It’s not always people who appear good, beautiful, and powerful by worldly standards who truly know God. (After all, Jesus didn’t look glorious on the cross.) “One deserves to be called a [true] theologian,” Martin wrote, “who sees God even in suffering.” The Bible says that even broken and weak sinners can know God if they trust his word and receive the forgiveness Jesus offers. In fact, Jesus told his disciples that the reason he came to earth was to save sinners (Luke 5:31–32).

Martin Luther was bold. He was only a priest in an Augustinian monastery, a college professor in a tiny town, and a preacher in the local church. But when he posted his Ninety-Five Theses, Martin also sent a copy to Prince Albert of Brandenburg, the same prince who had made the deal with Pope Leo to sell indulgences in Germany. The note said, “If you will look over what I’ve written, you will see how wrong your indulgence doctrine is.”

Prince Albert was furious. In anger, he immediately forwarded Martin’s letter to the pope. When Pope Leo read Martin’s theses, he also acted right away. But Leo didn’t think Martin was a threat. He saw Martin as a lowly backwoods priest with no influence. So Leo simply instructed the leaders of the Augustinian monastery to tell the young monk to change his ways. Leo thought this would settle the matter.

He was wrong. Martin’s students in Wittenberg had handed copies of his Ninety-Five Theses to a printer, and when the paper was published, people across Germany had begun to gather in their homes to read it out loud with their families. They liked the spunky monk from Wittenberg. To protect the weak and poor, he’d spoken up against a prince and the pope.

A few months later in April 1518, Martin wrote another paper, and he prepared to talk about it at the Augustinian order’s spring meeting in Heidelberg, Germany. Martin walked to the meeting in fear, expecting the leaders there to sternly rebuke him, just like the pope had asked. But to Martin’s surprise, the priests at the meeting loved his new document. Martin even made new friends at the meeting, and they gave him a ride home. “I went on foot,” Martin reported when he arrived back to Wittenberg, “but I came home in a wagon.”

What was Martin teaching that got his new friends so excited? In this second paper, his Heidelberg Disputation, Martin described two types of theologians. (By “theologian,” Martin didn’t just mean people who work as Bible teachers for their jobs. He knew every Christian is a theologian because all Christians study about God.) In his document, Martin contrasted two types of people—the “theologian of glory” and the “theologian of the cross.” These two types of people have two very different ways of thinking about God.

Theologians of glory think people are capable and smart enough to know God through human reason. These people say we just need a little help—a little boost from God’s grace through the sacrifice of the mass—to live a good and righteous life.

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