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00:00In a time of kings and princes, power was in the hands of the few.
00:09Then, one man broke through, challenging an empire with little more than an idea.
00:16His story would engage millions, and inspire generations in a quest for truth.
00:23His name, Martin Luther.
00:30I cannot, and I will not, retract anything.
00:49A brash young monk named Martin Luther had just infuriated the most powerful leader in
00:55Europe, Emperor Charles V.
00:59Charles now wanted Luther dead.
01:08Luther had no army to shield him.
01:11Instead, he had a different kind of protection, popular support.
01:16Thanks to the recent invention of the printing press, Luther's protest against the church
01:21had transformed him into Europe's first celebrity.
01:26He is the first theologian who had mass media behind him.
01:34Burning Luther's writings would not stop the inevitable showdown of the old against the
01:38new.
01:39The medieval versus the modern.
01:43His notoriety made him a figure you couldn't just dismiss, or get rid of.
01:51Getting rid of Martin Luther would now preoccupy the most powerful people on earth.
01:56For decades, the stage was set for one of the biggest battles of the millennium, featuring
02:02a boisterous media-savvy monk against the Emperor, the Pope, even Henry VIII.
02:16Daily life in 15th century Europe wasn't easy.
02:20Half of all children would not live to see adulthood.
02:24Disease was rampant, food often in short supply.
02:28For the poorest and most desperate, there was no safety net, other than the occasional
02:33gift from those with something to spare.
02:51Life was slightly better in the city of Mansfeld, thanks to a thriving copper industry, where
02:57a manager named Hans Luther was moving up the ranks.
03:01Hans came to realise he'd need a solution to the constant stream of legal arguments
03:06that slowed his operation.
03:09In the early 1490s, he saw the answer in his son, Martin, grooming him for a university
03:17education with an eye toward a career as a lawyer.
03:22There were conflicts, frequent conflicts between the miners and the smelters, and I think Luther's
03:27father found it would be helpful to have a lawyer in the family to help resolve some
03:31of those kinds of problems.
03:36By his early twenties, Martin Luther had fulfilled his father's expectations to the letter, earning
03:42bachelor's and master's degrees in record time.
03:47But as he began law school, something wasn't right.
03:56Luther left school suddenly, mid-term, and travelled home to meet with his father.
04:05Hans' hope for a lawyer in the family was about to be dashed.
04:13Martin wanted to please his father, but his law courses seemed trivial, especially in
04:23light of Martin's deeper concerns, fears that were about to reach a breaking point.
04:43Luther saw acts of nature as acts of God, like most people of the era.
05:11For Luther, the intensity of this storm brought his conscience to the surface.
05:32That night, Luther made a promise.
05:35If his life was spared, he would become a monk.
05:41One must first cry out that he sees no hope.
05:45In this disturbance, salvation begins.
05:49When man believes himself to be utterly lost, the light breaks.
06:04Within days, Luther arrived at an Augustinian monastery, casting off law school, and all
06:10the expectations of his father.
06:17Hans believed Martin was throwing his life away, plus a vow of celibacy meant no grandchildren.
06:26His father was not happy about his decision to go into the monastery, and made no bones
06:32about it.
06:36The decision to become a monk wasn't likely a spur-of-the-moment choice.
06:43Martin Luther's heart was already heavy, fearful of an all-powerful God with impossibly high
06:49standards.
06:50For Luther, his feelings of guilt fostered tremendous feelings of fear.
06:56He was scared stiff before a wrathful God.
07:02Luther hoped that punishing himself for his sins would be pleasing to God.
07:08He beat himself, fasted for days, slept outside in the cold.
07:16But the extreme austerity just didn't seem to be working.
07:20Luther still felt the guilt of his sin.
07:24I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair, so that I wished I
07:29had never been created.
07:31Love, God.
07:34I hated him.
07:36A monk that was driven, that was unable to sleep because he's saying, am I doing everything
07:43that the church requires?
07:44Am I obeying all the rules of my religious orders, the Augustinian?
07:48Uh-oh, have I said the right prayers?
