Reinhold marxhausen biography of martin luther the reformer

Luther, Martin —, German reformer. Martin Luther was the first and greatest figure in the 16th-century Reformation. A composer of commentaries on Scripture, theology, and ecclesiastical abuses, a hymnologist, and a preacher, from his own time to the present he has been a symbol of Protestantism. Martin Luther was born at Eisleben in Saxony on Nov.

Luther's parents were of peasant stock, but his father had worked hard to raise the family's status, first as a miner and later as the owner of several small mines, to become a small-scale entrepreneur. In Martin was sent to the Latin school at Mansfeld, in to Magdeburg, and in to Eisenach. His early education was typical of lateth-century practice.

To a young man in Martin's circumstances, only the law and the church offered likely avenues of success, and Hans Luther's anticlericalism probably influenced his decision that his son should become a lawyer and increase the Luther family's prosperity, which Hans had begun.

Marxhausen, pastor of Immanuel Lutheran Church,

Martin was enrolled at the University of Erfurt in He received a bachelor of arts degree in and a master of arts in In the same year he enrolled in the faculty of law, giving every sign of being a dutiful and, likely, a very successful son. Religious Conversion. Between and , however, Martin experienced a religious crisis which would take him from the study of law forever.

His own personal piety, fervently and sometimes grimly instilled by his parents and early teachers, and his awareness of a world in which the supernatural was perilously close to everyday life were sharpened by a series of events whose exact character has yet to be precisely determined. A dangerous accident in , the death of a friend a little later, and Martin's own personal religious development had by started other concerns in him.