Luther [DVD] (2003)

Last year was the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, one of the most important cultural events in Western history. The Reformation was not a religious revolution; it was a theological, doctrinal, intellectual revolution. The Christian god was the same for all Christians, as was their holy book. Interpretation is what changed and mattered. For Luther (and many others) religion was personal, not institutional. God’s word in Scripture was Luther’s authority, not the church. All who had faith in God could believe, as faith did not require church intervention for understanding personal truth. One’s heart was enough. The church could even be seen as a hindrance to personal faith and salvation. God created man, not the church, so what authority did the church — a man-made institution — have over the soul? Seen in this light, the church was the enemy of faith, a corrupt and hypocritical power that stole from the poor in the name of God to enrich the rich through indulgences. Cardinals, bishops, prelates and the Pope himself benefitted from the system. If blasphemy existed, this was it. How dare the church presume to read, decipher and interpret what was in a person’s heart. How dare it assume it had authority to know anything valuable. Luther could read and write in several languages, including Latin. The Bible, God’s word, was his source for everything. The church became a pointless irrelevance, an impediment to his right to think and believe.‘Protestant’ has the word ‘protest’ in it. Luther’s protest was a peasants’ revolt. Power resided in the collective might of the people, not in a slim ruling elite in Rome. The Reformation was a revolt to claim and legitimize this power, the power of the word of God returned to the people, where it belonged. Christ was the humblest of men. He taught in the open air on hilltops, in villages, from the backs of donkeys, not in temples and cathedrals. He wore simple cassocks, not robes with ermine furs, vestments, gold chains and pointy hats. His sermons came from the heart, not from liturgies and rituals. His message was clear and simple, the link to God intimate and personal. No one can know your heart because it’s yours, not theirs. Only God knows what you know. An outsider, the Pope is as ignorant as all the rest. Put your faith in God, not the church. Not even in the emerging Protestant churches, Luther would later say. They are but sanctuaries for personal testament to God, there to support your faith, not exploit it.The protest of course was also political. If the Pope wanted to build St. Peter’s in Rome and other sumptuous edifices to the glory of the Catholic Church, he could do it with his own coin, not monies taken from the meagre incomes of poor believers through taxes called indulgences. Luther therefore called out the Church of Rome, fingering it as a sort of confidence racket. This was his view, his dangerous assertion, and it ensured he would be a marked man, a radical monk with seditious, heretical ideas who would burn at the stake for his apostasy, as many before him had. But, fateful or not, it was his destiny to survive, to start a chain reaction that would fracture Western civilization, cleaving it in two.At the Diet of Worms, his public trial in 1521, he refused to recant:“Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture…I cannot and will not retract [what I have written]…Here I stand. God help me!”Four years earlier, in 1517, he had hammered his 95 declarations/arguments into the heavy wooden double doors of All Saints’ Church in the town of Wittenberg in Saxony. His demands were written in Latin to the Church of Rome, but they were also meant to be read by the people, so copies were printed in German and widely distributed throughout the town and well beyond.Right man, right place, right time, aided by the genius of Gutenberg and his printing presses. So this is the way the pieces fall into place through the dubious lens of hindsight. Pope Leo X charged Luther with heresy. Luther responded by breaking with the Catholic faith, publicly denouncing it as corrupt and reactionary. When the written Papal decree of apostasy reached Luther he burned it publicly in the town square. Talk about spoiling for a fight! At this stage Luther was embracing his martyrdom, calling on God’s intervention if it so pleased Him to be merciful. Evidently God took notice. Luther was saved from the flames by influential friends in high places. For instance, Prince Frederick the Wise, founder of the University of Wittenberg, who risked his own life by having his men abduct Luther after the Diet of Worms, allowing Luther to escape and find safe refuge with sympathisers. This suited many German princes who detested the power of Rome. They hated the greed of local bishops whose authority drained their incomes and prevented reform. Reducing or eliminating the power of these parasitic emissaries of the Pope was welcomed by these princes. Game on!A thunder storm rages as the film opens. Lightning flashes in the blackness of the night. A young man is caught out in the deluge, alone on a muddy country road. He is soaked through. He lies face down and beseeches God, “I’ll become a monk. I’ll give myself to you. Just spare me!”Whether this truly happened or not (as Luther claimed it did), it’s a good allegory. The year was 1505 and Luther was 22. Thereafter, two years later, we see him as an Augustinian monk in Erfurt under the care of Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s Father Superior. Young Luther is still unsettled, still wrestling with his demons. He hears voices and suffers through fits. Tortured by doubt, he wonders if his own father had been right in telling him to study law, not theology. Is this really his destiny to be a monk? He beseeches God for an answer. He needs to find a proper direction to his life.Father Johann steadies him. The older man sees his passion and intelligence. He knows great things are possible for Luther if his intellect is properly applied. Father Johann helps give him the strength and confidence to endure, to believe in himself and accept the path he is on instead of dwelling on regrets, his failings and sins. It’s not through self-punishment that one finds enlightenment, but through all the blessings that flow from Christ’s love. This is the lesson Luther learns from Father Johann and it’s a strength and insight that will sustain him through all the turmoil to come. The love of the Saviour will be his strength and armour. He will fight his many enemies with books and ideas, not with swords and other weapons. His triumphs, if there were to be any, would be intellectual, philosophical, theological. He was a warrior of the spirit, not one of the flesh.His path to Wittenberg was paved by Father Johann. There Luther taught theology at the university. It was also there that his writings on church reform would occur. Earlier as a divinity student he had spent time in Rome as a pilgrim. What he saw there astonished and appalled him. In the film he says this to Father Johann:“Rome is a circus, a running sewer. You can buy anything: sex, salvation. They have brothels just for clerics.”Rome comes to Wittenberg in the form of John Tetzel, an emissary from the Vatican. Tetzel’s job is to fill the church’s coffers with monies given for indulgences (penance for sins that can ensure safe passage to Paradise in the afterlife). Whether Tetzel is disingenuous or a true believer we don’t know, but like any present-day Evangelical he’s charismatic and good at attracting money. Good man for the Pope, then.Luther is incensed. The poor German peasants cannot read the indulgences that are given to them. They are written in Latin, and even in Latin they are vague, virtually meaningless like any horoscope is. Even if the indulgences had been written in German, many of the people would not have understood what they said, as most of the people were poor and illiterate.Luther’s reforms were launched by the scandal and scam of indulgences. The practice was intolerable to him and had to be stamped out. If it could not be, well then, let’s see where this takes us.Of course it took him directly onto a collision course with Rome. But Luther was clever and had allies in Germany, especially in Wittenberg. Everyone understood some reforms were needed. A complete break with the Catholic Church had not been envisaged, not even by Luther. But the intransigence of Rome made it inevitable. One thing led to the next, and one of the most important of these was Luther’s translation of the entire New Testament from Latin into vernacular German. It was a work of genius, something never attempted by one man before. For the first time, in their own language, Germans who could read German were able to see what the Scriptures truly said. It was a revelation that changed everything. Copies were printed. The wildfire spread. The Reformation was on and there was nothing Rome could do to stop it anymore.By the time of the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 the Vatican had essentially conceded defeat. Protestant churches were already flourishing in Germany and fanning out across northern Europe, especially into the Low Countries and Scandinavia. The Reformation was secure. Game over.The film ends after Augsburg with Luther married to Katharina von Bora, a former nun freed from her vows by the Reformation. Their marriage in 1523 caused further outrage in Rome, but at this stage Luther was past caring. They went on to have six children.In the new church Luther wrote sermons and hymns and preached. His hymns survive to this day. In fact, as a boy I sang some of them in our local Lutheran Church. The first and only time I sat through a Roman Catholic mass was at age 12 with a neighbourhood friend. I thought I was on another planet surrounded by alien beings and was very glad to return to Earth when the bizarre service ended. Thank you, Martin Luther.The secular view in our age is modern. Most people who ever lived would not have understood our thinking. They had no science, no way of understanding the composition of the material reality that surrounded them. If we are the beneficiaries of modern scientific knowledge, it makes the religious past look strange and alien. Were the doctrinal differences between various Christian sects (even within Protestantism itself) so great to warrant all the hatred and bloodshed that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries?Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, is an eminently modern voice when he says:“The Reformation was the scraping of a little rust off the chains which still bind the mind…Darwinism is the New Reformation.”Indeed it is. Science, not divine revelation, has made truths about the world accessible to us. The Bible has and will always have a revered place in Western culture. Our culture is founded on both this book and Christianity. We are all religious, culturally speaking. But ours is not a religiosity that depends any longer on fables in the Bible to understand the world, and for that we should feel grateful.He was a radical, a rebel, though he never set out to be. His life and fate were ironic. He brought the roof of the Catholic Church crashing down and we still live among the chaos of its rubble today, the church an anachronism, a relic from another age with a tarnished authority that only the truly devout take seriously anymore.

