One of the hallmarks of Luther's theology was its concern for daily life. In the midst of debates about justification and salvation, church authority, and the Lord's Supper, he bore a deep concern for daily Christian life. Mark D. Tranvik looks at the importance of vocation in Luther's own life and in doing so discovers renewed insights into this important doctrine. Vocation, the called life, is a way of understanding that all of life is under the...

The place and significance of Martin Luther in the long history of Christian anti-Jewish polemic has been and continues to be a contested issue. It is true that Luther's anti-Jewish rhetoric intensified toward the end of his life, but reading Luther with a careful eye toward "the Jewish question," it becomes clear that Luther's theological presuppositions toward Judaism and the Jewish people are a central, core component of his thought throughout...

On October 31, 1517, so the story goes, a shy monk named Martin Luther nailed a piece of paper to the door of the Castle Church in the university town of Wittenberg. The ideas contained in these Ninety-five Theses, which boldly challenged the Catholic Church, spread like wildfire. Within two months, they were known all over Germany. So powerful were Martin Luther's broadsides against papal authority that they polarized a continent and tore apart the...

In this novel of Martin Luther's life, teen readers (and more than a few adults!) will be introduced to the life and adventures of Martin Luther.

The development of Martin Luther's thought has commanded much scholarly attention because of the Reformation and its remarkable effects on the history of Christianity in the West. But, much of that scholarship has been so enthralled by certain later debates that it has practically ignored and even distorted the context in and against which Luther's thought developed. In The Early Luther Berndt Hamm, armed with expertise both in late-medieval intellectual...

The Cross of Reality investigates Bonhoeffer's interpretation and use of Luther's theology in shaping his Christology. In this essay, H. Gaylon Barker uses the "theology of the cross" as a key to understanding the characteristic elements that make up Bonhoeffer's theology; he also shows how Bonhoeffer's conversation with his teachers and contemporaries, Karl Holl and Karl Barth in particular, develops. Bonhoeffer's thought was indeed radical and revolutionary,...

Galvanized by Erasmus' teaching on free will, Martin Luther wrote "De servo arbitrio", or "The Bondage of the Will", insisting that the sinful human will could not turn itself to God. In this first study to investigate the sixteenth-century reception of "De servo", Robert Kolb unpacks Luther's theology and recounts his followers' ensuing disputes, until their resolution in the Lutheran churches' 1577 "Formula of Concord".

In 1521, the Catholic Church, through the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, issued an edict calling for the apprehension and punishment of Luther as a heretic. The edict was akin to a death sentence. If Luther had been caught, he would almost inevitably have been burned at the stake. His fragile movement would have been crushed, and the nascent Reformation strangled in its cradle. Historian James Reston, Jr., recounts this crucial but little-known episode...