Even after five hundred years, Martin Luther remains one of the best-known Christian theologians. He is widely credited with launching the Reformation by nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Castle Church, Wittenberg, and standing up for the freedom and inviolability of the individual conscience before the Holy Roman Emperor at the amusingly-named Diet of Worms. Such widespread name recognition is both a blessing and a curse, for neither of these accolades are quite right. When Luther invited a disputation about the practice of indulgence-selling with his Ninety-Five Theses, he had no intention of beginning a rupture in Western Christianity that lasts to this present day. And while Luther did indeed refuse to recant before the Emperor at Worms, he was no defender of freedom of conscience in the modern sense, grounding his obstinance not in any account of human rights but in his commitment to the Scriptures. Luther is neither the father of individualism and human rights nor a sort of dark sorcerer conjuring into existence German nationalism and anti-Semitism (the inexcusable anti-Judaism of some of his later works notwithstanding).

So if we want to go deeper than the caricatured pictures of Luther we’ve been given, we can understand him as a Christian seeking a gracious God in spite of his own deeply-felt failures. This deep hunger to know a God who loves abundantly led Luther to his commitment that we should look for salvation entirely from God’s grace extended towards us in Jesus Christ, not from our own works or accomplishments – a commitment that Luther held so fiercely that it would eventually tear apart the fabric of the Western Church. God’s graciousness, for Luther, is grasped by faith and set forth to us in the Bible and in the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. When we realize and accept God’s graciousness, we are set free – not that we might dither our days away in self-serving but to love and serve our neighbors.

But before we get into the details of Luther’s beliefs, here’s a brief biographical sketch. Luther was born in Eisleben in what is now Germany in 1483 or 1484. Born to a well-to-do family, Luther’s father intended that he would study law, but Luther chose instead to become a monk, entering the Augustinian order in 1505. Brother Martin quickly became a rising star in his order: in 1511 he moved to the nine-year-old university of Wittenberg to teach theology. In 1515 he was appointed a provincial vicar of the Augustinians, supervising monasteries in Saxony and Thuringia. At the same time, he also became obsessed with what would become the key question of his life: how could he be certain that God truly forgave his sins? Luther was tortured throughout his life by what he called Anfectungen, attacks of despair and desolation. Given his ever-present awareness of his sins and failure to conform to God’s demands, where could Luther find a gracious God? All his confessions and sacramental absolutions, all his striving after holiness as a monk could not reassure him that he was truly forgiven by God or anything other than a miserable sinner. At some point in the 1510s, probably around 1515, Luther had what Luther scholars call his Turmerlebnis, his ‘tower experience’: his insight, grounded in Paul and St. Augustine, that our sins are forgiven and we are righteous before a holy God not by our own works, but by God’s actions on our behalf through Christ Jesus. All that we have to do is have faith that God has indeed made us holy and claimed us as his own in Jesus rather than trusting in our own moral achievements. This is what is known as ‘justification by faith alone.’

But even Luther’s Turmerlebnis did not automatically put him on a collision course with Rome. This changed when Luther began a controversy regarding indulgences, the practice of offering time off from purgatory for good deeds or money. Johann Tetzel, a particularly loud and unscrupulous seller of indulgences, was active in the Wittenberg area in 1517. Luther, disturbed by the pastoral implications of the hawking of indulgences, wrote ninety-five theses for disputation on the theology of indulgences. At first glimpse, nothing about this was particularly unusual, but the dispute grew increasingly fierce until Pope Leo X in 1518 officially condemned Luther’s theses, charging Luther to recant. Luther refused and began to publish tracts and treatises calling for a thoroughgoing reform of Christian faith and practice and condemning the papacy as the Antichrist. In 1520, Leo X issued a bull called Exsurge Domino condemning Luther as a heretic and threatening excommunication unless he recanted; unfazed, Luther burnt the bull. In 1521, Luther was called to the Imperial Diet held at Worms by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Luther was called once again to recant his condemned writing and once again refused, stating that he was bound by Holy Scripture and could not recant unless his works were shown to be contrary to Scripture. Luther was proclaimed an outlaw, but was hidden by his prince in Wartburg Castle, where he began work on his translation of the Bible into German.

From 1522 until his death in 1546, Luther guided the movement of reform that he launched, arguing against both Roman Catholicism and those who took his message in directions with which he disagreed. Most important of the latter group were those reformers, beginning with the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli, who denied any physical presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. An attempt to mediate between Luther and Zwingli at Marburg in 1529 failed when neither man would budge (Luther was particularly intransigent), beginning a rupture that continues to this day between Lutherans and Reformed Protestants. Luther also married the former nun Katherina von Bora and began a family with her, preached regularly, and provided guidance for the establishment of Lutheran churches throughout Germany. Luther died in the city of his birth, Eisleben, in 1546, but in a world very different from the one into which he was born: this monk and professor died as the leader of a family of churches which had rejected the primacy of the Pope, were bound together by confessional documents (primarily the Augsburg Confession), and by 1555 would be legally recognized in the Holy Roman Empire.

