Tomorrow I have to lecture on the drunkenness of Noah [Gen. 9:20-27], so I should drink enough this evening to be able to talk about that wickedness as one who knows by experience.
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"To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing."
"Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying."
"The church is not a pen-house but a mouth-house."
"The more you read the Bible, the more you will understand it."
"Drinking and eating are the highest pleasures."
German theologian whose 95 Theses (1517) launched the Protestant Reformation and broke the Catholic Church's monopoly on Western Christianity. Closely associated with Philipp Melanchthon (Lutheran systematizer) and John Calvin (later Reformer who built on Luther's break). For an intellectual contrast, see Pope Leo X, Renaissance pope (1513-1521) — Leo X's indulgence sales triggered Luther's break and Leo excommunicated him in 1521 — Luther's entire Reformation is structured as a direct answer to the indulgence-funded Vatican Leo represented.
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Luther jokes that since tomorrow's lecture covers Noah getting drunk after the flood, he ought to get drunk tonight so he can speak about drunkenness from firsthand experience rather than theory. It's a wry, self-deprecating quip that pokes fun at the idea that real understanding requires lived experience, while also poking fun at his own fondness for beer and plain-spoken teaching style.
Luther was famous for earthy humor, table talk with students, and a robust appetite for Wittenberg beer alongside his theology. As a biblical lecturer who spent years expounding Genesis, he genuinely did teach Noah's story, and he consistently favored concrete, experiential preaching over dry scholastic abstraction. The quip captures his pastoral instinct to meet sinners where they live, plus his refusal to pretend holiness he did not feel.
In early-modern Germany, beer was daily fare safer than water, and university lectures on Genesis were serious public events shaping Reformation doctrine. Luther's Wittenberg table talks, recorded by students from the 1530s onward, were a genre unto themselves, mixing doctrine, crude jokes, and politics. The Reformation prized plain German speech over Latin piety, so a professor joking about matching his subject by drinking fit the cultural moment perfectly.
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