Martin Luther

Michael A. Mullett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317648604
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

An engaging and comprehensive new edition of this established biography provides students with an understanding of the European Reformation through the life of its key mover, Martin Luther. Working chronologically through Luther's life, Michael A. Mullet explains and analyses Luther's background, the development of his Reformation theology in the 95 Theses, the Diet of Worms and the creation of Lutheranism. This fully revised and updated new edition includes a chapter on the legacy and memory of Luther through the centuries since his death, looking to his influence on modern Germany and the wider world. A comprehensive chronology at the start of the book traces the important dates in Luther's personal and political life.

This is a vivid, scholarly and empathetic biography of Martin Luther, which will be essential reading for all students of the European Reformation, early modern history and religious history.

1 Introduction

In this book we shall be considering the Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther from 1517 onwards, as a major event in world history and especially within the great saga of the history of human freedom as well as of religious truth. In this Introduction, we shall be considering in particular the way that the religious changes Luther instigated have been debated in English and other European historical writing since the 16th century: our concluding chapter will also return to some of these themes.

Our subject, Luther, saw himself as a liberator and has been represented in the tradition of historical writing about him – the ‘historiography’ – as one who struck some of the heaviest blows ever delivered for human progress by his work as a theologian in freeing Christians of his own and subsequent ages from a burdensome Catholic religious system. As it gained its own historiography between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, Protestant ideology justified the Reformation as a liberating movement setting masses of people free from an essentially corrupt and unfree medieval Catholic system, which had seized the once pure Christian Church of New Testament antiquity and created a tyranny of oppression and lies. Thomas A. Brady Jr captures with particular vividness the historiographical image of Martin Luther as a great, brave, anti-authoritarian and heroic public liberator and innovator, and one to whom a newly organised mass opinion, brought into being by the media revolution of print, responded with a novel and massively favourable immediacy, Luther inspiring, as well as directing, a religious and social renewal whose magnetic appeal leapt over the hitherto uncrossable boundaries between laity and clergy, men and women:

Martin Luther’s words and the news of his heroic resistance to pope and emperor struck [a] logjam of reform like a mighty hammer. By separating the question of salvation from ecclesiastical authority, he issued a passport to the early reform movements. This radical theology spread through public opinion, a new kind of milieu stimulated by an inundation of printed words and images on an absolutely unprecedented scale. Its flooding tide struck an ecclesiastical world immobilized by its past and distracted by many preoccupations. The movement swept up both traditional anticlericalism and a newly virulent anti-Romanism, which … inspired priests and laymen as well as women to speak and act for the reform of religious life in their own hometowns.¹

The great Reformation historian Heiko Oberman added the observation that Luther’s doctrine of the last times – his eschatology – created a further sense of liberation, of deliverance from the past: Luther could envisage

the dark clouds of divine judgment gathering over a world nearing its end, a world fettered and enslaved in a thousand ways, that insisted on self-determination before God, that dared to speculate about the ‘meaning of history’ and to speak of freedom of the will without being able to free itself from the paralyzing primeval fear of being trapped helplessly in the cage of an impenetrable world history.²

John Witte Jr begins his fine study of the relationship between Lutheranism and law with the resounding overture:

The Reformation that Martin Luther unleashed in Germany in 1517 began as a loud call for freedom – freedom of the Church from the tyranny of the pope, freedom of the laity from the hegemony of the clergy, freedom of the conscience from the strictures of canon law. ‘Freedom of the Christian’ was the rallying cry of the early Lutheran Reformation.³

It is no accident – and we perhaps need to be cautiously aware of the fact – that some of the most eloquent statements of Martin Luther’s liberating historical import have been made by historians, such as Brady and Witte, who have come from that political culture that first announced those ‘truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …’.⁴

‘Christian liberty’ and the Reformation

The notion of the Protestant Reformation as forming a milestone in the history of human liberty goes back in fact to the Reformation itself, when the first Protestant reformers acclaimed their own acts of emancipation from the medieval Church’s alleged tyranny. Here, for example, is the early Swiss Protestant leader Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) announcing his abandonment of the Catholic Church’s strict fasting laws as a major contribution to human freedom of choice and action:

if you want to fast, do so; if you do not want to eat meat, don’t eat it; but allow Christians a free choice … if the spirit of your belief teaches you thus, then fast, but grant also your neighbour the privilege of Christian liberty … [and do not] make what man has invented greater before God than what God himself has commanded. … Further, we should not let ourselves be concerned about such ‘works’, but be saved by the grace of God only.

