Martin Luther and the Reformation

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I. Background

The Reformers were guided by early Christian authority rather than pagan classics. They were less Greek and Roman than Hebrew. While the humanists satirized the abuses of the Church, the Reformers denounced them; the one group tolerated the papacy and concentrated its scorn on superstitions and on the medieval religious orders; the other was alienated by the practice and pretension of the Renaissance papacy. It was not simply that Renaissance popes had been derelict in their duty to cure souls, or that they were politically minded and materialistic, and often guilty of gross nepotism and flagrant immorality. What mattered was the abuse of the spiritual office of the Pope. And the abuse rested on claims that became the focus of the intellectual and theological grievances of the Reformers. By and large the humanists had assumed that they knew the way to salvation and devoted themselves to enriching the possibilities of life, while the Reformers were seeking new avenues of assurance.

Behind this quest lay a deep soul-sickness or, perhaps, sensitivity that had continued in Northern Europe alongside the Renaissance. It existed in the country rather than in the gay and elegant court and it shook the middle and lower orders more than the aristocracy.

A sense of doom had lingered long after the Plague. Even during the Plague the reaction in the North had been more hysterical and ghoulish than in the South. Dancing frenzies and flagellations were less frequent in Italy. And one is tempted to attribute this to climate. Throughout the 15th century the North was preoccupied with death, judgment, and hell fire, and an abiding pessimism about man's fate runs through its prose and poetry. A peculiarly macabre dance fashion cropped up, performed by men with skeletons. The dance was intended to remind watchers of their mortality and their equality before the relentless swathe of time. Woodcuts popularized the steps and stages of it. Also, a spate of the early printed pamphlets dealt with the art of dying. In art, morbid undertones took on a bizarre realism. Van Eyck's The Last Judgment portrayed the subterranean horror to which the evil were to be committed. Bosch's strange sermons in paint are inhabited by wild, nightmarish creatures. Even Durer, the realist, flanks his righteous Christian knight on his way to a "city on a hill" with a figure of death holding an hourglass, and a monstrous devil --half wolf, half pig. Similarly, Schöngauer's St. Anthony Tormented by Demons crawls with hobgoblins and foul friends. Luther believed deeply in the reality and power of Satan and his demons.

As somber as the Northern climate may be, it was also the proximity to death and the frequency of it that kept morbid pessimism alive. In France and Burgundy, for instance, the desolation of the Hundred Years War was followed by decimation between rival factions, not to mention recurrences of the Plague. So, from the time of the Plague, through wars, famines, and civil wars, there had been no respite from the threat of death and no guarantee against the onset of disaster.

A high level of death-consciousness was fertile soil for the Reformation, and offers insight into Luther's unusually persistent concern about salvation. For it was the terror of death that sent him into an Augustinian monastery. Born the son of a miner and foundry owner, at Eisleben in Saxony (1483). He did so well in school that his father urged him to become a jurist. He studied arts at the University of Erfurt for four years until, in 1505, a flash of lightning struck him to the ground in a thunderstorm. Without consulting his father he abandoned his intention to go on to law for the robe and cowl. A psychologist, interested in history, has called this Luther's ''identity crisis.'' Then he began to seek a new ''life style.'' These phrases are ways of describing the mystery of conversion.

II. Martin Luther

His doubt redoubled on his return. Confession of particular sins seemed inadequate for man's plight. The whole man needed release from total inner corruption. Piece by piece and doubt by doubt, Luther came to view the all-pervasiveness of sin and the only solution that could satisfy his wounded conscience. Since man was too deeply sunk in sin to do anything for his own salvation, he had to be saved, or justified, by faith alone. Meanwhile he was lecturing on Scriptures and was feeling his way toward a new principle of hermeneutics, a new method of expounding the Word. Like the medieval friars, he abandoned the allegorical and topological approaches to the texts. But unlike the friars, who developed a homiletic style of preaching, Luther concentrated on the inner meaning and underlying unity of the Scripture. His attention was fixed on the agony of Christ, forsaken because of the sins of man that He had taken upon Himself. Man could accept his utter worthlessness and yet take joy in the faith that was made possible through Christ's sacrifice' God was a merciful and righteous father, and not a fierce, irascible judge. The Reformation, one could say, occurred because a brilliant professor was doing his job-preparing thoughtful, original lectures.