This is one of the best historical dramas that I have seen in many a long year. It is almost as fine a film as "A Man for All Seasons". The hero here is the man that the great Catholic statesman Thomas More detested so much; the founder of the Protestant movement, Martin Luther.The film opens with Luther, weeping with terror at finding himself exposed to a thunderstorm whilst traveling alone at night in the midst of the countryside, beseeching the aid of St Anne and promising, in return, to become a monk. This he does, to the disgust of his father, who had scraped and borrowed money to get his son educated as a lawyer. Luther, obsessed with his own human failings and his all-enveloping sense of sin, feels that he cannot ever do enough to rid himself of his self-disgust and merit the forgiveness of God. Sent to Rome as an emissary of his monastic order Luther is horrified to discover that Rome, the city of the Pope, is rife with corruption and that some of the most corrupt persons there are the leaders of his Church.The rot sets in. He begins to doubt. Luther is sent off by the head of his monastery to study and become a Church divine. The hope is that his doubts will be stilled. His studies though make even more doubts arise in his mind -- then he encounters the practice of the sale of indulgences - said indulgences being hawked by a venal and arrogant officer of the Church. Luther cannot take any more of this; writes up his 95 theses and nails them to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, for all who can read to see --- The revolt begins -- and spreads.The film does not back away from showing how Luther's call for reform was taken up and altered, to suit their own ends, by a number of thinkers and would-be leaders who sought to out-Luther Martin Luther and preached a vision of reform that could not and would not be realised without violence and mayhem. Nor does it seek to hide the fact that Luther, appalled by what has done in his name, called for violence to be inflicted upon the violent - if they did not follow him - thus beginning the wars of religion that wracked Europe for generations to come. The film sets are magnificent, wonderfully colourful and the costumes worn by the actors are extraordinarily accurate. (I studied the period for my degree - I was amazed to see the costumes that I had seen in reproductions of paintings and woodcuts there on the screen before me.) Joseph Fiennes is an impressive and utterly credible young Luther, heading up a cast of impressive stature, all of whom acquit themselves well.It was a pleasure to see the late Sir Peter Ustinov in the role of the Elector Frederick. He is only present in a few scenes but steals each and every one that he plays a part in. The special features are, alas, not up to much. There are a few very bitty interviews with the chief players and the heads of the production team that made the film, but these are short and very badly edited. Some of them actually start part of the way through a spoken sentence. Still, all in all, a very good and entertaining film ;two hours slipped by quickly and enjoyably. Given that and the price Amazon is charging for the DVD at the moment I would class this as a bargain of a DVD that should not be allowed to slip through anyone's fingers.

