Luther Extra Credit (Rachel Kritzik)

Watching the movie “Luther” was extremely helpful in understanding the origins of the Protestant Reformation.  Rather than just reading words on a page, actually seeing all the people we learned about depicted in a movie really helped me understand how they felt about everything, why they did what they did, and how what they did affected others.

The movie showed Luther’s life in a phenomenal way. His upbringings, how much of a sacrifice his parents had to make to send him to school, his first encounter with indulgences, how he reacted to the threat of excommunication and the peasant revolts, how he met his wife, the runaway nun, and so much more were all shown excellently. Consequently, I felt a personal connection to Luther, which doesn’t happen often when studying people; usually they’re just names I have to know for a test, and after that, I can forget about them. But this wasn’t the case. Because of watching “Luther,” I feel as if I have a very deep understanding about Luther and his actions. Before watching this, I didn’t understand why translating the Bible into German was such a big deal and why it had such monumental consequences, but the movie made both those answers crystal clear. I guess I couldn’t really grasp the concept of how unless something was in a person’s vernacular, they had no way of knowing it. So until Luther, many devout German Christians didn’t even know their own Bible! That’s such a crazy thought to me, seeing as we can just go on the Internet and use Google Translate. Lastly, I really enjoyed seeing how much of an effect the printing press had of Luther’s 95 Theses, and how it immensely helped the spread of his thoughts and ideas.

Overall, I am so glad I took a few hours out of my weekend to sit down and watch this movie, because it was just amazing and helped me understand Martin Luther and his actions so much more. Honestly, the amount that this movie helped me might be more than the amount of people Luther influenced in his lifetime. Just kidding, that would be way too big of a number.