Chapter Seven—
Catholics on Luther's Responsibility for the German Peasants' War

"There were many peasants slain in the uprising, many fanatics banished, many false prophets hanged, burned, drowned, or beheaded who perhaps would still all live as good obedient Christians had Luther not written." Such was the conclusion of the Catholic controversialist Johann Cochlaeus. "There are (unfortunately) still many Anabaptists, assailants of the Sacrament, and other mob-spirits awakened by Luther to rebellion and error," he continued. "I'd lay you odds, however, that among all the peasants, fanatics, and mob-spirits not one could be found who has written more obscenely, more disdainfully, and more rebelliously than Luther has."^[1] It is a charge that was repeated with variations by almost every Catholic controversialist who touched on the uprising. Luther's writings and teachings, they all insisted, were in large part responsible for the Peasants' War.

Is this defamation or propagandistic exaggeration? Certainly from Luther's perspective, and probably from the perspective of the modern historian who is aware of Luther's many statements before 1525 condemning rebellion, it is.^[2] But is it defamation in the specific sense, a deliberate and malicious attempt to ruin Luther's good name by attributing to him responsibility that his critics knew was not properly his? I think not. What needs to be understood is how a nonpolemical mindset disposed Catholic apologists to read Luther's writings as they did. To illustrate this process of reception, let us examine why Catholic authors in Leipzig and Dresden, the two leading centers for Catholic

controversial literature in the vernacular,^[3] could argue on the basis of Luther's own writings that he had incited the Peasants' War of 1525.

Emser's Answer to Luther's "Abomination"

Hieronymus Emser's Answer to Luther's "Abomination" Against the Holy Secret Prayer of the Mass, Also How, Where, and With Which Words Luther Urged, Wrote, and Promoted Rebellion in his Books (Dresden, 1525) lays out many of the major elements of the Catholic view.^[4] In part one of this reply to Luther's Concerning the Abomination of the Secret Prayer of the Mass, Called the Canon , Emser offered under five headings or "proofs," multiple excerpts from Luther's writings that demonstrated to Emser's satisfaction that Luther had incited the Peasants' War.

Emser introduced his lists of proof texts with an assertion that was key to at least three of his "proofs." For the last fifteen centuries, he claimed, Christendom was divided into two estates, namely the spiritual and the secular. "This order and differentiation between the two aforementioned estates, namely the priesthood and the laity, is not a human invention as Luther falsely claimed in his book to the German nobility, rather [the two estates] were established by Christ himself."^[5] On this foundation Emser then built his case, proof by proof.

Proof one: "How Luther mixed up with each other both estates, the spiritual and the secular, and destroyed the order of Christ and the holy church, and thereby caused all sorts of strife and misfortune and gave the first cause for rebellion."^[6] Under this category Emser cited excerpts from Luther that dealt largely with Luther's contention that all baptized Christians were priests and that differences were only ones of office. In rejecting the distinction between clergy and laity, Luther argued that secular authority should exercise its office irrespective of pope, bishop, priest, or ecclesiastical law. Emser also cited several excerpts in which Luther attacked popes, bishops, and priests.

Here are a few of Emser's examples. He excerpted from To the German Nobility (1520) from signature "A.4 on the last page"^[7] Luther's assertion that "they have cooked up calling the pope, bishop, priests, and the cloistered the spiritual estate and the princes, lords, artisans, and farmers the worldly estate, which is a splendid deceit and hypocrisy, although no one should become timid on this account. For all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except one of office."^[8] Emser reproduced six more ex-

cerpts from this pamphlet, including Luther's contention that "Christian secular authority should freely exercise its office without hindrance even though it might affect pope, bishop, [or] priests. That which the spiritual law has said to the contrary is sheer fiction [and] Romanist presumption."^[9] Emser also quoted two excerpts from Luther's A Sermon on the New Testament, That Is, On the Holy Mass (1520), including one in which Luther asserted that all Christian men were priests and all Christian women, priestesses, "be they young or old, lord or serf, woman or girl, learned or unlearned."^[10] Luther's Answer to the Hyper-Christian, Hyper-Spiritual, and Hyper-Learned Book of Goat Emser at Leipzig (1521) yielded three more excerpts,^[11] his A Recantation of Dr. Luther of His Error, Forced on Him By the Most Learned Priest of God, Lord Hieronymus Emser, Vicar at Meiben (1521) four,^[12] and his That a Christian Assembly or Community Has the Right or Power To Judge All Teachings and To Call Teachers (1523) one.^[13] The excerpts from A Recantation included some that could be seen as encouraging violence against the clergy, as, for example, Luther's suggestion that it would be best that "we henceforth do not call this peculiar foreign priesthood priests but rather tonsurelings [blattentreger ] and chase the useless people out of the country. What to us are the tonsured folks, who are neither spiritually nor bodily priests, and what need have we of them since we are all ourselves bodily, spiritually, and in every respect priests."^[14]

