Variety and Reception

We see in these writings some significant variety in the ways in which different authors read and re-presented Martin Luther and his writ-

ings. These authors all wrote in support of Luther and his teachings, as they each understood it. Underlying this support was both consensus and divergence.

The authors agreed among themselves on a few crucial items about Luther's character and his message. They all saw Luther as a learned doctor and an engaged pastor dedicated to teaching "Christian truth." They also agreed that Luther's teachings set him in conflict with the institutional church and especially the papacy. Most important of all, these authors agreed that Luther insisted that "Christian truth" could be establish only on the basis of "Scripture alone." The historian and bibliographer Hans-Joachim Köhler has examined a representative sample of 356 pamphlets that closely resembled the major characteristics of the larger universe of approximately 10,000 pamphlets published between 1500 and 1530. He found that nearly all the pamphlets dealt in one way or another with the issues of theology and the church. "Only six of the 285 German pamphlets in our sample," Köhler remarks, "do not touch upon theological topics—and likewise only three of the 71 Latin texts."^[111] Of the five major thematic groupings Köhler constructed—theology and the church, the economy, politics and law, learning and education, and society and culture—theology and the church was the most popular topic, found in 98 percent of the pamphlets. Issues of the economy were least popular, found in only 43 percent of the pamphlets.

Köhler's results go beyond these gross categories to identify the most important subtopics within this pamphlet literature. Once again, it was a religious issue, or to be more precise, a Reformation issue, that dominated these publications. The one issue that excelled all others, the one issue that received the greatest attention, was the principle of sola scriptura , Scripture alone. In other words, two-thirds of the pamphlets, both Catholic and Evangelical, dealt in one way or another with the claim that Scripture should be the sole source of faith. In the period 1520 to 1526, this Reformation topic was dealt with by more than 70 percent of the authors.^[112] Perhaps not surprisingly, then, this was also the one issue on which all these defenders of Luther agreed.

If our authors agreed on Luther's vocation as a teacher and on his insistence on Scripture alone, they disagreed (without probably being aware of the disagreement) on his larger role and on the crucial conclusions he drew from Scripture alone. Some of our authors still presented Luther as primarily a teacher and theologian seeking to reform

the institutional church. He was a highly learned theologian and a trenchant (and perhaps excessively vociferous) critic of abuses within the church. But others saw Luther in a larger, possibly apocalyptic role. To view Luther as a special instrument of God—as an "Elias" or "Christian angel," as Stifel did—invested his message with special authority. We see in this public persona the beginnings of Luther's peculiar personal authority among his followers.

When we turn from Luther's person to his message, only a minority of these authors picked up on some issues of central interest to Luther himself, such as the priesthood of all baptized Christians.^[113] In fact, the majority of Luther's defenders published in Strasbourg were still reading Luther within a context strongly shaped by humanistic and specifically Erasmian concerns. This context inclined these authors to assimilate Luther's scripturally based criticism of human laws to the Erasmian attack on the "superstitions" of external observance that lacked spiritual grounding. For a time—a crucial time for the fledgling Reformation movement—Luther was read and re-presented in these Erasmian terms. In took time for these authors to realize that more was at stake, that Luther's radical understanding of commandment and promise was corrosive not only of "man-made laws" but of reliance on law in any form in the process of salvation.