing excommunication, Luther continued to spread his teachings, ultimately founding the Lutheran Church, which gained substantial support from various German princes.

The Qur'an is such a "great spirit of lies" that it leaves "almost nothing of Christian truth remaining" (181), thus the only explanation for its numerical success lies in "God's wrath" (179). However, Luther proceeded, in characteristic fashion, to hurl all manner of rude epithets at Erasmus to which the learned humanist replied: "How do your scurrilous charges that I am an atheist, an Epicurean and a skeptic, help your argument?" This underscored Erasmus’ more basic concern that Luther’s acrimony was incongruent with the spirit of the apostles and divided Christian Europe into armed camps.