Although Luther had written similar things in other books, Emser wrote at the end of this list of citations for "proof one," he reckoned that he had provided sufficient citations to prove that Luther "mixed together the spiritual and worldly [estates], incited one against the other, and took it upon himself to make priests out of laity and laity out of priests and to allow them to remain neither priests nor Christians." Luther did all this, Emser alleged, with the goal of "dividing and troubling the general peace, brotherly unity, and the ancient Christian order which . . . has come down to us from Christ and the holy apostles."^[15]

Emser obviously was greatly offended by Luther's assertion of the priesthood of all baptized and believing Christians. That which appealed to religiously engaged laity by dignifying their religious stature at the expense of clerical privilege, as seen in earlier chapters, not surprisingly was rejected by some of those such as Emser whose status was reduced or transformed. What is interesting in this is Emser's immediate conclusion that this transformation threatened all authority,

secular and religious. This conclusion was also reached by Thomas Murner, as seen in chapter 3.^[16] I shall return to this point in a moment, but first let us briefly survey Emser's other four collections of "proofs."

Proof two: "How Luther despised, rejected, and condemned the power, government, order, right, and laws of both of the abovementioned estates, also [how Luther] exhorted their subjects to contempt and disobedience toward the same, made lords serfs and serfs lords and always free, [and] in addition he conceded to them all governmental authority."^[17] The excerpts under this head dealt largely with a variety of specific attacks by Luther on human laws in the spiritual realm and on those who promulgated, enforced, and obeyed such laws. Among the laws Luther attacked were those requiring Christians to turn in the Scriptures to Catholic authorities,^[18] and those dealing with vows, with the proper mode of receiving the Sacrament, and with mandatory confession. In some of these excerpts Luther advocated the freedom that all Christians had from baptism. This freedom allowed Christians to take the Sacrament as they wished, to confess or not, to judge doctrine, and to select their own pastors. Emser also cited Luther's praise of the Hussites and his rejection of the veneration of the Virgin and the saints. Thirty citations in all make up this "proof," drawn from eleven of Luther's treatises, ten in German and one in Latin.^[19]

Proof three: "How Luther attacked with unchristian insults and calumnies the pope, bishops, and the whole spiritual estate, with no exceptions, and incited, angered, and embittered the common people against them."^[20] Most of the excerpts under this heading reproduced Luther's highly unfavorable characterizations of the papacy and bishops. After thirty-four citations on this topic Emser quit multiplying examples and simply remarked that "on practically every page" of a whole series of Luther's publications Luther had "most poisonously" reviled and abused "pope, papacy, bishop, bishopric, convent, cloister, and all the clergy from the highest to the lowest." Luther had done this, Emser charged, to awaken "such animosity and hatred among the common people against their spiritual fathers and pastors [seelsorgern ] that they no longer want to hear their teaching and preaching." Instead, the common people would run after "Lutheran preachers" even "three miles away," and if they met a monk or priest on the street, they would throw filth or stones and scream at them "like wolves." Finally, they stormed and plundered their houses,

foundations, churches, and cloisters and struck them, took them prisoners, ravaged them and drove them into wretched exile. The like had not been seen in Germany before "Luther began his game."^[21]

Proof four: "How Luther also especially attacked, insulted, and committed and incurred the crime of lese majesty against secular authorities such as the emperor, king, and princes."^[22] Under this heading, Emser presented a series of twenty-three excerpts in which Luther attacked or ridiculed princes and even the emperor when they attempted to exercise their secular authority in the spiritual realm and, from Luther's perspective, overstepped their proper authority. "What of anything good the common man should then take from such horrible abuse, malediction, and injury to majesty and superior authority, to which, as the holy apostles have taught us, every soul is subject," Emser concluded his list, "I shall let the reader be the judge."^[23]

