Conclusion—
A Revised Narrative
What would a narrative look like if it paid primary attention to what the public would have learned about Luther from the local press? Here is one sketch that draws on material from the preceding chapters.
Rumors had been circulating for some months that a monk named Martin Luther had attacked the church's traditional teachings on indulgences. A handful of humanists had in fact read the occasionally cryptic theses that the Augustinian friar and professor had written, but the broader reading public first came to know something about Martin Luther from his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace . It swept through the major centers of the empire and was snapped up in large numbers by the curious.[1] In the space of just a few pages, Luther clearly and calmly explained and criticized the scholastic understanding of the sacrament of penance and indulgences, insisting that the associated views and practices were still debatable and lacking adequate scriptural basis. Rather than actually seeking indulgences, it was a thousand times better, Luther taught, that Christians do the good works and suffer the punishment that indulgences were supposed to replace. On the whole, the impression Luther gave was of a morally earnest critic of scholastic theology, concerned that Christians choose good works over indulgences.
This first "best-seller" was quickly followed by a series of short German sermons and devotional works written specifically for the laity. They were issued in a handy format that was cheap to produce, inexpensive to buy, and easily passed from reader to reader. These
works seemed to have struck a responsive cord. The reading public sought them out with an avidity that had not been seen before in the short history of printing. Dozens of different pamphlets in multiple editions of hundreds of copies each poured from the presses to meet the demand. Printers competed with each other to see who could quickly rush to market a new work by "Martin Luther, Augustinian" or, as his fame grew, simply "M. L. A."
Two interconnected themes ran through these early works: first, that Christians should acknowledge their own sinfulness and surrender all reliance on their own works, and, second, that they should trust God and God's promise in Christ as their only source of salvation. Addressing topics that directly touched the religious life of the laity, Luther told his readers and hearers that the ordinary lives they lived were far more pleasing to God than clerically prescribed good works so long as they lived their lives in faithful trust of God's forgiveness through Christ. All baptized Christians had to rely solely on God's gracious forgiveness, so that a life dedicated to "good works," even the life of a monk or priest, was in no way superior to the lives of faithful laity and, in fact, could actually be harmful for any who believed that good works, clerically approved or otherwise, counted for anything before God. Clerical claims to mediate salvation through the various sacraments were explicitly questioned. It was the Christian's reliance in faith on God's gracious forgiveness through Christ that made a sacrament efficacious, not anything the priest did or failed to do. In fact, any faithful Christian could, if necessary, do what the priest did. And priestly bans did not necessarily separate Christians from the true church.
Thanks to these largely pastoral and devotional works, Luther became Germany's first best-selling vernacular author, speaking to a far wider audience than, say, the humanists who had used the press before him. Yet in this flood of publications printed and reprinted throughout the German-speaking lands there was almost no mention of his growing estrangement from the papacy. While a few humanists and Latinate readers followed the progress of his appearance before Cajetan in Augsburg, his debate with Eck in Leipzig, and his increasingly trenchant Latin criticism of the papacy and papal claims, this development raised scarcely a ripple in the German-language press. Whatever the readers of Luther's German writings might have heard from their more learned fellow citizens about Luther's conflicts with church authorities and other academics, their own direct encounter
with Luther's views suggested a far more edifying than confrontational program.
To be sure, vernacular readers might have caught glimpses of the increasingly acrimonious debate in the writings of a few publicists such as the humanist Ulrich von Hutten, whose name was occasionally linked with Luther's. But it was not until the late summer and fall of 1520 that readers of Luther's vernacular writings learned at first hand what their Latinate fellow citizens had known for some time. In a series of angry yet eloquent treatises, Luther attacked the religious authorities of the day. He claimed that the pope and his supporters had perpetrated a series of frauds on Christendom. He urged his readers to reject the authority of the papacy to interpret Scripture or to call a council. They should liberate themselves from a papal captivity and clerical tyranny that distorted the sacraments and subordinated the laity to a fictitious "clerical estate." All Christians were true priests, and there was no difference among them—be they bishop or priest, prince or commoner, male or female—except one of office. Scripture was the sole authority for determining questions of proper Christian belief and worship.
