Reception and Re-presentation

Martin Luther attempted mightily throughout his life to dictate how his own writings should be understood. Even though he could normally (but not always) control what was printed under his name, he could not (try as he might) control how he was interpreted by his readers. And when readers became preachers or publicists in their own right, Luther had even less control over the message they associated with his name.^[12] They issued their own treatises to explain what he said, what he meant, what people should do. Opponents took to the press as well to decry Luther's message and explain its fallacies and its dangers. Even Luther's allies often disagreed with each other, and with the Reformer himself, in their understanding of what he had said and what he stood for. So, too, did his opponents. Each treatise was received differently by different people, interpreted differently by different audiences. It was the press, then, that both connected Luther with his audience and led inevitably to a divorce between Luther's "intent" and the "meaning" appropriated by various readers.

As distressing as this diversity was for Luther, and as unsettling as it may be for scholars today, we must recognize that the reader and the representer, that is, the re -presenter, whether a preacher or an author,

invested Luther's publications with meaning drawn from his or her own life experience. In the dialectic of reader and text, there was born myriad interpretations. There was no one "theology" or one correct understanding of Luther's teaching in the sixteenth century. On the contrary, several what we might term "communities of discourse" each read Luther in a different way, with individuals within these "communities" reinforcing each other's particular reading of Martin Luther.

Readers understand what they read from within their own experiences of life. Knowledge and understanding is a cumulative process, a fitting of ideas and impressions into a mosaic made up of the assumptions and beliefs of the larger society and of one's own subgroups within that society and colored and given final arrangement by the experiences of the individual. The mosaic that constitutes understanding varies from individual to individual and from subgroup to subgroup within society. A burgher fitted Luther's message into a quite different constellation than a peasant. A Catholic priest saw things differently than a lay person. And for a variety of accidents of life history, even two members of religious orders could differ widely on their reception of Luther's message: the Dominican Martin Bucer, for example, became a passionate Evangelical, the Franciscan Thomas Murner became one of the Reformation's most determined opponents. Different people reading the same text could come to drastically different understandings. We shall explore this variety and its implications for any account of the early Reformation movement.