Proof five: "How Luther also explicitly counseled rebellion, wrangling, and strife, [and how Luther] defied, scorned, and with the common rabble (whom he also zealously incited to this end) threatened the authorities, both the spiritual and the secular."^[24] Under this heading Emser presented some forty-seven excerpts that, on the face, were incendiary or which fell under some of the classifications of proofs one through four. To give the most blatant example, he cited an excerpt from Luther's Latin afterword to Sylvester Prierias's Epitoma responsionis ad M. Lutherum , in which Luther remarked (albeit in Latin), "Since we punish thieves with the gallows, robbers with the sword, heretics with fire, why do we not even more employ every possible weapon against these teachers of destruction, these cardinals, popes, and all the dregs of the Roman Sodom, who unceasingly lay waste to the church of God, and wash our hands in their blood?"^[25] Emser also cited excerpts in which Luther stated that disturbance accompanied the true gospel. For example, Emser cited a passage from Luther's Answer to the Goat Emser at Leipzig , in which Luther replied to Emser's charge that his teaching provoked unrest wherever it spread, "that I began in God's name and [that] my teaching is the true word of God has no stronger proof than that it has spread so quickly throughout the world and caused disunity. And if it had not done that, I would have long ago despaired and grown tired."^[26] From this long list of examples—and Emser said that for the sake of brevity he had not listed a great number more—Emser concluded that any honest man would recognize that not the papists but rather Luther had lied when he said that he had not awakened or given cause for this uprising.^[27]

To summarize, Emser began with the two estates, spiritual and secular. In proof one he rejected Luther's notion of the priesthood of all believers since it involved mixing the divinely established two estates. In proof two he took issue with Luther's notion of the freedom of the Christian since it asserted that all Christians were equal and thereby overturned the proper hierarchy in society and since it further advocated freedom from human laws and thereby encouraged disobedience to proper authority. In proof three he gathered many of Luther's attacks on the papacy and the bishops. In proof four he collected Luther's attacks on and ridicule of secular rulers who overstepped their bounds and attempted to rule in the spiritual realm. In proof five he concluded with what he saw as explicit incitements (and a few could easily be read that way) to rebellion.

Emser's treatise reproduced most of the elements of the Catholic understanding of Luther's responsibility for the Peasants' War. Although it is somewhat arbitrary to do so given the interrelation of the different "proofs," let's look more closely at proof two and bring in some other controversialists to show how they agreed in their reading of Luther.

The Catholic Reading of Christian Freedom

Emser read Luther's "Christian freedom" as subversive to social order and as encouraging sin. He argued that Luther had condemned the authority of both estates and turned lords into subjects and subjects into lords and made everyone free.^[28] Emser objected, for example, that in his translation of I Corinthians 10, Luther glossed a verse concerning freedom from dietary regulation with the comment "Christ is free and so too are all Christians in all things." And Emser added, "Luther promotes the same thing concerning freedom in many places in his Testament."^[29] Emser also objected to Luther's rhetorical question in To the German Nobility , why should we become bound by the word of a man since we are all born free in baptism and subject only to the divine word? For Emser, when Luther rejected ordinances or distinctions of rank that limited Christian freedom, when he advocated the freedom to commune in both kinds without all the regulation of the Mass, he was counseling sedition and rejecting legitimate authority.^[30]

Johann Cochlaeus agreed. In the 1527 Dresden reprint of his Answer to Luther's Treatise "Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants ," he stated that the Lutherans, "under the sem-

blance of Scripture with cunning and deceitful exegesis have so brought the poor unlearned people around to the false freedom of baptism that they believe that since we are all brothers in Christ through baptism, all things should be equal among us, as happens with true brothers." He then addressed Luther directly and cited from Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity, "'I tell you truly,' you said, 'that no law can justly be imposed on Christians, neither by human beings nor by angels, no matter how much they wish to, since we are free from them all.'"^[31]

The man responsible for the Cochlaeus reprint in Dresden, Petrus Sylvius, summed up the controversialists' position in his 1527 A Clear Demonstration . "And in truth had the Christian princes not been so soon awakened against the Lutheran peasants," Sylvius wrote, "then the Lutheran teaching would have turned all lordship and authorities into peasants and there would have not only been no divine service or houses of God but also no castle or noble estate left undestroyed in the German lands." Sylvius was convinced that this contention could be proved from Luther's own writings. One would have had the Lutheran writings and teachings to thank for the overturning of all authority and the destruction of religion, "since Luther has written from the beginning of his publication and especially in the treatise on Christian Freedom and the Babylonian Captivity that each Christian should be and is free as a matter of right and should be himself a lord, prince, king, bishop, and pope since they were all to a man priests and kings. And each should believe, celebrate, and do whatever he wishes, however he wishes, without regard for anyone."^[32] Sylvius buttressed his assertion with reference to Emser's Against Luther's 'Abomination' (1525), Cochlaeus's Answer . . . to Martin Luther's Book (1525), and the works of "many others."^[33]