Vernacular readers in places such as Strasbourg were also treated about this time to the first rebuttals by avowed supporters of the papacy. While disputing this or that point Luther made, they all charged that Luther was upsetting legitimate authority and tradition. These defenders of the papacy argued that the public debate was itself wrong and dangerous, subversive in principle to legitimate hierarchy and authority. While Luther was entreating his readers to make up their own minds on the basis of Scripture alone and not let the papacy and its clerical allies mislead them with fabricated claims to authority, his opponents were issuing treatises that said that the broader public—"the ignorant and rebellious commoners"—should in no way be involved in such disputes. Yet by entering into the vernacular debate, the Catholic publicists were implicitly inviting the commoners to debate the issues and take sides. By refuting Luther's view they actually propagated them. The medium subverted the Catholic message and gave the curious at least a glimpse of Luther's tantalizing ideas. No wonder the Catholic publicists generated such a feeble response to the Evangelical barrage.
The public saw the battle clearly joined when in the summer and fall of 1521 the markets were flooded with copies of the speech Luther had delivered before the emperor and the Imperial Diet assembled in
the city of Worms.[2] Many of these readers surely knew that the pope had excommunicated Luther as a heretic a few months earlier. But for Luther's partisans the Worms speech gave the real reasons for his "persecution" by the papacy. He had issued treatises dealing with "faith and morals so evangelically and simply that even my opponents must confess that they are useful and innocuous and in all respects worthy to be read by Christian people."[3] He had attacked the papacy and the papists, who by "their most wicked example" had "devastated, ravaged, and corrupted" the world both "spiritually and bodily."[4] The "unbelievable papal tyranny" had "devoured" the possessions and property of the German nation and continued to do so through dishonorable means.[5] He had also attacked others who sought "to protect the Roman tyranny and to destroy the godly service taught by me."[6] While he sought instruction if he erred, his opponents gave him no hearing but proceeded against him with force. So unless he was "overcome through testimony of Scripture or through evident reasons" (for neither pope nor councils could be relied upon because both had erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves), he was "overcome by the Scripture" that he had cited. His conscience was "captive to the word of God," and he could not recant.[7]
Luther's defiant speech defined the issues at stake for many readers and hearers. Those who opposed the "unbelievable papal tyranny" and insisted on "the testimony of Scripture" would suffer abuse and persecution at the hands of papal hirelings and church authorities. Given all that Luther had accomplished in revealing the "true" meaning of Scripture, many were coming to think of him as not only a learned doctor of the Bible but also as a divinely "chosen light of Christendom," sent to tell of God's divine word and to reveal the sorry state of the present world. For his courageous attacks on the papal "Antichrist," some were even coming to see him in biblical terms, as the prophesied "Angel of the Apocalypse" sent by God and "raised up in the fervor of the spirit of Elias" to begin the final, apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good and evil, Christ and the devil. While Luther took on many of the trappings of a biblical saint or prophet, his opponents were defined in the most negative of terms, as hypocritical, greedy self-seekers and enemies of Christ.
Yet even as his supporters were united with Luther in his insistence on Scripture as the sole authority for deciding doctrine within the church, and even as they shared much if not all of his horror for the papal "tyranny" and its alleged abuses, they did not, or at least many
of their leaders did not, see the central issues in the same way that Luther did. For several fateful years, many of Luther's enthusiastic supporters fundamentally misunderstood his theology of justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law. While Luther insisted that a Christian was freed by faith from all laws, human and divine, many of his supporters (at least in southern Germany) agreed that Christians were freed by faith from "man-made" laws not supported by Scripture, but insisted nevertheless that human beings were still required to fulfill the divine law established by Scripture. The Christian's freedom from human laws freed him to serve God's divine commandments. Even as south German Evangelicals came gradually over the succeeding years to understand the full implications of Luther's radical doctrine of justification by faith alone, they continued to put more stress on scriptural example and divine commandment, whether in worship or Christian behavior, than Luther and his "Lutherans" did.
