Martin Luther

Nailed 95 questions to a church door — and spent the next 29 years writing the answers.

October 31, 1517, Luther posted the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Castle Church door for academic debate. The famous moment was a single afternoon. The slow art was everything else. He had spent 15 years in the monastery wrestling with his own salvation before the theses — the Anfechtungen, the so-called "tower experience," the years of failing to find peace through merit. After the theses came the Diet of Worms (1521): "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders." Hidden at Wartburg Castle by Frederick the Wise, he translated the New Testament into German in eleven weeks, finished the full Bible by 1534, and in doing so reshaped the German language itself — Luther's German is the substrate modern High German runs on. He kept writing until his death in 1546: hymns, catechisms, polemics, sermons. The Reformation he triggered fragmented Western Christianity for 500 years and is still fragmenting. He had to break with his own monastic life before he could ask anyone to break with Rome — self-first transmutation, then societal, and the societal half is still in motion.