Ep. 240 Martin Luther - His Youth and His "Anfechtungen"
History of the Germans

Ep. 240 Martin Luther - His Youth and His "Anfechtungen"

C1AdvancedSeptember 17, 202649 min
  • One speaker

In this episode we will look at the first 35 years of Martin Luther’s life, from his birth in 1483 to a moment sometime between 1512 and 1519 when he achieved his great theological breakthrough. This is a crucial period in the history of the Reformation, a time when Luther struggled with what he called his “Anfechtungen”. Anfechtungen is one of these untranslatable German words like Schadenfreude and Gemütlichkeit. It is something more than a trial or tribulation, more of an existential assault on faith itself — an overwhelming, often visceral experience of doubt, terror, and despair before God, in which the sinner fe...

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certain broad types already delineated in his own generation. His followers hailed him

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  • 152 words a minute: a natural pace.
  • 391 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

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0:00

Very naturally, he, Martin Luther, is a controversial figure. The multitudinous portrayals fall into certain broad types already delineated in his own generation. His followers hailed him as the prophet of the Lord and the deliverer of Germany. His opponents on the Catholic side called him the son of perdition and the demolisher of Christendom.

0:29

The agrarian agitators branded him as the sycophant of the princes, and the radical sectarians compared him to Moses, who led the children of Israel out of Egypt and left them to perish in the wilderness. But such judgments belong to an epilogue rather than a prologue.

0:48

The first endeavour must be to understand the man. Now one will not move far in this direction unless one recognises at the outset that Lutter was above all else a man of religion. The great outward crises of his life which bedazzle the eyes of dramatic biographers

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