Luther's thoughts tumbled out of the classroom into the marketplace in 1517 when plenary indulgences were being hawked by a Dominican, Tetzel, near Wittenburg. For one-fourth of a florin, buyers were assured that as soon as the coin the coffer rings The soul from purgatory springs. Faithful to academic custom, Luther nailed 95 propositions (or theses) in Latin on the door of the castle church as an open invitation to a debate on their merits. They began with a popular attack on the venality of Rome, passed through the doubts as to the Pope's right to remit punishment inflicted by God, and finished by asserting that nothing but contrition could remit spiritual guilt and nothing else was necessary.

Luther's doubts about the extent of the Pope's power to indulge were, indeed, legitimate, for the question had never been definitively settled. Beyond that, however, he had implied an unorthodox way to salvation, and had begun the Reformation.

III. Political Ramifications

For a year, Frederick the Wise of Saxony hid Luther in his strongest castle, but meanwhile under the direction of Luther's close friend, Melanchthon, the Reformation in Wittenberg was proceeding. Luther directed it with letters while he translated the New Testament into rich German. Revisions of it and the German Old Testament followed later.

In 1520 he had published three treatises defining his position and calling for action. In the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation he appealed to the German ruling classes to throw off the yoke of Rome. He maintained that each believer is his own priest--a doctrine that could yield embarrassing results. Luther meant that any layman could attain forgiveness independent of a priest. The priesthood was only a special vocation. With this stroke, he broke the power of the Church over secular authorities, the power to give or withhold the meas of salvation and encouraged the authorities to reform an erring church. In "On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church" he attacked the sacramental system, denied four of the traditional sacraments, and kept only Baptism, the Eucharist, and, in a revised sense, Penance. Confession was possible between laymen. Marriage was a civil affair to which the Church could give its blessing. Ordination and confirmation were rites of the Church but were not sacraments. Extreme unction was unscriptural and, therefore, was wholly renounced.

As for the Eucharist, he wanted both the elements distributed to the laity, denied that it was a reenactment of the sacrifice of the Cross, and deviated from the doctrine of transubstantiation, abandoning the traditional distinction between essence and accident. Christ was in, with and under the elements.

Finally, "The Liberty of a Christian Man" set out the doctrine of justification by faith, making faith primary, and a free gift of God, and good works of no heavenly merit but simply the fruit of faith. God, in His mercy, gratuitously declared men just and sinless, men who were, in fact, riven with sin. He would, like a merciful judge, declare the guilty criminal to be not guilty because someone else had made reparation for him. Then the unworthy man could feel free from the terror of God's justice, free from the duress of judgment and death, and live in the joy of an eternal salvation when for no reason of his doing but because Christ's righteousness had been imputed to his credit. Liberty was conceived as a spiritual rather than a political attribute, a liberty, or power, to act righteously yet, here again, Luther's words were extended to ends that he did not intend. These early writings laid the groundwork for the later additions and subtractions of Reformed theology.

IV. Radicals and Peasants

Amsterdam caught the enthusiasm around 1530; and in 1534 prophets of the revolutionary wing penetrated the city of Munster to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. The city had just rebelled against its prince-bishop and was in terror of subjection. During a twelve-month siege the Anabaptists instituted a communistic state. Since supplies were running low, this was practical as well as Utopian. Similarly, as the supply of men was depleted by skirmishes, polygamy was instituted for the protection of the womenfolk as well as for personal and unorthodox ethical reasons. To the respectable this new Jerusalem was an enormity to be crushed and scattered without hint of mercy. Only in this century were the cages containing the bones of the leaders--John Leyden and Burgomaster Knipperdalling--removed from a steeple where they had swung in derisive display for centuries.

Munster's inglorious defeat cut the heart out of the aggressive branch of Anabaptism, but its pacifist, pietistic aspect continued to conquer the hearts of the downtrodden and dispossessed.