Underpinning this freedom, as these Catholic authors saw it, was, in Cochlaeus's words, the "false principle that faith alone justifies and sanctifies."^[34] Luther knew, Paul Bachmann wrote sarcastically, "that no believer goes to hell even if he is a murderer, thief, a robber, an adulterer and so on. Because no sin condemns a person, only lack of belief."^[35] And Johannes Fabri, later bishop of Vienna, remarked with a touch of Schadenfreude regarding the lament in the Saxon Visitation Articles that too much was being taught about the forgiveness of sin and too little about repentance, "Yes, dear Luther, not only a few but nearly all your disciples have for more than ten years not said or taught anything else but that only by faith, that faith alone justifies,

that mere faith makes one blessed, that one should only believe and that is sufficient. And who, but you, first brought this teaching up?"^[36] This indeed was their complaint against Luther and his "disciples" made twelve years ago, "that you forever preached naked faith alone so that the common people, unfortunately, have fallen away from all fear of God, good conscience, love of neighbor, good works, indeed all Christian honesty." Fabri drew a stark conclusion from this: "And who, other than you, is [therefore] responsible for those innocent children who were slain and perished in the Peasants' War?"^[37] As he read it, Luther's Christian freedom gave the appearance of teaching improvement and edification but in fact was a "fleshly freedom" that came down to "whatever one wanted to say, one said, and whatever one wished to do, one did."^[38]

But the Catholic objection went beyond the reliance on "mere faith." For, as they saw it, Luther said not only that faith without works saved, but that a striving after good works could actually damn. Luther, Sylvius explained in his 1534 The Last Two Books , "rejects and slanders good works, even those done as well as possible, as if they were simply horrible sins, and [he] considers as no sins all the vices and wickedness that one can produce, and [he] wishes to deal before God with mere faith alone without any divine love and Christian works."^[39] He and his colleagues read Luther to say that "mere, naked faith" would save, apart from works, and that traditional good works such as the Mass were not only unnecessary but positively harmful. As Johannes Mensing put it, "They have promised the people very many freedoms so that they become, indeed, slaves to their flesh . . . so that they would prefer to outrage virgins than to hold mass."^[40] Paul Bachmann read Luther much the same way:

Like the hellish spirits he [Luther] teaches that one should avoid the good and do what is wicked. That is, his teaching is that one should protect oneself from all godly and human laws and commands and from all good works, which God has commanded to do, more than from all sins, and that one should only cling to bare faith, and that he who does all sorts of evil yet relies only on naked faith strengthens faith and is made blessed and holy. But he who does good, what God has commanded to do, has destroyed the faith and is condemned.^[41]

Sylvius can be seen to sum up the connection he and his fellow controversialists saw between Christian freedom and equality, "mere" faith, the avoidance of good works, and the Peasants' War. Luther's teachings about Christian freedom and equality made the "Lutheran

common people" unable to tolerate authority or be anyone's subject. The "black Lutheran peasants" and "his" Anabaptists had already dared to practice Luther's teaching that in Christendom there could and should be no authority but rather everyone should be equal to every other. Looking towards the future, Sylvius predicted that the "Lutheran common folk"

will cultivate division, unrest, war, robbery, [and] murder, not only against true Christendom but also against each other. [They will do this] all on account of the many-sided and self-contradictory, wicked Lutheran teaching and their wicked lives, as Luther teaches . . . that one can and may freely practice and commit every vice and wickedness even of the whole world and it would be no sin if one only had mere faith. But one should only protect oneself from good works for although they are done in the best way, they would nevertheless be nothing more than horrible sins.^[42]

All the elements of the Catholic view are present in this one summary statement.

The Logic of the Catholic View

Are we simply studying various misunderstandings or even deliberate propagandistic distortions of Luther's teachings? To an extent, yes. But that's not all we're doing. To be sure there are misunderstandings and distortions, but such observations miss the point. Readers pick and choose among the ideas introduced to them. Some issues resonate with their life experiences; others do not. And in the dialectic of reader and text, some ideas are invested with new meaning, transposed to a different key, or filled out in ways unintended by their author.