07:52Uh-oh, I better do this or I'm going to hell.
07:59Luther's supervisor and friend, Johann von Staupitz, understood that the church's right
08:12of confession was designed to bring relief to those burdened with guilt, forgiveness
08:17for every kind of sin.
08:30Luther confessed, but he found little reassurance.
08:43While some monks might make their confession in a few minutes, Luther could go on and on
08:47for hours, fearful that even one unconfessed sin might be his undoing.
08:57He went to confession, he repented, he atoned, and it still dawned on him, but I don't feel
09:04saved, I don't feel happy, I'm not at peace, I'm still agonizing.
09:12I feel unable to earn and achieve God's love, mercy and salvation.
09:19This is the angst that he had.
09:26Despite his internal struggles, Luther was a good student and earned the respect of his
09:31peers.
09:34He was an incredibly hard worker.
09:37Because of this and because of his native intellect and because of his passion, he advanced
09:43in the monastic community very quickly.
09:50After two years of preparation, Luther was ordained, celebrating his first Mass in 1507.
10:04For Martin, this was a moment of raw fear, as he felt the full weight of his unworthiness
10:10before God.
10:13Once again, Luther's conscience was condemning him.
10:26As a priest, Luther believed he had now reached his highest calling.
10:31Luther's father wasn't so sure, wondering if Martin's call to the monastery came not
10:36from God, but from the devil.
10:56Luther's distress grew.
11:02Staupitz long believed the best way to relieve Luther's angst was to keep the young monk
11:06busy.
11:07He'd previously persuaded Luther to earn a doctorate in theology.
11:15Now a new challenge.
11:18Staupitz arranged a position for Luther in the faculty of the new university in Wittenberg.
11:28Luther's quest continued.
11:38He leads me beside still waters.
11:42He restores my soul.
11:49You at the back, what does this mean?
12:00Anyone?
12:01No?
12:02The city of Wittenberg was something of a backwater, and the university wasn't well
12:23known.
12:24But that began to change in 1517, when a traveling friar named Johann Tetzel set up
12:31his controversial fundraising scheme nearby.
12:36Tetzel told the townsfolk that the documents he was selling, called indulgences, could
12:42erase the consequences of their sins.
12:46The appeal was irresistible.
12:52Many from Luther's church in Wittenberg were taken in by Tetzel's claims.
12:57A practice that surely looks, an awful lot of the time, like something like salvation
13:06for sale.
13:08What's this?
13:14This is extortion.
13:23A scheme completely opposed to religion.
13:26Its only intent is profit for unprincipled men.
13:31The corruption was not just a local problem.
13:34The tentacles stretched all the way back to Rome.
13:38One of the external reasons in contributing factors to the success of the Protestant Reformation,
13:45everybody knows, was namely the corruption at the time of the Catholic Church, which
13:51we can't deny.
13:54Peter's Basilica in Rome.
13:56In 1517, it had not yet been built.
14:00There were plans, but the work was stalled because Pope Leo X didn't have the funds.
14:07He's engaged in trying to kind of update buildings in the city of Rome itself, to transform it
14:12into a nicer place to live, so he needs money.
14:19Funds were raised through the sale of indulgences.
14:24And no one sold them more aggressively than Johann Tetzel.
14:28As an unabashed salesman, Tetzel was unmatched.
14:32He'd tell peasants that their dead relatives were screaming in pain in purgatory, begging
14:36for relief, which a simple coin could provide.
14:42Tetzel was a self-promoter from start to finish.
14:47I mean, this guy was just a...
14:50I mean, a fake, right to the bottom.
14:53From Luther's perspective, the sale of indulgences was leading people away from God.
14:59Before long, all the churches, palaces, walls and bridges of Rome would be built out of
15:04our money.
15:07Why doesn't the Pope build St. Peter's out of his own money?
15:11He is richer than Croesus.
15:13He would do better to sell the basilica and give the money to the poor people who are
15:18being fleeced by these hawkers of indulgences.
15:26To address the problem, he invited an academic debate on the issue.
15:32He began by writing 95 debate topics, or theses.