Understanding Luther’s theology is made complicated by the fact that he did not leave us a single summa or compendium of his beliefs analogous to, say, the Institutes of John Calvin. He is what is called an occasional theologian rather than a systematic one, writing in response to specific occasions (hence ‘occasional’) that he felt demanded his attention. Nonetheless, the heart of his theology is quite clear: justification by faith alone. Because of Jesus Christ’s perfect life and death, Luther believes, we are set free from having to earn our way into God’s good favor but are rather given grace freely through Christ. Luther is fond of using the language of a ‘great exchange’ or the nuptial imagery of Ephesians 5: Christ takes on our sins and failures, just as a bridegroom takes on his bride’s debts, and nails them to the wood of the cross; just as a bridegroom shares all his goods with his bride, so Christ gives us his new and unending life and the forgiveness of all our sins. All that we have to do is to trust that our salvation is Christ, not our own efforts – a faith which is itself a gift of God!

For Luther, Scripture and the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the primary means by which we learn the truth of justification by faith alone. But of course, Luther’s opponents could point to any number of places, in Old and New Testament alike, where God clearly commands us to do certain actions and refrain from others. Luther argued that to find in the Bible a message of God’s unconditional grace, you had to read the Bible correctly, using a hermeneutic called the Law-Gospel distinction which Luther argued Scripture itself teaches. Luther asserts that, in general, Scripture can be divided up into two sorts of messages: commands and promises. Both testaments, Old and New, contain God’s commands for holy living (called the Law) with rewards contingent upon those instructions being followed, and promises of God’s wholly unmerited favor (called the Gospel). Both of these, Luther things, are given by God and are necessary, though in different ways. The most important point of the Law is to help us see that we are incapable of fulfilling it, which deflates the attempts at self-justification to which Luther thinks we are especially prone. But the point of the Law is not to force us into endless despair. Rather, the Law is given so that we will abandon our attempts to earn our way into God’s good graces and run to the Gospel. This may not be the way we would most like to be saved – Luther calls this a theology of the cross as opposed to a theology of glory that exalts human capacities – but it is the way that God has chosen to save us.

The Sacraments, Luther teaches us, also convey the Gospel: they are means of grace, giving us assurance that we are in God’s good favor. In the Lord’s Supper, Luther taught, we receive Christ’s body and blood as sheer gift from God to us for the forgiveness of our sins. This is why he was so vociferous an opponent of the Roman transformation of Lord’s Supper into a work that we offer to God. The Reformed doctrine of the Lord’s Supper also, Luther believed, took away the assurance that the Supper was supposed to offer. Reformed theologians made the true reception of Christ’s Body and Blood dependent on the recipient’s faith, leading to anxiety as to whether or not one was truly receiving Christ. We see a similar focus on assurance through the sacraments in Luther’s teaching about baptism. Luther was fond of instructing people, especially those suffering from despair, to remember their baptism. Unlike Calvin or the later Reformed tradition, who would instruct people doubting their assurance to look within their hearts for proof of the Spirit’s activity, Luther would point people outside themselves: look at Jesus on the cross, remember that God baptized you via the minister. The only safe place to look for assurance is God coming to you from outside you: in Scripture, in baptism, and in the Eucharist. The human heart, even when redeemed by God, will nonetheless be changeable and sin-prone throughout this life.

Does the doctrine that we are saved purely by God’s grace through faith mean that Christians don’t have to do good works? For Luther, the answer is emphatically ‘no’! He will argue this by making a distinction between two different kinds of righteousness, and the inner and outer human person. The ‘inner person,’ the human being as it exists solely in relationship to God, is totally free from all works. It receives a righteousness wholly external to it when it is joined to Christ by faith. This righteousness is wholly passive; it isn’t something the inner person does, it is simply accepted gratefully. The ‘outer person,’ the human being as it exists in relationship to other people, does works. In thanksgiving for the free gift of grace received by Christ, the human being exercises an active righteousness in the world enabled by the passive righteousness of the inner person. In fact, Luther thinks that those who accept his doctrine will do more genuinely good works than his Roman opponents, for many of the good works they counsel – pilgrimages, veneration of saints and relics, indulgences, and so on – have no benefits for the neighbor. The true Christian is freed from having to earn her salvation by acts of piety precisely so that she is freed for loving her neighbor abundantly. This is why Luther will say in his famous 1520 The Freedom of a Christian that “The Christian individual is a completely free lord of all, subject to none. The Christian individual is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

Luther was not a perfect man, as he himself would be the first to admit. Those looking for grounds to condemn him will find no shortage of them in his works or his actions. In particular, his writings on Jews and Judaism, particularly towards the end of his life, has been condemned by Lutheran Church bodies for their vehement anti-Judaism. While Luther was not particularly unusual among his contemporaries, his writings remain inexcusable. But he is someone who has transformed my own relationship with God for the better, and someone who I believe can do the same for you. I suffer from my own Anfechtungen: anxiety and depression that make me frequently doubt my worth and value as a person. Yet I exist within a society that constantly instructs me to stake my sense of my self-worth on my accomplishments or abilities, and so Luther’s teaching has been such a balm to me. I cherish above all his refrain that our salvation comes not from our own accomplishments but from God’s free gift. His conviction that we need to have our attempts to justify ourselves broken down, that only thus can we really understand the truth of God’s gracious salvation offered to us in Christ Jesus, rings true in my own life. His focus on the sacraments as means of God’s freely given grace extended to us, and more broadly on finding our assurance not in our own sin-sick selves but on God’s objective work on our behalf has strengthened me in periods of doubt or despair. I hope that this might spur you to look more closely at his works – The Small Catechism, The Freedom of a Christian, Two Kinds of Righteousness, and his Galatians commentary are great places to start – that he might help you, as he has helped me, to find a good and gracious God.