For the most part, Catholic controversialists that I have studied remained wedded to the mind-set or Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectation)^[43] of late medieval Christendom, which included belief in divinely established and necessary hierarchy, a distinction between clergy and laity, and the necessity of works in the process of justification. In other words, while Luther and his followers now operated with an Erwartungshorizont different from that of late medieval Christendom, the Catholic controversialists continued to work from within the old Erwartungshorizont . So their central beliefs and expectations led them to read and understand Luther's text differently than Luther and his partisans did. Of course, the effect of a mind-set or Erwartungshorizont is a natural and unavoidable fact of intellectual life. No one approaches a text without presuppositions and commit-

ments, without Vorverständnisse ; and these presuppositions and commitments necessarily shape one's perception.

Given the Catholic controversialists' commitments, it is hardly surprising that they generally failed to accept or perhaps in some cases even to understand, on the one hand, Luther's distinction between the two realms (regimente ), spiritual and temporal, and, on the other, Luther's rejection of the distinction between the two estates, spiritual and temporal. So when they read Luther's comments about freedom in the spiritual realm, they did not read or understand them within the context and with the limitations intended by Luther. As a result, they read Luther's insistence on Christian freedom from law and good works in the spiritual realm as freedom from law and good works in general . This view of things was reinforced by Luther's insistence that justification came through faith apart from works and that works done with an eye toward earning salvation were actually sinful. Catholic controversialists read Luther on this score as encouraging people to think that they could be saved by "mere, naked faith" and discouraging them from performing good works. As the controversialists saw it, statements of this sort were counsels for sin and disobedience. Further, having rejected Luther's distinction between the spiritual and secular realms, they read Luther's comment about equality among Christians in the spiritual realm as advocating an end to hierarchy within society generally. This was another encouragement to disobedience.

They were reinforced in this reading of Luther by Luther's many attacks on the governing authorities of the two estates. Since they did not accept or did not understand Luther's distinction between the spiritual and the secular realm, they read Luther's attacks on spiritual and secular authorities who attempted to establish and enforce laws in the spiritual realm as unqualified attacks on authority, both spiritual and secular. This reading was powerfully reinforced by the rhetoric of Luther's attacks, which could easily overpower his theological qualifications. I shall let Duke Georg of Saxony speak for a number of Catholic polemicists (and rulers—Duke Georg was both) who read Luther's rhetoric as an incitement to violence. For who does not realize that "all his abuse, slander, cursing, scolding, and incitement to disobedience" that was found in Luther's writings, the Duke wrote, was "done with the sole intention that, if the pious princes and lords, which he had attracted to himself, did not wish themselves to instigate war or rebellion, he should nevertheless cause the emperor and other lords [to do so], so that in any case the plans of his lord, the devil,

would be successful?" In other words, the force of the rhetoric itself would provoke violence. Were Luther, however, that which he claimed to be, the Duke continued, namely, a true preacher of the gospel, he would undoubtedly do nothing of the sort. Instead, he would chastise the shortcomings and misdeeds of his adversaries "with complete patience and gentleness." He would seek their improvement not destruction. "But since he on the contrary does nothing but scold, curse, rave, and rage, it is to be feared that he will lead to eternal and irreparable destruction not only his adversaries but also his closest adherents."^[44] In sum, the disobedience the controversialists expected from Luther's insistence on "mere faith" and "Christian freedom" was confirmed by Luther's attacks and his often inflammatory rhetoric.

The committed Catholic also found ample evidence in events themselves to confirm this reading of Luther. Let me illustrate from the Peasants' War how events could have confirmed Catholics in their view of Luther's writings.

From the early 1520s, Catholic controversialists who disagreed with (or did not understand) Luther's notion of Christian freedom and his distinction between the two realms had been predicting that Luther's message would result in rebellion against secular authority.^[45] For example, the Franciscan Thomas Murner put it particularly well in his The Great Lutheran Fool (Strasbourg, 1522). In biting verses Murner defined what was required of men and women to become Lutheran. They must despise the papacy, bishops, and clergy; consider the pope the Antichrist; tread under foot all papal pronouncements; give up fasting, confession, and praying; deride all secular authority; hold the mass in contempt and reject its sacrificial character; abandon the other sacraments; destroy churches and cloisters; drive out members of religious orders; abuse the clergy from the pulpit; advocate bloodshed and rebellion; plunder clerical property; and, in short,

Alle ding zu keren vmb,
Dan ist das ewangelium
Gar volkumen mit seim orden.
Also sein wir al lutherisch worden .
[To turn everything upside down fully realizes the gospel arrangement. Thus we have all become Lutheran].