15:39Then, in the most iconic moment of the era, Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church
15:49door in Wittenberg.
15:53Those who believe that through these letters of indulgence they are made sure of their
15:57own salvation will be eternally damned, along with their teachers.
16:07The result, indifference.
16:10No one wanted to debate Luther.
16:16The entire Reformation might have stalled right there, except for a new invention that
16:20had recently arrived in Wittenberg, a game-changing technology called the printing press.
16:33Before the printing press, making books was an excruciating process.
16:39Each word was painstakingly written out by hand.
16:42It could take years to create just one copy of a book.
16:50In the mid-1400s, Johann Gutenberg perfected the movable-type printing press, a process
16:57that could turn out in seconds what formerly took months.
17:03But the printers still had one problem, content.
17:06They needed material that would go viral, create controversy, and boost sales.
17:15Nothing really caught on, until they found Martin Luther's 95 theses.
17:22It was perfect.
17:25Without Luther's knowledge, printers began churning out copies by the thousands.
17:32The striking of a match in 1517, a bonfire, the flames of which are still burning.
17:40They spread like wildfire, you know, ten days there in Spain.
17:47That's incredible.
17:48How shocked he was that everything he said was suddenly out there.
17:54Although the 95 theses were written for academics, not peasants, one thing was clear to all.
18:01The document denounced the sale of indulgences.
18:06Luther had struck a nerve, rousing dormant perceptions that the Pope had too much power
18:12and wanted too much money from the German people.
18:19This is mine.
18:20Oh, really?
18:21Where did you get these?
18:22It's everywhere.
18:23At first, Luther was unaware his ideas were propagating.
18:30These have been printed.
18:33It soon became clear he was something of a celebrity, the author of an accidental best-seller,
18:40a work that boldly proclaimed the corruption on everyone's mind.
18:46Avoid those who search for your soul in a money bag.
18:51In his sermons and writings, Luther continued to critique what he saw as fixable errors
18:56in church practice.
18:58Suppose you say that I will never again buy an indulgence.
19:03I reply, good.
19:07My will, desire, plea, and counsel are that no one buy an indulgence.
19:15Let the lazy and sleepy Christians buy indulgences.
19:20You run from them.
19:25Come now and to call me a heretic, I consider such blathering no big deal, especially since
19:32the only ones doing this have darkened minds and have never even smelled a Bible.
19:38Before long, the heretic label began to stick.
19:43Church leaders sought to contain Luther.
19:47Luther would now be questioned in the city of Augsburg.
19:50Now I must die.
19:52What a disgrace I will be to my parents.
19:57Luther's questioner was Cardinal Cayetan, one of the most skilled theologians of the
20:02era.
20:08For Luther, Cayetan had all the authority and power of the Pope himself.
20:18And he once described it as kind of the bad cop.
20:21He's trying to break him, kind of bring the big man in, bring the interrogator in and
20:26sort of break Luther if you can.
20:29But when Cayetan asked Luther to retract his statements about indulgences, Martin would
20:35not.
20:39Luther then grounded his position in an even more outrageous statement.
20:43His holiness abuses scripture.
20:45I deny that he is above scripture.
20:49Cayetan was appalled by Luther's blatant contempt for papal authority and his rudeness.
20:54Cayetan is not a clear Christian thinker.
20:58He is about as fit to deal with this situation as a donkey is to play the harp.
21:02And indeed, some of Luther's friends will be concerned that he showed such great disrespect
21:07for such important personages.
21:12Luther's friends believed his scandalous statements put him in grave danger.
21:16They persuaded him to escape the city, slipping past the guards, scurrying back to the relative
21:22safety of Wittenberg.
21:26A more cautious man might have laid low, but Luther did the opposite, agreeing to a very
21:32public debate in the city of Leipzig.
21:39Luther's opponent, Johann Eck, scored points as a debater, but his performance was not
21:44a crowd pleaser.
21:54I am being misunderstood by the people, so let me be clear in my own language.
22:02I simply assert that a simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a pope
22:10or a council without it.