By perhaps an ironic twist of fate, it was this misunderstanding about the right relationship, from Luther's perspective, between gospel and law, be it human or divine, that led Luther by his own admission to fit out "Scripture alone" with a whole panoply of aids to "right" understanding. From highly directive prefaces and forewords, to tendentious glosses and theologically shaped translations of Scripture, Luther attempted mightily to see that readers took away from Scripture the same message that he did. Whatever the cogency to the theological appeal to Scripture alone and to the doctrine that Scripture interpreted itself, in practice Scripture reached the reading public as printed text fitted out with guides to its interpretation. Luther's translation became an "overnight sensation," sweeping all other translations before it. Despite his strenuous efforts, however, he remained unable to dictate the right understanding of Scripture even to his close followers.
This became clear in the fall of 1524, when the reading public was introduced to a dispute among the leaders of the Reformation movement about images in church, the pace of reforms, and, above all, the right understanding of Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper. It seems probable that many readers either did not understand the dispute or found unconvincing or inconclusive the scriptural arguments adduced by either side. To encourage as many people as possible to accept his view of the issues in dispute, Luther began supplementing Scripture with reminders about his own considerable reputation as an "unworthy instrument of God" who had written "with such clarity and
certainty" regarding the gospel, the grace of Christ, the law, faith, love, the cross, human ordinances, the papacy, monasticism, the Mass, and the "articles of faith that a Christ should know."
As if to counter this appeal to authority, other authors took to citing Luther himself on the point that faith should not depend upon any human being but stand solely on the word of God. While paying Luther his due as the foremost exegete of Scripture in the last several hundred years, authors tried gently to disagree with him and minimize the significance of the dispute. Readers were assured that the dispute did not touch on the central message of salvation by faith alone, whatever Luther claimed. The important thing was that Evangelicals were united in their opposition to the "papal" understanding of the Mass as sacrifice and all the "unnecessary and damaging additions" that had grown up around its practice. That was all that mattered. Not so, said both Luther and his opponent Karlstadt. Those who failed to properly discern the body of Christ ate to their damnation. The quarrel went on for years without resolving to general satisfaction the meaning of scriptural passages in dispute or the significance of the disagreement for Christianity. This falling out among the Evangelical ranks also contributed to a general trend whereby Luther became increasingly a regional author, writing largely for north and central German audiences.
Also contributing, perhaps, to the rapid fall off in the demand for Luther's works was the German Peasants' War of 1525. Sweeping through large sections of central and southern Germany, this violent movement took the form in the press of a series of articles that gave another twist on Luther's teachings about Christian freedom. "It has until now been the custom for the lords to own us as their property," one article read. This was "deplorable," it 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."[8]
While Luther rejected this understanding of Christian freedom and ultimately denounced the peasants in the most ferocious terms, his Catholic critics saw in the peasant uprisings clear confirmation of what they had been saying all along. Luther's attack on the spiritual estate, his insistence that faith alone saves and that good works could in fact damn, his teaching that all Christians were priests and that
there was no distinction between pope, bishop, prince, burgher, and peasant, and his violent abuse of popes and princes who defended the traditional faith, had all led the "poor common people" into contempt for legitimate authority, rebellion, and ultimate and disastrous defeat and death. Luther's writings and events themselves confirmed this harsh judgment.
After 1525 or so, large parts of the Reformation movement entered into its institutional phase. The great ideals and principles of the propaganda campaign of the late teens and early twenties were gradually turned into laws, reformed worhsip services, catechisms, and school orders. The great crescendo of vernacular agitation gradually ebbed, leaving behind an altered landscape and a new, much higher demand for vernacular works than had existed before the Reformation message (or messages) had swept the land.
A Commentary
The omissions in this revised narrative are at least as significant as some of the changes in emphasis and interpretation. There is no mention, for example, of Luther's educational program, since only the humanist elite knew much about it outside Wittenberg. The Ninety-Five Theses is only briefly alluded to because, despite its great importance in rallying humanists and other elites to his side, it had relatively limited circulation in vernacular editions and was, in any case, difficult to understand. Instead, it was his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace that first introduced Luther to a truly broad public. This sermon made no mention of such topics as justification by faith alone. On the contrary, it advocated good works over indulgences! Given the central position of this work in the biography of the public Luther, it is ironic that when American Luther scholars planned the fifty-five volume American edition of Luther's works, they considered it so unimportant, or perhaps so "un-Lutheran," that it was not included. Yet it represented the first widespread introduction of sixteenth-century Germans to Luther.
