What was some of Martin Luther ideas in the Reformation?

Answer 1

Martin Luther was not the only person involved in reformation other people such as Jan Hus, Peter Waldo, and John Wycliffe had made attempts at reforming the Catholic Church

The selling/abuse of indulgences was a concern of Luther. The reform movement really gained momentum When Martin Luther wrote and made public "The Ninety-Five Theses". This was a list of questions and propositions (mainly about the abuse of indulgences) for public debate.

There were many other teachings and practices of the Late Medieval Catholic Church that Luther and others were not happy with. For example, on a visit to Rome in 1510 Luther was greatly disappointed with the state of religion in Rome.

"He was favourably struck, indeed, with the business administration and police regulations of the papal court, but shocked by the unbelief, levity and immorality of the clergy. Money and luxurious living seemed to have replaced apostolic poverty and self-denial. He saw nothing but worldly splendour at the court of Pope Julius II., who had just returned from the sanguinary siege of a town conducted by him in person". - History of the Christian Church by Philip Schaff

Luther also believed the scriptures should be available for the common people to read, he translated The Bible into everyday German.

"Luther did not have in view the existence of an autonomous church alongside of the existing church. He desired the renewal of the church. He sought for good pastoral care, formulated the necessity for a better theology and expressed a desire for biblical piety". - Dr. Frank van der Pol from Christelijke Encyclopedie, (Kampen, 2005).

Answer 2

Martin Luther's primary "idea" was "faith alone", that you could do whatever sin you wanted, hundreds of times a day, but if you believed more firmly than you would be saved regardless. His primary idea was he wanted to get drunk, have sex, and be foul mouthed, and still go to heaven, so he made up an entire religion around that, rewriting the Bible to conform to his ideas: throwing entire books out of the Old and New Testaments, and rewriting the ones that were still there.

In addition, he started this idea, now expressed as "rightly dividing the Scriptures" in that most of Our Blessed Lord's preaching was only for the Jews, and that Christians were not bound by the moral commandments of the Old Testament - a certain logic to his madness. In addition, he threw seven books out of the Old Testament which had been there from the 4th century before Christ, and were used by Our Blessed Lord, Himself, most of His quotes in the New Testament are directly from the Septuagint; and he threw out several books from the New Testament, with which he did not agree, notably St. James

He also came up with the bondage of the will which came to full fruition later in double predestination, saying that we were preordained to do what we were going to do and there was nothing we could do about it.

All of this can be found by reading his original writings. I should also recommend the book, The Facts About Luther, by Msgr. Patrick F. O'Hare, LL.D. which details these various beliefs and the shortcomings in Martin Luther's own life - and published writings.

The other thing that Martin Luther said that he based his revolt against Christ's Church on was putting the Bible in the common tongue, but this was blatant nonsense on the face of it, as there had been thousands of translations of the Bible into German starting as early as the fourth century; here is a quote from Wikipedia:

There are still approximately 1,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Medieval German Bible translations extant.[1] The earliest known and partly still available Germanic version of the Bible was the fourth century Gothic translation of Wulfila (c. 311–80). This version, translated primarily from the Greek, established much of the Germanic Christian vocabulary that is still in use today. Later Charlemagne promoted Frankish biblical translations in the 9th century. There were Bible translations present in manuscript form at a considerable scale already in the thirteenth and the fourteenth century (e.g. the New Testament in the Augsburger Bible of 1350 and the Old Testament in the Wenceslas Bible of 1389). There is ample evidence for the general use of the entire vernacular German Bible in the fifteenth century.[1] In 1466, before Martin Luther was even born, Johannes Mentelin printed the Mentel Bible, a High German vernacular Bible, at Strasbourg. This edition was based on a no-longer-existing fourteenth-century manuscript translation of the Vulgate from the area of Nuremberg. Until 1518, it was reprinted at least 13 times. In 1478–79, two Low German Bible editions were published in Cologne, one in the Low Rhenish dialect and another in the Low Saxon dialect. In 1494, another Low German Bible was published in the dialect of Lübeck, and in 1522, the last pre-Lutheran Bible, the Low Saxon Halberstadt Bible was published. In total, there were at least eighteen complete German Bible editions, ninety editions in the vernacular of the Gospels and the readings of the Sundays and Holy Days, and some fourteen German Psalters by the time Luther first published his own New Testament translation.[1] 1: Arblaster, Juhász & Latré 2002, p. 116.