November 10 in Church History

Martin Luther was born in Eisleben on November 10, 1483, and baptized the next day, which is how he came to be named for St. Martin. He was brought up to pray to the saints and honor the priests. A thunderstorm in 1505 frightened him into a vow to St. Anne, and two weeks later he entered the Augustinian house at Erfurt. He became a doctor of theology and a professor at Wittenberg.

He meditated day and night on Romans 1:17 until he saw it as the gift by which God justifies through faith. He wrote that he felt reborn and that he had entered Paradise. Scholars still debate when this happened, but everything that followed, from the Ninety-five Theses to Worms, grew from that reading of Paul.

Leo the Great, who died on this date in 461, shows how much the church of the West had changed before Luther. He taught that the bishop of Rome held Peter’s authority over the whole church, and his letter on the two natures of Christ was acclaimed at Chalcedon. He also went out to meet Attila in 452, when the Roman state had little else to offer.

Far away in 1871, the journalist Henry Stanley reached the sick and aging David Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, with the famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Livingstone refused to go home. His death in Africa two years later did more for the anti-slavery cause and for missions than his meager list of converts.