There is but passing mention of Luther's growing opposition to the papacy in the late teens because this development was reported, if at all, only in Latin publications. His summons to Rome, his appearance before Cajetan, his debate with Eck at Leipzig, his conclusion that popes and councils could both err, his suspicion that the papacy was
the Antichrist foretold by Scripture—these milestones in Luther's personal and intellectual biography found little echo in the vernacular press. Luther's ferocious attack on the "papal Antichrist" first made its dramatic appearance in the vernacular in the summer and fall of 1520.
The revised narrative makes no mention at all of Luther's "breakthrough" to justification by faith alone apart from works of the law. Whether one favors the late dating, as I do, or an earlier dating as many other scholars do, it is crucial for our reconstruction of Luther's public career to remember that the first mention Luther made publicly of this "breakthrough" came in his 1545 preface to the collection of his Latin writings. Many of the sources on which scholars base their reconstruction of Luther's early theological development were first published only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Most standard narratives make no mention of the essential confusion that surrounded Luther's teaching in these early years. The "Erasmian" reading of Luther that we saw in the Strasbourg press of 1521 and 1522 may well represent even the majority view among those who followed the debate and cared about the issues. Whether of the majority or minority, those supporting Luther likely did so more because of his appeal to Scripture alone and his attack on papal abuses and traditional observances than because they understood the full implications of justification by faith alone. Scripture alone was the one issue all the supporting publicists agreed upon, and it was the most discussed single issue in all the pamphlet literature, both Evangelical and Catholic. More than that, a rejection of human laws in favor of the divine had its real and obvious attractions, as the Peasants' War was to show a few years later.
This revised narrative also stresses Luther's growing personal authority. The view of Luther as an earnest "man of the Bible" concerned for the spiritual well-being of the laity was well fixed in the public mind months before Luther's great antipapal polemics first appeared in the vernacular press. As people came increasingly to see the contest between Luther and the papacy in apocalyptic terms, Luther's public persona took on many of the attributes of the biblical prophet. For every author who was concerned that his partisans were making an "idol" of Luther, there were many more describing Luther and their own times in apocalyptic terms. In his survey of sermons purportedly preached to urban congregations, Bernd Moeller identified as one of the four most repeated themes the rapidly approaching Endtime.[9] Luther's special, almost prophetic authority fit within this
shared vision. It also made it extraordinarily difficult for other Evangelicals to disagree with the Wittenberg reformer.
Without minimizing the importance or cogency of Luther's theological conviction that Scripture interpreted itself, this revised narrative also points out that in practice not even Luther was willing to leave Scripture alone. Painful experience taught that people did not read Scripture in the same way, and so Luther devoted extraordinary energy to induce readers to interpret Scripture as he did. Yet disagreements over the right understanding of Scripture only multiplied.
Within a few years of the publication of Luther's German New Testament , controversy over the Lord's Supper showed that even Evangelicals who agreed on so much could disagree fundamentally on this point and fail to convince others of their particular reading of Scripture. This is why, the revised narrative claims, the issue of Luther's personal authority became so important both for Luther and for his opponents. When you cannot agree on the basis of the "sole authority," other authorities come into play. In this regard, Luther enjoyed a considerable advantage over his opponents.
Finally, the Catholic claim that Luther was responsible for the Peasants' War takes on new cogency when viewed from the standpoint of publications, and of the message intended versus the message received. Luther could rightly claim that he had written often and powerfully against rebellion, but his Catholic critics could also reasonably argue that whatever Luther said, his writings had the effect of encouraging rebellion. They could point to the Peasant articles and to the tragedy of the Peasants' War itself to document their claim. While understandably rejected by Luther and his supporters, the Catholic charge had its own logic and legitimacy.