Luther was even more violent in his denunciation of the peasants who demanded ''liberty'' in social terms on the basis of scriptural authority. The German peasantry were in an ambivalent position in the 16th century. Rising prices were in their favor, but the gap between prices for agricultural produce and industrial equipment was growing instead of decreasing. Not that peasants needed many tools. But their returns were not as large or fast as the city merchant's returns, and the growing disparity was irksome. More trying than this, though, were the downward pressures foisted on them by the Knights and magnates. The Knights as a class were threatened with decline because their rents and services, being relatively fixed, fell behind climbing prices. They were eager to reimpose maximum obligations on a peasantry that was eager to escape them. The Peasants War [was the result of] the injustice and oppression of these landlords. Coming as it did in the early states of the Reformation, and encouraged as it was in some areas by convinced Anabaptists, it threatened to drown Luther's work in a torrent of civil strife. At first Luther was noncommittal; he recognized that many of the peasants' grievances were genuine, but as the peasants indulged in indiscriminate pillaging he realized [the] true danger to his own cause and turned against them with extraordinary venom. Prices, he urged, could better merit heaven by smiting, slaying and stabbing rebellious subjects than by prayer. It was said that over 100,000 peasants were killed in battle or executed afterward, and crippling fines were laid upon those who escaped with their lives. From this time the peasantry ceased to count in German politics; princes and magnates had vindicated their power once and for all. Where the revolt had been most vigorous, in Bohemia and Austria, the savage reprisals alienated the peasantry from Luther and the decline of Lutheranism in southern Germany dates from the crushing defeat of the Revolt rather than from the Counter-Reformation.

V. Impact

Happily, the dictates of political realism coincided with the ethical consequences of his doctrines. Man was such that he needed the civil sword to contain him in order and tranquility and to bind him in a tolerable state of social cohesion. His liberty was a purely spiritual freedom from the duress of death. It was an inner grace that enabled man to fulfill the law because he had been made righteous by the free gift of God. So Luther preached absolute and unconditional obedience. He refused to condone even passive resistance to the secular arm except by princes. He did nothing to alter the habit of the authoritarian conscience. Indeed, he regarded wicked rulers as God-sent scourges. Lutheranism exchanged obedience to the Pope for abject obedience to the State.

Luther's economic ethics were equally conservative, and in this shared the resentments of his petty bourgeois background. He did not visualize money as a productive thing in itself and therefore forbade all usury. This was to be more medieval than the schoolmen. Like St. Thomas, he believed that each person had his proper place in society and should keep it, and he used the word ''calling" to suggest that God wants a Christian to be dedicated to his vocation.

If this was old-fashioned, his appeal to German nationalism was radical and modern, foreshadowing the virulent German consciousness of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Imperial Knights had early rallied to his standard, prepared to do battle for the emancipation of Germany from the Roman yoke. Although this was one of Luther's themes, his hopes were for peaceful reformation. But his vigorous German style and his outcries against the exploitation of Germany by foreigners were calculated to raise feelings of outraged patriotism.

It was Luther's periodic fury and what seemed to be his reckless rending of the unity of Christendom that alienated the majority of humanists from him. Some, like Melanchthon, were convinced, but most found his convictions hard to stomach because they were held so passionately. The humanists temper was more urbane. A vast temperamental gulf separated them from the ''true believer.'' Yet the root of the differences lay in their views of the nature of man and of human destiny. lt was no less than the difference between the Renaissance and the Reformation. Erasmus went to the heart of the problem in a tract "On the Freedom of the Will" (1524). Initially he had sympathized with Luther. Had he not also attacked the barren formalism and legalism of the Church, its manifest corruptions, its archaic superstitions, like the veneration of relics? He had also disapproved of the abuse of indulgences, and may be regarded as a forerunner of the Reformation. Nevertheless Erasmus accepted the authority of the Church. He wanted to reform it morally from within, and to trim off its impurities. He was not pressed by desperate doubts to reach out for a new way to salvation. Morals were his concern as salvation was Luther's. Their debate over free will must be taken in a spiritual sense the free will was not the mundane choosing of this or that during the day. The issue was whether a man could help himself toward salvation by his own voluntary acts. Erasmus thought so, without denying the cooperation of grace in bringing about good works. Luther thought not.

Granted that a heathen could be upright and decent, but no man, no matter how pure, was worthy of justification because every human deed was tainted by selfishness and pride. God alone had the freedom to justify whom He chose. One believed that man could, to some extent, make his own destiny, and the other believed that all man could do was throw himself on the love and mercy of God. The difference was insoluble.

In an age when such differences mattered more than life, it was inevitable that the Church should encourage the Emperor to root out the Reformation with fire and the sword. Many were burned and executed and, to his dying day, Luther expected to be arrested at any time for trial as a heretic. When he died (1546) he was full of foreboding about the future.

Source: John New, The Renaissance and the Reformation: A Short History

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