22:14As for the pope's decree on indulgences, I say that neither the church nor the pope can
22:21establish articles of faith.
22:24These must come from scripture.
22:32God once spoke through the mouth of a donkey.
22:38I will tell you straight what I think.
22:40I am a Christian theologian.
22:43I want to believe freely and be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council,
22:50university or pope.
22:53One thing was clear.
22:55Luther had rejected the pope and the church as the ultimate source of authority.
23:01Instead, he hangs everything on the Bible.
23:07Pope Leo wasn't happy about Luther's statements, but he measured his response.
23:15As part of the arrangement, Luther agreed to stay quiet.
23:20He tried.
23:24But when the opposition derided his ideas, Luther went on a writing spree in 1520, churning
23:30out some of the most significant works of his career, bestsellers that were the talk
23:35of Europe.
23:36The first, titled To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, laid out Luther's ideas
23:42for church reform.
23:45The Catholic Church had long considered priests, monks and nuns as having a higher calling
23:51than regular Christians.
23:53To Luther, this was all wrong.
23:56He saw the Bible leveling the playing field.
23:59So a maid who cleaned a room was not simply cleaning a room.
24:04She was doing God's work.
24:06When we look to Luther, I think that he is valuing all vocations, all things that people
24:13do, that they have importance.
24:16And so Luther's views on this were radical.
24:19They revolutionized society.
24:23Soon, commoners demanded more from their princes, and many monasteries emptied out, their purpose
24:30no longer clear.
24:33It was the kind of message the public was ready to hear.
24:37And Luther, the writer, knew just how to grab their attention.
24:43The printers sold every copy of the treatise they could print.
24:48Luther's fame grew.
24:54Luther fueled the controversy by using especially extreme language.
24:59Moderation was nearly impossible for him.
25:02He saw himself engaged in an epic struggle for souls, a battle that called for strong
25:07words, not polite talk.
25:11You are murderers, traitors, liars, the very scum of all the most evil people on earth.
25:20You are full of all the worst devils in hell, so full that you can do nothing but vomit
25:26and out come devils.
25:29It was quite common on all sides of the Reformation debates to make personal attacks on your opponents
25:37and to say absolutely awful things about them and their mother and all sorts of other relatives.
25:43He is a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with
25:53a frothy mouth and a whorish face.
25:56He had outbursts of anger and that expressed itself in a language that was crude sometimes.
26:05I beg you, blow your nose a bit, make your head lighter and the brain clearer.
26:11He still talked like a firm, or like a minor, you know, so his language was colorful and
26:18excessive and fun.
26:21We are permitted to laugh and have fun with and embrace our wives, whether they are naked
26:28or clothed.
26:29Yeah, Luther's fun to read in part because he expresses himself in a very, how would
26:36you put it, earthy way, sometimes in a scatological way, I mean, he's crude at times.
26:48By now, Luther's understanding of the relationship between God and people was coming into focus.
26:55The central question Luther was answering is one that nearly everyone asks.
27:00What makes me a good person, a righteous person in God's eyes?
27:05The normal way in religious rhetoric is you say, well, God does this, but you have to
27:10do this.
27:14Luther had long been tortured by his feelings of unworthiness, tormented by the guilt of
27:19his failings that even his devotion as a monk could not remove.
27:31The righteous person lives by faith alone.
27:48The righteous person lives by faith alone.
27:51Johannes, please, sit, sit, please, please.
27:58Luther's breakthrough, triggered by a passage in the Bible's Book of Romans, was his understanding
28:03that God's favor could not be earned, even partially, by doing good deeds.
28:09Instead, he saw righteousness as a gift, given by God to those with faith in Jesus.
28:18To him, this is astoundingly good news, and it's not the news that people have been getting.
28:23He now has what he considers to be good news to proclaim to his people, rather than merely
28:28burdening them with more and more things that they have to do and more and more standards
28:32that they have to meet.
28:34Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection has accomplished everything.
28:41Your good works do not earn your salvation, not in the least.
28:47No.
28:49This is a gift for you from God.
28:56Luther's ideas then faced an obvious follow-up.