For Murner all these "Lutheran rules" flow from Luther's fleshly Christian freedom, but especially the rejection of authority:

Der cristlich glaub gibt vnss freiheit,
Zü erkennen hie kein oberkeit .

Wir sein im tauff al frei geboren,
Ee keiser, künig, fürsten woren .
[The Christian faith gives us freedom to recognize no earthly authority. We were all born free in baptism before there was an emperor, king, or princes].^[46]

Controversialists like Murner believed their prediction confirmed in the most widely circulated peasant manifesto, The Twelve Articles .^[47] This declaration provided an ideological rationale for religious, economic, and social grievances that united peasant bands throughout southern and central Germany. Composed by Sebastian Lotzer, a journeyman furrier of Memmingen, for the peasants of Upper Swabia, The Twelve Articles was reprinted over twenty times in the space of a couple months and became the statement of grievances, either in whole or in part, for peasant bands throughout the area of uprising, excepting only Switzerland and the Alpine region and parts of Franconia and Thuringia.^[48] The first and twelfth articles show clearly the influence of the Reformation movement: the first requested that the entire community have the power and authority to choose and appoint a pastor, and the twelfth offered to withdraw any of the previous eleven articles that was shown to be contrary to Scripture. Sandwiched between these two articles, and liberally annotated with references to Scripture, were ten articles dealing with such things as tithing, serfdom, fishing and game laws, wood cutting, feudal services, rents, new laws, communal fields, and the death tax.

Of particular interest to us is its third article, which stated that "it has until now been the custom for the lords to own us as their property." This was "deplorable," the article continued, "for Christ redeemed and bought us all with his precious blood, the lowliest shepherd as well as the greatest lord, with no exceptions." And the article called upon the Bible as its authority:

Thus the Bible proves that we are free and [we] want to be free. Not that we want to be utterly free and subject to no authority at all; God does not teach us that. We ought to live according to the commandments, not according to the lusts of the flesh. But we should love God, recognize him as our Lord in our neighbor, and willingly do all things God commanded us at his Last Supper.^[49]

In this demand, together with the first and twelfth articles, Catholic readers such as Cochlaeus and Emser saw Luther's Christian freedom taking its inevitable rebellious form.^[50]

We could of course argue, and rightly so, that in their depiction of Luther's notion of Christian freedom both peasants and Catholics misunderstood Luther's position. But the misunderstanding is readily explicable. The historian Peter Blickle has shown that the Reformation changed how the peasants legitimated their long-standing desire to change their relations with their lords. Before 1525 peasants had claimed that their revolts were only to remove innovations that violated traditional law. By 1525, however, appeal to traditional law could not legitimate changes necessary to relieve the tensions that had developed in the last century. Appeal to divine law could, and did. Moreover, appeal to divine law—which could cover any demand that could be deduced from Scripture—allowed the uprising to take on a supraterritorial character.^[51] Specifically in the matter of freedom from serfdom, the Reformation allowed the peasants to transcend the traditional law of serfdom and insist that all should be free on principle. If God was lord, the peasants concluded, there could be no seigneurs. "No one but God our creator, father, and lord should have serfs," concluded the villages of Schaffhausen, and in this they were followed by many other peasant articles. The Reformation also allowed the peasants to attack serfdom on the basis of justice and divine law.^[52] It proved quite easy, given the peasants' situation and aspirations, to translate into the temporal realm Luther's insistence on the Christian freedom to test all laws against Scripture.

Of course, once the peasants justified their uprising in these terms, it is hardly surprising that Catholics believed their reading of the rebellious potential of Luther's writings had been confirmed by events. So when they charged Luther with responsibility for the Peasants' War, they were only reflecting their honest understanding of his writings.

Conclusion

It is a fascinating characteristic of a significant number of the Catholic pamphlets against Luther that in proving a point they often contented themselves with listing excerpts from Luther's works. We looked at this in some detail with Emser's Answer to Luther's "Abomination ," but Cochlaeus, for example, also commonly proceeded in the same fashion.^[53] Sometimes commentary or exposition followed the list of excerpts, but often not. It is difficult to think of a clearer demonstration that they were reading Luther differently than, say, Evangelically

minded readers. The conclusion seems inescapable. If the same text proved one thing to a Catholic and another to an Evangelical, the historic meaning of a text cannot be determined independent of its reader.