Luther's Revolution

The Political Dimensions of Martin Luther's Universal Priesthood

Montover

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781630877088
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Luther's universal priesthood is, in part, a political doctrine that constitutes a revolutionary strain in Luther's thinking--a strain that can only be described as radical. Luther's political understanding of the universal priesthood posed a challenge to the concrete structures of his day, which were built upon a cosmological foundation that came under attack as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Thus, Luther's universal priesthood was not simply another evangelical concept that dealt with the office of ministry. It also served as the means for reordering the concept of temporal authority and the temporal order. Understood in this way, the universal priesthood had a political dimension that must be acknowledged if it is to be fully understood.

1

Historiographical Assumptions

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out the obvious flaw in the production of historical narratives. Though his initial observation is not in the least bit unique to him, his conclusions are worth considering, especially in light of this study.

Trouillot begins his work by making an obvious observation: humans participate in history as actors and narrators. In the vernacular, history is the story of actors and narrators. Actors participate in the sociohistorical process by doing something. Narrators serve to tell the story of what happened.1 This view of history serves to create a dichotomy between those who make a story happen and those who tell the story. Such a view of history too easily separates the two participants in the historical process. The task of the modern historian is to look past the dichotomy of the vernacular understanding of history.2

A theory of the historical narrative must acknowledge both the distinction and the overlap between process and narrative. The events as they happened must finally be told but the process from event to narrative can be troublesome because it is extremely complicated. As one reviewer wrote “The practice of history necessarily generates an ambiguous twilight between reality and text, between the doers and sayers of deeds.”3

Agents, or those who are the participants in an historical event participate in one form or another in an historical act or movement. Agents occupy positions within the historical process. Yet these agents eventually become subjects who are studied by historians who seek to determine who they were and what they did by placing them into a wider context. Thus, a person who is involved in a strike becomes a striker. They have been defined and described.4 Oftentimes the description of the person or event is based on research which does not provide the entire reality of the agent or subject. The narrator must determine what facts to report and what facts to leave out of the narrative. Does it matter that the striker is also a mother? Does it matter if the striker, who is also a mother, is incapacitated during a violent repression of the strike and is thus unable to care for her children? The determination of how to describe the striker is based upon the narrator who is all-powerful in his or her decision-making process. The narrator has full control because the narrator controls what is mentioned and what is omitted.

Yet people are not always subjects constantly confronting history. The capacity upon which they become subjects is part of their condition. This reality makes people fully historical. It engages them simultaneously in the socio-historical process and in narrative constructions of that process. Embracing this ambiguity is the first step in understanding how history works. It is the first move any student of history must make in order to fully comprehend the production of history.

With that task accomplished the student of history must then make the second move—the methodological move—and focus on the actual process of the production of history.5 It is this second move that will inform the methodology utilized in this study.

The search for the nature of history has led us to deny ambiguity and either demarcate precisely the line between historical process and historical knowledge or to conflate the historical process and the historical narrative. For Trouillot, the process of history should not serve to answer the question, ‘What is history?’ Rather the historian must confront the question, ‘How does history work?’ What history is changes. How history works reveals processes and conditions of production of historical narratives.6

The production of narratives begins long before historians reach the scene. In the process of developing the historical narrative someone always enters the scene and sets a cycle of silences, or more specifically, someone decides what not to say about a particular event or series of events. Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments.

First, there is the moment of fact production. Someone must create the source and say something about the event or person. The person who creates the source may well be the person involved directly in an historical event. However, the source may also be the account of those present, and, at times, the source is created by someone who did not witness the event. Therefore it is important to understand something about the source in order to identify possible filters in the final narration of the person or event.

After the fact is produced it must then be assembled. Someone must decide to preserve the event through a narrative or by preserving artifacts. In this way an archive of the event is produced. Again, the decisions concerning what to retain and what to abandon as a representative of the facts also present the historian with a challenge. Who decides what to retain and what to discard? Why was the particular decision concerning the production of the archive made? What was at stake politically, philosophically, or personally for the person who collected the facts?

Eventually someone must undertake the task of creating a narrative of the person or event. This is the moment of fact retrieval. Again, this is a moment in the process where silences can easily enter the narrative. What facts will be reported and what relevant facts will be omitted? What is the rationale for the inclusion of some aspects of an event and the omission of other aspects of the event? Certainly historians must be allowed to distill information in order to create manageable narratives. Yet it must be acknowledged that a portion of the event is often untold.

Finally, according to Trouillot, there is the moment of retrospective significance. Someone must accumulate the data, examine the narratives, and complete the process by considering the significance of the event or person. This is the final moment in the creation of history. Silences can enter the narrative in this stage as well. Determining what is significant about an event or individual involves a process of discernment. What is relevant? What is compelling? What is provable? What is acceptable? All these questions present opportunities for scholars to create a narrative that suits the needs of the narrator (not to mention potential readers!) as much as it serves the process of telling the story.7

Absences and silences are created in a process that is neither natural nor neutral. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis. Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituent parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded. Thus whatever becomes fact does so with its own inborn absences, specific to its production.8

Trouillot outlines this process in his retelling of the story of the slave revolt on the island of Haiti. The facts of a vibrant rebellion on the part of African slaves against white owners were silenced, according to Trouillot, because historians had no way of dealing with such a narrative.9 The story was simply not told and as a result a silence emerged in the story of slavery in the West. The prevalent story of helpless Africans enslaved by more powerful whites would have been directly challenged by the story of the Haitian rebellion. The fact that the story was not told is, to Trouillot, an example of how silences in history serve to maintain traditional understandings of power and the systems these understandings create.

Trouillot’s work can also be applied to a different end in the examination of Luther’s life as it has been told by modern biographers. Silences are created when aspects of Luther’s life, aspects which directly impact the development of his theology, are ignored or dismissed or misrepresented. In addition, by accepting long-held assumptions about Luther’s life, a silence is created due to the assumption that the whole story has been told.

This book will provide a single example which can serve as a case study of this tendency in Luther studies. In modern biographies of Luther the reality of the political dimensions of Luther’s doctrines (in this case, the doctrine of the universal priesthood) are simply ignored during the moments of fact retrieval and retrospective significance. This silence serves to further a caricature of Luther as a person interested only in the soul without reference to the world. By reexamining the context in which Luther developed his doctrines, a different narrative emerges which gives voice to the silence that has existed for so long.

What remains to be discovered once these silences are acknowledged is how they influence Luther studies. A political understanding of Luther’s doctrine of the universal priesthood opens the door for new understandings of how Luther’s doctrines impact the lives of those who have attached themselves to his teachings.

The method I will utilize to discern the presences of the silences in Luther studies which impact the modern understanding of Luther’s ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Historiographical Assumptions
• Chapter 2: Biographical Appraisals of the Political Dimensions of Luther’s Universal Priesthood
• Chapter 3: A Consideration of Luther’s Body of Work on the Topic of the Universal Priesthood
• Chapter 4: The Social and Political Context of Papal Claims of Temporal Authority
• Chapter 5: Luther’s Responses to Claims of Papal Authority in “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation”
• Chapter 6: Conclusions and Trajectories for Further Studies
• Bibliography