28:59If God frees people from the need to do good works to earn heaven, then what should Christians
29:05do with that freedom?
29:08Again, Luther saw the answer clearly.
29:13Here is the truly Christian life.
29:18When a man applies himself with joy and love to serving others, voluntarily and for nothing,
29:25doing only what is helpful, advantageous, and wholesome for our neighbor, since by faith
29:34we already abound in all good things in Christ.
29:39So when you didn't have to worry about your future, you were free to care for the futures
29:43of others.
29:44If you were caught all the time, as Luther put it, turned in on yourself, and life is
29:49just about you, and what you and all that, what a pitiful life, when you don't have the
29:55eyes to see others, you know, whom you could love.
30:00So now you can leave who you really are, a loving person, to love your neighbor.
30:06That's what the Reformation's about, the whole thing.
30:10Everything is hinged on that.
30:12Everything is hinged on all good things in Christ.
30:14Leo tried controlling Luther by issuing a papal bull, a formal document that required
30:20Luther to disavow his writings.
30:28The time for silence is over.
30:54The time to speak has come.
31:06The delivery of the papal bull stirred up unrest among Luther's supporters.
31:11Luther himself took his boldest step yet, burning the bull.
31:16And as they excommunicated me for the sacrilege of heresy, so I excommunicate them, in the
31:25name of the sacred truth of God.
31:30Christ will judge whose excommunication will stand.
31:36Amen.
31:44There was no turning back now.
31:49When Emperor Maximilian died in 1519, his grandson Charles was elected to replace him.
31:55He was only 19 years old.
31:58He was raised to be a king, but he was still 19 years old.
32:06The needs of the German people were not important to Charles, but he did want to keep his empire
32:11united.
32:12And he believed the key to cohesion was a unified religion, a policy that made Martin
32:18Luther an unwelcome thorn in his side.
32:21But Charles had to tread lightly.
32:25Public support for Luther was enormous.
32:28So in an attempt to appear fair-minded, Charles agreed to a formal hearing on German soil,
32:36in the city of Worms in 1521.
32:40Because people knew that Luther was going to be there, he was a media star by this point,
32:43and so lots of people came.
32:46Anticipation ran high for this showdown between the powerful emperor and the lowly but popular
32:50monk.
32:52And when he finally got to the gates of Worms, the crowd went wild.
33:00Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs, I would
33:09enter.
33:11I will have a debate.
33:13I must.
33:22As he approached the hearing, the gravity of the situation began to sink in.
33:27Many assumed Luther would be burned at the stake before the day was over.
33:33Burning at the stake, it's terror violence exercised by the state in order to maintain
33:41social control.
33:43And it's very powerful, very disturbing.
33:49In the center of the room was a collection of books written by Luther.
33:57He was asked to disavow all his writings, to publicly retract his statements, and so
34:03spare himself.
34:08This might be it for him.
34:10So, yeah, he's very nervous about what might happen here.
34:18Since you desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth.
34:24I do not accept the authority of popes and councils.
34:28I do not.
34:32I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each
34:38other.
34:40Unless I am convinced by scripture or clear reason, my conscience is captive to the word
34:46of God.
34:48I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against
34:54conscience.
35:02May God help me.
35:08He had a chance to save his neck, but after he had a chance to test his own commitment
35:15and, is it what I really believe in?
35:18He was willing to die for it.
35:20And he never changed from that.
35:22The whole, just the meeting just blew up.
35:25Late afternoon, April, dark, torches, you know, providing the only light and, you know,
35:32bang!
35:33Thinking about him as a kind of master of drama, he sort of sweeps out of the room and
35:39disappears for a while.
35:41Charles signed a decree condemning Luther, ordering that he receive punishment for high
35:47treason.
35:49Charles realized it would not be politically wise to arrest Luther in the midst of the
35:53adoring crowds, so he honored a previous agreement to give Luther safe passage, a few
35:59precious days of furlough before the sentence would be enforced.
36:09Luther took the opportunity to head for home, but he never made it.
36:24Martin Luther was dead.
36:27That's what most Germans assumed when they heard about the kidnapping.
