The Papal Antichrist

Culturally determined expectations or stereotypes were at work in most of these pamphlets. When Stifel said that he believed Luther was "sent to us by God, ordained and raised up in the fervor of the spirit of Elias,"^[37] he was tapping into the popular legend that Elias and Enoch were the two prophets sent by God to reveal the Antichrist.^[38] Stifel also likened Luther to the angel of the apocalypse, another role associated with the fight against the Antichrist.^[39] Here is the predominate source of the nimbus and hovering dove. Luther was more than a monk, doctor, or even man of the Bible. He was God's specially chosen instrument to combat the papal Antichrist.

Chapter 2 argued that readers of Luther's works printed in Strasbourg would have seen Luther as a learned doctor and engaged pastor who based his teachings solely on Scripture and whose appeal to the laity (and sympathetic clergy) was that his message enriched and dignified the laity's religious status. Chapter 3 explored how in the fall of 1520 Luther's public persona gained new dimensions with his published attacks on the institutional church, especially the papacy. With the treatises of the late fall Luther had presented himself as an impassioned critic of clerical fraud and papal tyranny. He had even suggested that the papacy might be the Antichrist spoken of in Scripture.

Most of the pamphlets published in Strasbourg accepted Luther's drastic depiction of the papacy.^[40] In the very title of one of his treatises, for example, the nobleman Hartmuth von Cronberg defended Luther against the charge that he went too far in calling the pope a vicar of the devil and Antichrist (Rejection of the Alleged Dishonor Attributed By Many to the Pious, Highly Learned and Christian Father, Doctor Martin Luther of the Augustinian Order, In That He Called Our Father the Pope a Vicar of the Devil and Antichrist )^[41] Cronberg considered Luther's charge to be the irrefutable truth.^[42] The pope and his supporters, by relying on human wisdom rather than the two great commandments to love God and neighbor, were taking a "devilish and most dangerous way" and misleading countless people from the true way of Christ into the path to hell.^[43] In another treatise, A Pleasant Christian and Godly Admonition and Warning addressed to Emperor Charles V, Cronberg rather improbably urged the emperor to lead the pope out of brotherly love to the "divine spring" by showing the pope "on the basis of the Holy Scripture that he truly is a vicar of the devil and Antichrist, that truly the papal law is thought up by

human minds without any proper basis, and that such things are nothing less than a stinking piss [pffitz ?] of the devil." People had been "wickedly misled" into "our own self-conceived devilish way" and thereby hindered "from coming to the wholesome spring, which, by the great grace of God, has been so truly and clearly expressed by the teaching of doctor Luther so that anyone who has eyes and ears clearly sees and hears the same."^[44] In Marcellus's Passion of Doctor Martin Luther , Luther was challenged with having taught that the Council of Constance had erred and that the papacy was the Antichrist. Luther replied, "You have said it. Nevertheless I say to you, I can prove it with divine Scripture [as well as] that which I have written in books. And unless I am overcome with divine Scripture, I will not recant or speak against my books."^[45]

The grounds given for Luther's opposition to the pope varied from treatise to treatise. Cronberg saw Luther's opposition coming from the pope's imposition of human laws rather than the divine law expressed in the two great commandments. In Karsthans , the objection arose in relation to the scriptural basis for papal authority.^[46] This line of argument was continued in New Karsthans .^[47] The treatise also defined "Antichrist" as one who was "against Christ" [gegen-Christ oder Wider-Christ ] and explained that "there has never been, and there may never be, a greater Antichrist than the pope at Rome, who completely perverts the gospel and positions himself against Christ in all things."^[48]

Several authors took issue with various claims that the pope either could not err or if he erred, could not be corrected by anyone but God. Here they were echoing Luther's arguments, especially in his To the Christian Nobility .^[49] For example, Karsthans in the pamphlet Karsthans criticized Murner's claim that no one might punish or judge the pope unless the pope erred publicly in matters of faith. Citing Luther, Karsthans sarcastically observed that as far as the pope's defenders were concerned, unless the pope worshipped the golden calf nothing he did would be considered an error of faith.^[50]

Others, for example the anonymous author of A Beautiful Dialogue , were seriously upset by the claim that it was the clergy, at least in the first instance, who made up the church. In this Dialogue the "priest" charged that what Luther wrote was against the Christian church and against ecclesiastical law. The character of the mayor asked, "Who is the Christian church?" The priest replied, "Haven't you often heard it from me in the sermon?" The Christian church was

"the pope and his cardinals, all the bishops and prelates." This the mayor could not believe. He had heard it said that the pope himself had established the ecclesiastical ("spiritual") law and that he might make the law to be whatever he wished. The mayor was concerned that there was little of "God's law" in the ecclesiastical law that he had heard at home from his student. For if the Christian church consisted only of the pope and his adherents, "then we poor Christians have lost the game." If the pope and his people could also not err or sin and yet little good could be said about him, what good should the mayor think of him? "Have you not heard what Doctor Martin Luther has written about them all," the mayor asked, "what a great, wicked thing they do at Rome with buying and selling benefices, with exchanging, changing, [and] despoiling [benefices] and not being in residence nor serving and many other things, how they also eat meat during periods of fasting and all times and forbid us all sorts of things, and how they are up to their ears in shameful matters? In addition, all their affairs are aimed at extracting piles of money from us."^[51] In this one example we see the full range of the attack, from theological considerations to anger over abuse and fiscal extortion. Luther, as this example also illustrates, was the cited authority on papal tyranny and abuse.

Most of Luther's defenders had been convinced by Luther that the papacy was in fact the Antichrist. This accomplishment put Luther in a special position within sacred history and legend. He was spoken of in biblical terms, taking on the attributes of the prophesied opponents of the Antichrist. He was not just any monk, doctor, or man of the Bible, however learned. Fitted to the role of revealer of the papal Antichrist, he possessed an authority and inspired a deference that no other man of his age could claim, at least in the religious realm. No wonder the other publicists rallied to his side to attack the papal tyranny.