Martin Luther’s life was a journey of finding salvation and through that condemning the church of their faults. As a child he grew up in a strict household, he was severely punished for mistakes and disobedience. He was sent to the best schools so that one day he would become a lawyer as his father wished. He was also a devote member of his church being both an altar boy and a part of the choir. In this stage of his life he believed God to be a severe judge and that the church was a ruling body to be strictly obeyed. As he grew older he was sent to Erfurt college to study law. Soon before he was to graduate from the college the black plague swept through the city and he encountered widespread death and fear of God’s retribution. During this time, he also was put into peril by a thunderstorm, during which he became aware that if he did not repent he would be going to hell. So he made a deal with God on that day that if he were to survive he would become a monk. Against his parents will he joined the Augustinian monastery, a very strict monastery that he believed would keep him away from the world thus earning his way into heaven. In his time in the monastery he did not believe that he was getting any closer to God, despite living the way that made so many others sure of their salvation he still felt that he was unsaved. In order to get closer to his salvation he went on a pilgrimage to Rome. There he found that the Papacy was concerned primarily with earning money and earthly pleasures. He found that they were selling experiences that were supposed to be used to save the souls of people. He began to doubt then that the church’s teachings would truly lead him to salvation, and even became angry at God. He went back to the monastery and continued to doubt his salvation until his confessioner made him take a position at the University of Wittenberg. He was employed as a professor of biblical studies, where he began to have a deeper understanding of God when he not only had to study the word but teach it to others. Through his study he discovered a new meaning to Romans 1:17 where he realized that people could not earn their way into heaven as it is not their own righteousness that saved them but God. He now believed that salvation was between a person and God, not a person and the church. It was only after this revelation that he truly believed his soul to be saved. It still was not until after Pope Leo X took the papacy that he wrote his 95 theses against the church, and most notably the Pope’s sale of indulgences. This greatly angered the Pope who declared him a heretic, the punishment of which was death. But his constant attempts to capture Luther were unsuccessful both because of the local church support of Luther and the change in the Imperial Throne in which he was given temporary truce in order to win favor with Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who was the candidate of choice of the Pope. When Frederick the Wise lost the seat of the Imperial Throne he had Luther taken away and protected him from both the Emperor and the Pope.