36:34But Luther's story was not coming to an end.
36:38In fact, it was about to end.
36:42Luther's hideout was a secret room at Wartburg Castle.
36:46He grew a beard as a disguise, his coat as a shield, and the
37:00cloak was a symbol of the plague.
37:04Luther's hideout was a secret room at Wartburg Castle.
37:08He grew a beard as a disguise, his codename, Knight George.
37:15Martin Luther disliked the isolation of the castle,
37:18but it didn't slow down his work.
37:20Here, he embarked on one of the most significant projects of his life,
37:24translating the New Testament into the language of the people.
37:30Luther finished the translation in just 11 weeks.
37:33The words would be used that people out there in the fields would understand and relate to.
37:39Joseph is speaking to Mary in the most beautiful German you can possibly imagine.
37:48Luther's exile at Wartburg Castle went on for months.
37:52He began to hear stories of how the movement he started was veering off course, badly.
37:59In Wittenberg, anti-Catholic mobs were smashing church windows and destroying art.
38:05So-called prophets were proclaiming they had knowledge superseding the Bible.
38:10I think it pained Luther to see that people that he loved and trusted,
38:15while he was gone, his tempering influence was removed,
38:18like the control rods were pulled out of the reactor.
38:22To quell the unrest, in March of 1522,
38:25Luther ended his exile and returned to Wittenberg.
38:29We must do to one another as God has done to us through faith.
38:35He preached civility, patience and non-violence.
38:40Order returned, for a time.
38:44When he goes back to Wittenberg, he's completely on his own.
38:46I think if he was not able to impress himself on the people at that point,
38:52it would all have been over.
38:54So that's a remarkable moment.
39:04In early 1523, Martin Luther received a secret letter...
39:11..from nine nuns hoping to escape their convent.
39:16In most German territories, this would be simple.
39:19But these nuns lived in the staunchly Catholic land of Duke George.
39:26Anyone who helped them leave faced a penalty of death.
39:32Luther devised a covert operation.
39:35A local merchant would bring the normal delivery of pickled herring to the nuns' cloister.
39:41But when he left, the empty wagon wouldn't be empty at all.
39:45The plan worked perfectly.
39:47But then, Luther had a new problem.
39:50What to do with a wagonload of young women who had no means of support?
39:55In time, he would find suitable homes, or husbands, for all but one.
40:01The holdout, Katharina von Bora, didn't like the arrangements Luther would make for her,
40:06eventually rejecting several marriage proposals.
40:09But she was willing to marry Luther.
40:15By this point, Luther was 41 years old, and getting pressured by his friends to find a wife.
40:21Luther's friends kind of say, well, how about her?
40:25And so he thinks, well, OK.
40:28And they convince him that she would be a good person to become his wife.
40:33And so, the marriage was arranged.
40:35Martin finally agreed to marry Katharina.
40:39Although it wasn't because of any romantic feelings, at least, not at first.
40:44Luther explained that the reason he married was to please his father, and to spite the Pope.
40:52Over time, Martin came to love Katie dearly.
40:57She was intelligent, and she loved him.
41:00Over time, Martin came to love Katie dearly.
41:04She was intelligent, resourceful, and savvy with finances in ways that Martin was not.
41:11We remember her as Katharina von Bora, and not Mrs. Martin Luther, for a reason.
41:17She stood on her own. She didn't belong to anybody.
41:20To be married to somebody as gruff and bold as Luther could be, she had to kind of match him.
41:31Katie managed orchards, brewed beer, slaughtered pigs, and gave birth to six children.
41:40At any given time, the Luther home, a former monastery, housed more than a dozen guests.
41:46Katie managed it all skillfully.
41:49He would sort of turn to her and say, well, by the way, sweetie, we're going to have 40 extra folks for dinner.
41:53Find something for them to eat.
41:56In an era when it was illegal for a man to will his estate to his wife, Luther did it anyway.
42:03So great was his respect for Katharina.
42:07He was not a feminist, but his view of humanity is about as inclusive as you can expect from a 16th century man.
