And so Luther began protesting against church practices of that time which gave people the impression they must contribute to their salvation. Good works do not earn us salvation, Luther taught, rather, faith active in love is fruitful in a good life and good works. Beginning at Wittenberg, evangelical reform spread to many areas of Northern Europe, especially in Germany and the Nordic countries. In Lutheran leaders were summoned to give an account of their faith before the parliament of the empire gathered at Augsburg.
The confession of Christian faith they presented to the emperor is known as the Augsburg Confession, and this has become the charter of Lutheran churches all around the world.
As the movement for reform spread, other leaders came to the fore, and sadly divisions appeared among them. Those who followed Luther were nicknamed 'Lutherans'. Luther himself would have preferred them simply to be called 'Christians', but eventually the name was adopted. Today, around 74 million people call themselves 'Lutheran'. See Lutherans Worldwide. After the Reformation, the Lutheran church went through times of internal dissension and was beset by external perils of various kinds, culminating in the horror of the Thirty Years War.
Luther probably did not nail the theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, as legend would have it, on October 31, , but rather sent copies to various bishops, including the archbishop of Mainz.
Copies were eventually forwarded to the pope. When Luther refused to recant, his writings were burned in Rome, Italy, and in he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Under the direction of German baron Philip Georg Friedrich von Reck, a group of forty-six Lutherans arrived in Georgia in , a year after James Oglethorpe founded the colony. Mostly religious expatriates from Salzburg, the group eventually settled in at a site they named New Ebenezer , located twenty miles northwest of Savannah.
They quickly went to work, sponsoring religious schools, building churches, and experimenting with various economic endeavors, including silk making, farming, and lumbering. After the war, Georgia Lutherans formed synodical affiliations with Lutheran parishes in Charleston, South Carolina, and in Ebenezer served as the host for the first synodical convention in Georgia. As settlements pushed westward between the s and s, Georgia Lutherans increasingly sponsored missionary work, targeting slave owners, enslaved people , middling farmers, and yeomen.
Like other Protestant missionaries during this era, they tended to affirm the status quo rather than any gospel of equality, deferring to the wealthy and powerful men in the communities they entered. For example, one church they founded in Macon had separate entries and seating for men, women, and enslaved Blacks.
In direct competition with the well-organized elements of revivalist Baptist and Methodist groups, Lutheran missionaries had less success; by only eight Lutheran churches existed in the state, with a communicant strength of whites and 61 Blacks. The political and military conflicts of the Civil War era disrupted church attendance and Lutheran commitment to missionary work. After the war, Lutheran churches struggled to retain members and raise cash for new facilities.
The number of Black communicants on Lutheran rosters likewise declined to only a handful. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, saw a remarkable reversal of this downward trend as urban areas exploded in the state; indeed, by prominent Lutheran churches dotted the downtowns of Atlanta, Augusta , Macon, and Savannah and even stood in such small country towns as Plains and Senoia. Luther distilled his criticism into the Ninety-Five Theses , a list of complaints he publicly nailed to the Castle Church door in Wittenburg, in He challenged the Catholic Church to debate his points.
But indulgences were an important source of revenue for the church, and Pope Leo X was not open to debating them. Luther appeared before a church council but refused to take back his statements.
In , Luther was excommunicated by the church. Eventually, a bounty would be put on Luther's head. Two unusual developments allowed Luther's movement to spread. When the Pope's soldiers tried to hunt Luther down, Frederick hid and protected him. During his time in seclusion, Luther kept busy by writing. The second development that allowed the Reformation to catch fire was the invention of the printing press. Luther translated the New Testament into German in , making it accessible to common people for the first time.
He followed that with the Pentateuch in During his lifetime, Martin Luther produced two catechisms, dozens of hymns, and a flood of writings that set forth his theology and explained key sections of the Bible. By , Luther had married a former nun, conducted the first Lutheran worship service, and ordained the first Lutheran minister. Luther did not want his name used for the new church; he proposed calling it Evangelical.
Catholic authorities coined "Lutheran" as a derogatory term but Luther's followers wore it as a badge of pride. English reformer William Tyndale met with Luther in Today, it is estimated there are over 70 million members of different Lutheran denominations all around the world. Check out our list of 15 facts below! At the start of the 16th century, Europe had seen large changes in the arrangement of social classes in the last hundred years.
The severe drop in population from the Black Death created new economic opportunities and mobility for the lower classes of society. New technologies were invented to offset labor shortages and increase productivity, which then established new classes of society to facilitate manufacture and trade.
Hans Luther, the father of Martin Luther , was a benefactor of this new middle class as he earned a living leasing and operating copper mines and smelters. The Luther family made a sufficient income to provide a university education for his son, helping Martin to become a renowned theologian, contributing significant reformations, leading to the creation of Lutheranism.
It is arguable that the Protestant Reformations would not have happened, or at least nearly not as effectively, without the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in For most of the Middle Ages, books were hand-written by scribes in Latin, a language which only the most educated people could understand. The printing press is considered one of the most important innovations of the Middle Ages because, as nothing before, it enabled the vast distribution of information.
The spread of books, enabling a growth in higher education, had a clear impact on the Lutheran reformers. Now that more of the general population could read and know the teachings of the Bible, it was the reformers' affirmation, led by Martin Luther, that Christians should live in accordance with scripture and disregard non-biblical Catholic traditions.
On October 31st, , Luther wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, protesting the sale of indulgences by the Catholic church. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," which came to be known as the Ninety-five Theses. Asserted by Philipp Melanchthon in , Luther also posted his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg that same day, as church doors acting as the bulletin boards of his era, an act now viewed as sparking the Protestant Reformation and celebrated each year on October 31st as Reformation Day.
As Luther obsessively studied portions of the Bible, he came to believe that the church was significantly corrupt with the sale of indulgences and had lost sight of the essential truths of Christianity. The most important of which was the doctrine of " justification by faith " alone through God's grace. Luther began to teach that salvation is a blessing of God's grace, attainable solely through faith in Jesus as the Messiah. A diet was a formal contemplative assembly of the Roman Empire.
This diet is most known for the Edict of Worms , which condemned Martin Luther and his writings contradicting the Catholic church.
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