This was the best film I've seen in a very long time, thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. I originally bought it because I very much like the late great Peter Ustinov who I met briefly in London years ago. I wasn't a wear of this film until recently. The story was good, the costumes, sets and actors were all superb and the film was shot magnificently and with glorious colour.I wasn't very familiar with the history behind Martin Luther and all that he achieved in his life not being a religious man myself so it was a good background insight in to his work. I found the actions and of the catholic church at that time quite disgusting, outrageous and reprehensible. I'm not sure they're much better now. I wonder people are still taken in by all this.But bearing in mind the film is not strictly historically very accurate, it was a fascinating insight in to his work, his achievements his supporters and his many enemy's. Well don that man!

Dvd and package were in good condition. Joseph Fines version of Luther is my favorite.

Très bon film

Excelente biografía. Muestra de manera clara el carácter firme y férrea convicción de quien sin duda es uno de los personajes más importantes de la historia. Indispensable para entender nuestra historia y celebrar los 500 años de la reforma.

this was bought for my father as a gift. he loves it. thank ypu

This account of the life of Martin Luther is captivating and spellbinding. Intense is the word I use to describe the whole movie. My understanding is that the story is quite accurate. The movie begins in Germany in 1507, when God called Luther to become a monk in the Augustine order. His father disapproved but Luther knew he had to obey God. While in Wittenberg as a student, he began to question some of the Catholic church's practices, such as relics and indulgences. His eyes were opened to the suffering and poverty of the Catholic peasants, and how the church's hierarchy lived in wealth and splendor. He began to teach against unbiblical practices and taught instead the true Gospel of forgiveness and salvation.Luther also resisted the power of the Catholic church, exposing the fear that was put upon the people so that they would give of their few resources to the church. Superstition was rampant. Earlier in dedicating himself to God, Luther prayed, "I am Yours. Save me." For the rest of Luther's life, God answered that prayer, saving not only Luther but through Luther preaching the true Gospel about the love of God, God saved a nation. From Germany, the Gospel of Jesus Christ traveled through Europe and eventually around the world. Luther paid a price for his obedience to God and often lived in fear for his life. In the end, God blessed him with support and a wife (who was formerly a nun) and children. God used Luther's life and dedication to Himself to set a strong foundation of truth from the Word of God, in the church.The performances were superb. Sets and costumes were authentic and realistic, right down to the dirt and squalor that the peasants lived in compared to the opulence and wealth that surrounded the hierarchy in the church. There is violence in this movie that would prevent younger children from watching it. I highly recommend this movie. I found that now I'm even more appreciative of the sacrifices made by other Christians before me, so that I have true knowledge of the salvation Jesus purchased for me on the cross. A quote from Luther: "My conscience is captive to the Word of God".