42:19In 1527, Luther fell ill.
42:22Sickness was no stranger.
42:24In the past, he'd suffered debilitating kidney stones, gout, insomnia, dizziness, and ringing in his ears.
42:32But the most challenging of all hit hard this year.
42:35A recurrence of his deep bouts of depression.
42:39At times, he would lock himself in his room for days.
42:44There's a specific word that he basically coined.
42:47There's a specific word that he basically coined.
42:52That is an attack.
42:54Some people translate it as anxiety or something like that.
42:57It is spiritual attack.
43:01In this, his most severe attack, Luther felt utterly abandoned, full of doubt, alone in the universe, as if God had died.
43:18By late summer 1527, it might have seemed like God had died,
43:23as grotesquely masked plague doctors arrived in Wittenberg to try and stop an outbreak of the plague.
43:32The needs of others were enough to finally break Luther's malaise,
43:36and he began to minister to the sick and console the dying.
43:41Many evacuated the city, but Martin and Katie stayed, even though Katie was several months pregnant.
43:49Her child, Elizabeth, would die a few months after birth.
43:55Suffering, which was such a thing to fear and to be avoided in Christian spirituality,
44:01now for Luther became an opportunity to love the neighbour.
44:05Luther's advice during the hard times is to reinterpret those hard moments as occasions for beauty and occasions for love.
44:18In these most dire times of death and abandonment, Luther wrote his most powerful hymn, A Mighty Fortress.
44:27The title might suggest a hymn about battle, but for Luther, A Mighty Fortress was about comfort and hope in times of trial.
44:38The title might suggest a hymn about battle, but for Luther, A Mighty Fortress was about comfort and hope in times of trial.
44:47The title might suggest a hymn about battle, but for Luther, A Mighty Fortress was about comfort and hope in times of trial.
45:05Martin Luther didn't age well.
45:07Now in his late fifties, his body seemed decades older, as illness after illness took their toll.
45:17Luther faced the most devastating emotional blow of his entire life when his 13-year-old daughter, Magdalena, fell ill.
45:30I mean, when you love a child and something breaks, you just see the raggedness of his heart.
45:37Raising children taught Luther about patience, love, and now grief.
45:45Magdalena would die with her father at her side.
45:49I pray God that I and all of us may have such a death, nay, such a life,
46:04such a life of bright presence, where I, so full of trust, all drew forth our love.
46:16And that event, then, if you read letters that came afterwards, when he's comforting people who lost loved ones or children or wives,
46:26he again and again brings up, I know what you're going through, I still think about my Magdalena, I still think and miss her.
46:37Magdalena's death triggered a dark period for Martin Luther.
46:42Within a few weeks, he would pen his most infamous and disturbing work, A Shocking Attack on the Jews.
46:49He read his Bible through a Christ-centric lens, and he could not ever compromise on any other kind of reading, which is a problem if you're talking with a Jewish person.
47:03The document advocates burning synagogues and expulsion of the Jewish people.
47:09Modern Lutheran church bodies have officially repudiated Luther's anti-Jewish writings, but the book remains a black mark on his legacy.
47:17We have to also take into account that Luther's readiness to engage that issue comes in the context of societies which are not tolerant.
47:29There is no modern notion of tolerance.
47:33Twenty years earlier, Luther had written about the Jews in very positive terms.
47:37In 1523, he writes a work entitled The Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, in which he argues that it is the duty of Christian neighbors to be kind to the Jews who live in their towns,
47:50in order to try to win them over to Christ, in order to try to bring them into the church.
47:55He assumed that when his view of the Bible was explained to Jewish people, they would convert.
48:00Well, of course, this was terribly naive. They were the product of centuries of medieval persecution and all that, and they did not come back to Christianity.
48:12And this, Luther simply could not understand.
48:16Towards the end of his life, he's getting madder and madder and madder about, come on, Jews, you've had 1,500 years to figure this out.
48:24Time is gone, probably because he feels that his time is out.
48:26At the time, Luther's writing on the Jews didn't lead to any violence.
