A history lesson with some help

I thought this was pretty cool information.

"A Mighty Fortress": The Reformation Lives On through a hymn

On October 31, 1517, twelve years before he wrote this hymn, the Roman Catholic monk Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the Power of Indulgences to the door of a Wittenberg, Germany, church, effectively sparking the Protestant Reformation with his critique of indulgences sold by the Catholic church. Out of this Reformation, celebrating its 490th anniversary next month, was born all of the other churches that we know today: Lutherans, Presbyterians , Anabaptists (predecessors of the Baptist denominations) and Anglicans.

One of the hallmarks of the Reformation was the five "solas", meaning "alone":

Sola gratia (we are saved "by grace alone")
Sola fide (through "faith alone")
Sola scriptura ("Scripture alone" is the source of Christian doctrine)
Solus Christus ("Christ alone" is the mediator between God and man)
Soli Deo Gloria (all glory is due to "God alone")

Two of the ways Luther expressed the idea of sola scriptura were by encouraging ordinary people to read Scripture for themselves and to sing scriptural ideas in their own languages, rather than merely hearing scriptural ideas sung in Latin. Because of his emphasis on ordinary people participating in the service, Luther was a father of congregational singing."A Mighty Fortress" expresses the strength of ordinary people's devotion in the face of much resistance, and since its words and tune were both written by the founder of the Protestant Reformation, it has been called the "Battle Hymn of the Reformation."

For a while, it is the last hymn we will sing that was written by a monk--because ordinary people learned to read, write, and praise God with hymns in their own languages. May we sing it today with vigor, knowing we stand with generations of ordinary people to praise an extraordinary God.

Hope you enjoyed that. I didn't write all of that. I am not the scholarly or am I...