Martin Luther at 500

Five centuries ago this year, Martin Luther became a monk. No person has had a bigger impact on the 500 years since.

The title of John M. Fontana’s book about Johann Gutenberg, Mankind’s Greatest Invention, makes the valid point about Gutenberg’s printing press. Printing gave reading—hence power— to the common person.

Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455. But it took Luther to make the invention world-transforming, just as Henry Ford, not Gottlieb Daimler, transformed the 20th Century with automobile mass production.

Luther taught that we are justified by faith, not works. We don’t earn our way into heaven, we believe our way. It is between us and God. Justification by faith makes each individual equal before God, a radical concept to the early 16th Century's Pope and kings ("Dieu et mon droit"), and one still unfamiliar to much of today’s world.

As the printed Bible empowered Luther, he used it to empower each individual. Knowledge makes us free. Luther specifically denied a priesthood the right to get between the individual and God, denied the Pope’s role as the final interpreter of scripture, translated the Bible into German, encouraged individual study of the scriptures, and actively worked for a competent education system.

To Luther, piety meant someone who was free in conscience by virtue of faith, and charged with the duty of proper conduct within a community of similarly-committed individuals. A community of free and equal individuals. An emerging democracy.