Zwingli’s understanding of freedom with regard to fasting represented a kind of theological libertarianism according to which Christians are free of such imposed restrictions because they are ‘saved by the grace of God only’ and not by the legal coercion of any established religious system. Luther himself confirmed that insight:

the papal dominion … makes rules about fasting, praying and butter eating, so that whoever keeps the commandments of the pope will be saved and whoever does not keep them belongs to the devil. It thus seduces the people with the delusion that goodness and salvation lie in their own works. But I say that none of the saints, no matter how holy they were, attained salvation by their works.⁵

Early reformers, then, saw themselves as proclaiming a libertarian jubilee of freedom from centuries of Catholic enslavement as well as corruption. Luther made a major contribution to the unfolding of a historiography that portrayed his reforms as the antidote to the burdensome decadence that had crept over the course of time into the Roman Church. He represented Catholicism’s moral, institutional and, above all, doctrinal abuses as time’s evil legacy to the Church. The centuries had, he believed, left a thick dust of moral decay, when, for example, over the course of time, ‘avarice grew impatient at the long time it took [for Rome] to get hold of all the bishoprics, and my Lord Avarice devised the fiction that the bishoprics should be nominally abroad but that their origin and foundation is at Rome’. In terms of his view of his own role in restoring for the messianic future the purity of the distant past of the Christian Church, lost in more recent recorded time, Luther came to see the papacy as the Antichrist coming between God and His people, and he showed how the papal office had over the course of the ages introduced into the Church the institutions of the non-Christian world: ‘the pope’s teaching is taken from the Imperial, pagan law’.

As we shall see in Chapter 4 (‘The Leipzig disputation, June-July 1519’), as a consequence of his attack on the papal system of indulgences in 1517, in 1519 Luther was involved in debates in Leipzig with the Catholic controversialist Johannes Maier von Eck (1486–1543). The Leipzig debates turned into a protracted historical and theological review of the proceedings of the Council of Constance (1414–18) of a century before. The discussions raised the specific issue of whether the Council’s denunciations and eventual execution of the Czech dissident John Hus (c. 1372–1415) made a heretic of Luther himself, as a critic of the Church. In the intervals of the Leipzig debate, Luther carried out historical study, closely examining Hus’s doctrines, and began to draw lessons against papal claims from out of ecclesiastical history. In the following year, Luther published an essay with an historical theme, ‘The Babylonian Captivity of the Church’, showing that the papal bondage was the malign legacy of time. In particular, baptism, the eucharist and penance, the three ancient core sacraments – the sacraments being defined as principal channels of divine grace to Christians – had ‘been bound by the Roman Curia [papal court] in a miserable captivity … and the Church has been deprived of all her freedom’. His own historical importance, he was convinced, was not that of innovator – innovation was the sin committed against the true Church by the papal tyranny – but of restorer. Over indulgences, for example – that long tail of abuse that had grown on to the sacrament of the forgiveness of sins, penance – Luther claimed, ‘I alone rolled this rock away’.⁶

Let us, though, stay for a while with some of the further implications of that collision between Luther and Eck at Leipzig. The Council of Constance, especially in declaring Hus a heretic, had set itself up as a repository of constitutional authority in the Catholic Church, defining what its orthodoxy was in condemning the Czech reformist. In doing so, in that age of intense party conflict between the ‘papal’ and the ‘conciliar’ poles of attraction in the Church, the Council of Constance provided an alternative focus of ecclesiastical authority, competing with those assertors of papal power who were ultimately to gain the upper hand with the decree on pontifical infallibility made by the first Vatican Council in 1870. In 1511 another of Martin Luther’s opponents in controversy and a leading spokesman for the supremacy of the pope in the life of the Church, Tommaso de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534), published a work laying down that general councils were inferior to the pontiff inasmuch as only the bishop of Rome could convene a council.⁷ This was in fact a theoretical line on institutional papal authoritarianism that had been traced through decades of papal political and doctrinal recovery from the shadow of the conciliar ‘threat’ which was at its most intense at the time of Constance and its aftermath. The long-term papal political recovery achieved a high point of reassertion with the bull of Pope Pius II (r. 1458–64) Execrabilis of 1460 which denied the constitutional claims of councils in the government of the Church.⁸ Thus there had emerged two rival outlooks on where the sources of truth and authority were located in the Catholic body. The one can be labelled pontifical or petrine, inasmuch as it traced the pope’s supreme claims to magisterium – the power to teach and define doctrine and morals – back to Christ’s commission to Peter in Matthew 16: 18–19, while the other may be termed ‘collegial’ because it conferred the guidance of the Church on to the collective body of bishops – the collegium episcoporum – who largely made up the general councils of the Church. Eck himself was a papalist and in 1519 published a defence of the pope’s ‘petrine’ primacy.⁹ However, his strategy at Leipzig – since Luther was calling into question papal headship – was tactically to convict him of siding with the views of Hus against the authority of the Council of Constance and, indeed, of councils in general, making Luther an opponent of councils as well as of popes and pushing him ‘on from uncompromising … affirmations of conciliarism’.¹⁰