I have offered one variation on a revised narrative, a narrative that depends upon the press and its message to a receptive Germany. Scholars may well differ with particulars, but I hope that I have at least persuaded them of my three central concerns. First, the story takes a different form if you structure it around communication and ask what those with an engaged interest would know about Luther and when they would know it. Second, there was frequently a gap between what Luther intended to convey to his readers or hearers and what they understood. This discrepancy makes the narrative more complex and questions of influence and responsibility more difficult. Third, the crisis of authority that was the Reformation owed a great deal to print. Not only did the printing press broadcast the attack on tradi-
tional authorities to a broader audience and with greater rapidity than had ever been possible before, it itself embodied the subversive message it conveyed.
This book contributes to two lively historiographic debates: the extent to which printing played a crucial role in the German Reformation and the nature of the primary appeal of the early Reformation movements conveyed by print (and subsequently by preaching) to the larger population. To be sure, the sharply formulated "Moellerian" thesis, "without printing, no Reformation," lies in the realm of metaphysics—there was after all a printing industry and a Reformation, and historians cannot, as it were, replay the tape to see what would happen without printing.[10] Nevertheless, the more than forty-fold increase in the number of printed pamphlets that occurred from 1517 through 1524 suggests that critics may need to moderate their skepticism about the role of print in reaching a large, primarily lay audience.[11] In fact, given the conservative estimate that in the period 1518 to 1546 the presses of the German-speaking lands produced over six million vernacular treatises supporting or opposing the Reformation—which works out to one exemplar for every two people in the empire, literate and illiterate—even the estimates of literacy within the empire seem improbably low.[12] While undoubtedly only a minority of the population was directly touched and engaged by the propaganda spike of the early German Reformation, their numbers were not insignificant, their influence often considerable, and their willingness to share their views with others amply demonstrated by events. The conclusion seems inescapable: the printed word played a crucial role in the early Reformation, and when multiplied by the effects of preaching and conversation, can be said to be a major factor in spreading a relatively coherent message throughout the German-speaking lands.
On the matter of this "relatively coherent" message and its appeal, the evidence suggests a need for nuance and qualification. While Luther was the overwhelmingly dominant publicist during these crucial years—the number of printings of works by Luther exceeded, for example, the combined total of the seventeen other leading Evangelical publicists—his message was not necessarily the dominant message, at least in the early years. In the initial years of the Reformation, the message that vernacular readers of Luther were offered was pastoral, not communal. When picked up by other early publicists, the message was still more individual than communal but arguably more biblicist and
"Erasmian" than "Lutheran." A significant number of early publicists overheard Luther's doctrine of law and gospel in favor of the idea of the Bible as divine law, a reading of Luther that significantly qualified his insistence on "justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law." The eventual split among Evangelicals over the right understanding of the Eucharist grew out of differences that stretched back to the original spread of the Reformation; it did not arise from "departures" from Luther's doctrine by the urban reformers. Many of these early treatises were as much "prolaity" as "anticlerical," insisting that Christ's death liberated all Christians, both lay and clergy, from both the demands of clerically prescribed late medieval piety and the need for clerical mediation. The principle "Scripture alone" was the most advocated and attacked in the early pamphlet literature, but the principle was supplemented in practice even by its advocates. Luther's notion of Christian freedom was variously understood by different audiences. Their understanding of this concept, as with others, cannot be separated from the context in which they encountered it. In general, the messages sent were not always the messages received, and the historian who seeks to reconstruct the early Reformation message and its appeal must pay at least as much attention to the context of its readers (and hearers) as to the text that they read (or had presented to them).
As Luther's Catholic critics realized, the decision taken by Luther and his fellow Evangelical publicists to use the press to reach as large an audience as possible put the Reformation debate on a whole new footing. The thousands of small, relatively inexpensive vernacular pamphlets circulated rapidly through the German-speaking lands, inviting people to enter into a debate that heretofore would have been the prerogative of a tiny fraction of even the ruling elite. To engage in this ideological contest even the 5 percent of the population thought to be literate at the time was itself a revolution. As people were asked to take sides if only in their own heads as they read or heard the publicist's argument, it was inevitable that opinions would diverge and multiply. Scripture was only the most prominent text that came to be understood so variously as it gained through print a much larger readership. Printing, propaganda, and Martin Luther together ushered in an age that saw the repeated splintering of Western Christianity.