On this day, 457 years ago, Martin Luther died at his boyhood home of Eisleben. Martin Luther is most commonly attributed as being the father of the Continental Reformation, although he had forerunners such as Jan Hus. Luther found himself caught in a storm during his university days and prayed a prayer to St. Anne to rescue him, promising to become a monk if spared. This he did. Luther spent hours upon hours in the confessional, fretting over the security of his soul. A breakthrough came to him when reading the words from Paul's Letter to the Romans - "The righteous shall live by faith." Faith became the center of Luther's theology, causing him to decry the sale of indulgences by the Roman See, and thus to challenge papal authority. It was not Luther's mind that promulgated reform, but rather his passion. His most notable works, namely On the Freedom of the Christian Man have been the fuel for many of the less fortunate heresies of the protestant tradition. His doctrine of Sola Scriptura is the pinnacle of a problematic theology that has led to much of Protestantism being backed into a corner in regards to the development of doctrine, which according to Sola Scriptura ends with the last words of the New Testament - an assertion that is neither historical nor founded upon scripture itself.

Read Luther's 95 Theses.