Luther, Martin | Carter Lindberg (essay date 1996)
Carter Lindberg (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: "The Dawn of a New Era," in The European Reformations, Blackwell Publishers, 1996, pp. 56–90.
[In the excerpt below, Lindberg gives a brief overview of the medieval worldview and the religious practices of the day, focusing on Luther's opposition to the Church's granting of indulgences for monetary donations.]
It is through living, indeed through dying and being damned that one becomes a theologian, not through understanding, reading, or speculation.
Martin Luther
Luther came from an upwardly mobile family. His grandfather was a peasant farmer but his ambitious, determined father worked his way up in the mining industry to the position of a small employer. Luther himself was the first of his family to gain a formal education and become an academic. It is striking that other leading Reformers—Melanchthon, Zwingli, Bucer, and Calvin—came from...
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