The purpose of this research is to examine the life, work, and theological belief system of Martin Luther (1483-1546) regarding his vision of scripture as the way to salvation. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and theological context in which Martin Luther became a pivotal figure in European Christianity and the Protestant Reformation and then to discuss the pattern of ideas that emerged out of his experience, as well as the details of and means by which the articulation of these ideas exerted influence on the shape that European thought assumed as the medieval period made a transition toward the Renaissance.
When the late medieval period of the thirteenth century began to merge with the revival of classical learning and opened, by the time of the sixteenth century, into the Renaissance, a whole range of reforms and innovative thought had begun to emerge in the European culture. Hayes, et al., refer to "what modern historians often call the 'renaissance of the twelfth century'"(Hayes, et al. 239). The later Renaissance--more exactly the late Middle Ages that culminated in what is now considered the Renaissance--can be interpreted partly as a response to the strands of thought that emerged in the earlier period. This is not least because the Renaissance was coincident with the Protestant Reformation, which marked the departure from the unitary Age of Belief, culturally and religiously dominated by the Roman Catholic Church.
During the period of the twelfth-century renaissance, the structure of thought was marked by the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivum (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), which had been inherited from the classical tradition laid down by Martinus Capella in the fourth century A.D. (Hayes, et al. 59; 239). In the thirteenth century, this was overlaid with a belief that the highest endeavor of learning was to grapple with theolo...