But did Martin Luther’s alleged rejection of both the two opposing reservoirs of ecclesiastical guidance and governance that had emerged in Christendom in the course of the later Middle Ages leave him – now seemingly convicted as both anti-papalist and anti-conciliarist – rudderless, bereft of any measuring rod of doctrinal truth? The answer is ‘not at all’, since there quickly emerged a third – and for Luther and his fellows the only valid – source of veracity. It was one, however, that threatened to set up a location of certainty – indeed of infallibility – far more formidable than any claims so far made for papal or conciliar control of minds. For at least on the face of it, the emergent notion of what came to be termed the ‘inerrancy of Scripture’ surely posed a new menace of enslavement of the human mind. Indeed, there is an argument to the effect that the Luther who penned his masterpiece of 1520 on Christian liberty (see Chapter 5, ‘The Freedom of a Christian’) was not really much of a believer in human emancipation at all – not a Wilberforce or a Lincoln for mankind’s conscience but an enslaver whose theology can be represented as one handing over the souls of the justified from bondage to Satan to servitude of Christ, their wills shackled (see Chapter 7, ‘Erasmus and Luther’). After all, what Luther said in his apparent declaration of individual independence at the Diet of Worms in 1521 was not that his intellect was free but that it was ‘captive’: it was in bondage to the word of God, the Bible (see Chapter 5, ‘Luther at the Diet of Worms’). Would the Reformation, then, bring down a new iron curtain of infallibility over the minds of all those Europeans in its thrall, a state of servitude to a book?

Luther’s peers certainly took up his theme of captivity to a text, piling up citations which insisted that the Christian mind must be chained to the collection of literature, assembled over the course of time, that we know as the Bible, or Scripture. Luther’s close aide Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) set the biblicist ball rolling in 1521 with his categorical statement ‘whoever seeks the nature of Christianity from any source except canonical scripture is mistaken’. An academic colleague of Luther at the University of Wittenberg, Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt (1480–1541), followed up with the Diktat that ‘all preachers should always state that their doctrine is not their own, but God’s. … They can discover nothing out of their own heads. If the Bible is at an end, then their competence is at an end’. Zwingli concurred, claiming that ‘no such trust should be given to any word like that given to the [word of God]. For it is certain and may not fail. It is clear, and will not leave us to err in darkness. It teaches itself on its own’. And as reformers lined up to attest the clarity, consistency and sheer authority – not least the capacity to arbitrate disputes in the churches – of Scripture, which was ‘made holy by God himself’ (Balthasar Hubmaier, c. 1481–1528), the position came to be reached that the reader must (somehow) bring to Scripture no anterior preconceptions whatsoever but only a mind as a tabula rasa, swept clear to accept whatever impress the Bible was to make upon it. As Luther wrote in 1521, ‘This is not Christian teaching, when I bring an opinion to scripture and compel scripture to follow it, but rather, on the contrary, when I have first got straight what scripture teaches and then compel my opinion to accord with it’. If the Protestant Reformation was a project to ‘let God be God’, conceptually releasing Him back into His own sovereign potency, then His word must have binding power over His servants, setting aside their autonomy, ‘the arbitrary opinion of [the] heart’ (Carlstadt), ‘personal opinion’ (Conrad Grebel, c. 1498–1526).¹¹ Such prohibited interpretive liberty must give place to a new command structure, putting in the stead of the rejected mastery of the Roman papal Church that of the divinely inspired text which, it was assumed, had only one objective and correct line of interpretation, speaking, as it were, for itself, with a single unmistakable voice.

Thus was the Reformation’s liberating promise potentially encircled by a new dictatorship. The idea of Scripture’s sway over the consciousness of Christians was in fact part of the manifold intellectual inheritance that the reformers derived from the Catholic past, while the Catholic Church remained wedded to its own sense of the enormous value of Scripture as God’s revelation when its Council of Trent (1545–63), meeting amidst the advance of the Reformation, decreed that ‘one God is the author of [both the Old and New Testaments].’ Catholicism, however, retained and reaffirmed at Trent the notion of parallel sources of guidance and interpretation: for papalists, the papacy set up by Christ in the person of the first pope, Peter; for ‘conciliarists’, the collegiate episcopate, heirs of the apostles and disciples, also authorised by Christ; and, for all Catholics, something both nebulous and usefully flexible, ‘tradition’, in other words all the historically accumulated beliefs, practices and customs which together were held to represent accurate recordings of the dictations of the Holy Spirit.¹²

In contrast, Reformation Christianity was left, as we have seen, with only one watchword of certainty, only one kindly light to lead it, the Bible, envisaged as speaking not only with an authoritative voice, but also with a consistent one from out of a burning bush. And it was that very solitary uniquity that exposed Scripture to a scrutiny which in the event vitiated its potential to shackle minds to its precepts. Part of the problem for the ideal of binding scriptural inerrancy was the immense intellectual and scholarly legacy that reformers took over from the literary and linguistic techniques of the biblical humanist school led by Desiderius Erasmus (1466/9–1536) and encapsulated in his edition of the New Testament in its original Greek, first published in 1516. Thanks to the close study and collation of texts in the Erasmian mode, along with minute inspection of their historical contexts and languages, Scripture could be approac...