The Midnight Ride of a Young Law Student

Riding on horseback on his way back to the university where he was studying law, a young man born on this day in 1483 was caught in a violent thunderstorm, and promised his chosen saint that if he survived he would become a monk.

Years earlier, he had dropped out of school at the age of 14, and since he had a very good singing voice, would typically sing in the streets for bread. With the help of a benefactor, and the sacrifices of his parents, he was able to return to school and achieved three degrees before entering law school. It was understandable, then, that his parents did not approve of his decision to abandon the life they had planned for him and devote himself to God.

As a young man who was now shut in to a monastery, he struggled greatly with his sinful nature, and tried numerous rituals to cleanse his guilty conscious, from the mundane (confession, penance) to the extreme (like flagellation, where a person whips themselves as hard as they can, and other forms of 'mortification' popular in that time and place, like spending the night in the snow with no blanket... Crazy, right?).

Still, nothing the young benedictine could do would set his conscience right, and as obsessed as he became with ensuring his own salvation, he only seemed more and more crazy, and eventually his mentors conspired to get him out of the monastery and to focus his mind on others.

He was sent with only a clerk's education to become "Doctor of Bible" (that is, the Dean of Religious Studies) at a nearby university that had only recently been founded. It took a few years, and a few more degrees, but eventually the monk earned his title as Doctor of Theology, and joined the Senate and Theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg.

It was here, finally, at the age of 35, after many years of having failed to ease his conscience and earn the piece of mind that comes with salvation, after years of deep study, and after years of watching the religious leaders of his time make promises that donations to the church were the surest way to ensure salvation (this last offense unsettled him more than anything else he had experienced), Martin Luther finally decided he would take the dangerous step of protesting the powerful and prevailing authority of his day.

He began rather quietly, by sharing with his bishop his 95 arguments from the bible against the church that he had served and would now oppose. The core of the argument:

Facit hec licentiosa veniarum predicatio, ut nec reverentiam Pape facile sit etiam doctis viris redimere a calumniis aut certe argutis questionibus laicorum. 

It is no easy task even for a learned man to defened the Pope from slander, or even from the 'shrewd questionings of the laity'.

And

Hec scrupulosissima laicorum argumenta sola potestate compescere nec reddita ratione diluere, Est ecclesiam et Papam hostibus ridendos exponere et infelices christianos facere.

To use force alone, and not give reasons, as a response to such arguments from the laity, is to expose the Church and the Pope to scorn, and to make all Christians unhappy.

To us, these may seem fairly polite, but to the bishop, and to his Pope, they were the greatest threat possible to the very core of their life's work. Thus, they did not respond politely, and rather than be silenced, Martin Luther chose to take his cause to the people, by posting his argument to his church facebook page, which at the time was hosted on the doors of the cathedral.

Perhaps this is why so many today write open letters and nail them to the doors of their own little forum?

Heresy and History are hard to disentangle. Radical and Rebel are just one sides labels for the other side's champions of principle.

Happy Birthday Martin. Here's hoping you were right...