48:31But 400 years later, Adolf Hitler's regime would dredge up Luther's statements and use them to justify its campaign against the Jewish people.
48:41The Nazis can pull phrases out of Luther to bolster their opinions.
48:48They can pull phrases out of Luther to bolster anything.
48:50He says all sorts of things.
48:53Ironically, in the very same decade that Hitler was beginning to use Luther to justify oppression, an American visiting Germany saw Luther as an inspiration to do the opposite.
49:06The American was so taken by the story of Martin Luther's bold fight against oppression, he changed his name from Martin Luther to Martin Luther.
49:18When he came from Germany, he said to his son that we're going to change our names to Martin Luther, and we're going to be Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King Senior, Martin Luther King Junior.
49:30So that resonated greatly in the black community.
49:33He saw something there in terms of Martin Luther that he grabbed hold of and said, this is who we are.
49:42That Luther could elicit massive social change without a call to arms continues to offer hope to the downtrodden around the world.
49:50So I think Luther becomes a model for how one can stand up on the basis of their faith against institutions and individuals who are hurting people.
50:03On February the 18th, 1546, Martin Luther affirmed his beliefs one last time before passing away.
50:16In the mid and late 1500s, the many strands of the Roman Catholic Church were divided.
50:22No Protestant church subscribes to everything Luther wrote and said, but his ideas have left an indelible mark on the world today.
50:32Luther was a man of his word.
50:35He was a man of his word.
50:38He was a man of his word.
50:41He was a man of his word.
50:44He was a man of his word.
50:47He was a man of his word.
50:49No Protestant church subscribes to everything Luther wrote and said, but his ideas have left an indelible mark on the lives of nearly one billion Protestants today.
50:58We'll claim Luther and we'd claim what Luther has to say and teach, at the same time we would disagree with him.
51:05I would suggest that we agree with Luther is important because agreeing with him would disagree with him.
51:11He asks the most basic questions about human existence.
51:14Luther's lasting influence extends far beyond even the Church.
51:19He unleashed new ways of thinking that continue to profoundly shape the secular world.
51:27For example, as a vocal advocate for the education of children,
51:31Luther helped pave the way for the now ubiquitous public school system.
51:37He saw that teaching people to read, teaching people to write, was good for society.
51:43Faith or love.
51:46Luther included the need to educate women at a time when no other prominent figures thought that worthwhile.
51:53Within the 16th century context, to advocate that all girls should receive a basic education was revolutionary.
52:03As an impoverished outsider who stood up against kings and popes,
52:08Luther continues to inspire a belief that individuals can non-violently affect change.
52:16From the American Civil Rights Movement to countless Third World protests,
52:21Martin Luther still fuels an ideology of hope.
52:26He was speaking boldly. He was just saying the word that needed to be said.
52:31And I think that is what most resonates in the Third World.
52:36So it's this freedom and the capability of saying a word that otherwise was not permitted to be said.
52:44Ideas really do matter. And maybe ideas are more powerful than armies are.
52:51Luther likely would not have supported the American Revolution,
52:55but he inadvertently set in motion cultural changes that led to democracy in America and Europe.
53:02He lets the genie out of the bottle in some ways on issues that will ultimately bear fruit in notions of democracy.
53:09You cannot even, I think, see the democratic revolutions of the 18th century
53:17without taking into account Martin Luther's contribution to it.
53:23Luther laid the groundwork for Western democracy in one other important way.
53:28He was the first to prove the power of the media to amplify the marketplace of ideas
53:34and to serve as a check on government.
53:41Despite his impact, Martin Luther wanted very little to do with politics or secular life.
53:47Luther's focus always was the quest for the right relationship between God and people
53:55and how to show love for others in need.
53:58I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word. Otherwise I did nothing.
54:04And while I drank beer with my friends, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy
54:10that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.
54:15But I? I did nothing. The Word did everything.
54:23He speaks to the very basic universal hunger we have to find our ground of being
54:29and I found an orientation that helps us to explain why am I here, where am I going
54:34and that all then has an impact on how we actually live in this world.
54:40Few have played a greater role in shaping our modern world.
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