The Story behind "A Mighty Fortress is our God" hymn
Click here to listen to the song "Although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement ‘ the just shall live by faith.’” The “impeccable monk” was Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest at the time, and a professor at Wittenberg University. He was teaching a course on the biblical book of Romans, where the apostle Paul spells out the concept of justification by faith. Luther had been mulling over this for some time, increasingly dissatisfied with the mechanical rituals in the Catholicism of his day. Could a person really be justified by praying his way up a holy staircase in Rome? Could a person really get time off from purgatory for donating to a church building project? As a theme sentence for the whole epistle, Romans 1:17 made the difference. The righteous would find eternal life no...
