On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church

Readers of Murner's treatises would have had to puzzle out Luther's views from Murner's re-presentation. Their challenge would depend upon the issue. Certainly most nuances would be lost. The rationale underlying various theological positions would also be obscured. But the positions themselves would to varying degrees probably get through, although assuredly in a form far less convincing than Luther would have wanted. Still, in the early stages of a media campaign, the proponents of change would likely benefit from the further propagation of even a distorted message and the acknowledgment that the message was serious enough to warrant refutation. Murner's voice colored but it did not completely obscure Luther's program. This was the predicament that all Catholic publicists faced when they chose to respond to Luther's writings.

But what are we to think of the remarkable decision by Murner to translate Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church from Latin into German? By Luther's charge—in print—and by Murner's

own admission—also in print—it was Luther's "poisonous friend," Thomas Murner, who did the German translation. Luther claimed that Murner had done the translation in order to "disgrace me." Murner rejoined that he had done the translation to the best of his abilities without any falsifications. If the book was a disgrace to Luther, Murner wrote, then Luther had disgraced himself because Murner was not the author but only the translator. The Evangelical publicist Michael Stifel, discussed in the next chapter, disputed this in print, arguing that he had seen Murner's manuscript and that Murner had falsified more than translated. Whatever the truth of this accusation—and Stifel, as one of Murner's most vociferous opponents, was hardly an impartial observer—the published translation followed Luther's Latin treatise fairly closely. Stifel himself conceded that the falsifications did not make it into the printed work, although he of course gave Murner no credit for this. To the extent that Murner's translation made it into print unchanged, the only notable deviation from the Latin was the occasional use of colloquial terms that were slightly stronger than the Latin original.^[80] The printed version is, on the whole, a reasonably faithful translation.

For our purposes the interesting question is why Murner chose, by translating it into German, to make broadly available one of his opponent's most important treatises. As we have seen, Murner sharply criticized Luther for discussing matters of faith before the common people in German. Yet in this case, Luther had chosen to limit his critical discussion of traditional sacramental theology to those who could read Latin. It was Murner, then, who opened the debate to the broader reading public. Why did he do this?

Michael Stifel suggested that he did this for money (seven guldens' payment) and to bring Luther into disrepute through mistranslations and falsifications.^[81] Murner himself denied any falsification and contended that any disrepute that accrued to Luther was Luther's own fault as the treatise's author. I am inclined to find Murner's own explanation plausible. He apparently believed that Luther condemned himself with his own words. From Murner's perspective, that is from the context in which he read Luther, the message of this treatise did more harm than good to Luther's cause. But of course many people read Murner's translation and were convinced rather than offended. This is the seemingly paradoxical outcome when we consider not what Luther intended but how he was understood, when we consider how a treatise was variously received by the reading public. Catholic publi-

cists could propagate ideas they deplored in the mistaken belief that that which repelled them would repel others. This irony was another element of the Catholic dilemma.

In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church Luther attacked that aspect of the institutional church probably nearest to the laity's everyday experience, the institutional church's control over and claims for the sacraments. Of the seven traditional sacraments, the Mass, confession, and marriage (or at least the rules surrounding the sacrament of marriage) most influenced laity on a daily basis. But all the sacraments with the possible exception of the sacrament of orders were important to laity at one point or another during their journey through life. Several of the sacraments—especially baptism, the Mass, penance—were represented by the institutional church as crucial to lay salvation and under the discretionary control of the church. To be saved, the lay person needed the sacramental mediation of the institutional church.

Luther challenged this claim. He denied that there were seven sacraments. At first he argued that only three of the traditional seven—baptism, the Mass, and confession—were established by Jesus and possessed the requisite sign and promise. By the end of the treatise, however, Luther had concluded that confession was not a sacrament since it lacked a visible sign. Instead, Luther subsumed the sacrament of penance under the baptismal promise to which the penitent repeatedly returned.

When he turned to the sacraments themselves, Luther began with the Mass and devoted the most attention to this sacrament. The Mass impinged on the lay life in a variety of ways. From daily masses in the local churches to private and votive masses for the living and the dead, from Corpus Christi processions to the restriction of lay communion to the bread (with the wine reserved for the priest), and in the large clerical population needed to staff this multiplication of masses, the Mass was the sacrament that most clearly exemplified clerical claims, justified a large clerical population, and reminded laity of their dependence on the institutional church. Luther effectively demolished this whole structure. He charged that Rome had subjected the sacrament to three captivities: the tyrannical withholding of the cup from the laity, the insistence on the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the claim that the Mass was a good work and sacrifice. Underlying his attack on these three "captivities" was the insistence that the Mass or sacrament of the altar was "Christ's testament that, dying, he left behind him to be distributed to his faithful."^[82] The Mass "is a promise

of the remission [ablassung ] of sins done for us by God, which promise was confirmed by the death of God's son."^[83] Since the Mass was a promise, access was gained "with no works, no powers, no merits but only with faith."^[84] On this basis Luther attacked the claims of priestly mediation and all the institutions that sprang from this claim. "Therefore it is a manifest and wicked error," Luther insisted,

that the Mass should be sacrificed [geopffert ] or done for sins, for satisfaction, for the dead, or for any other of our needs. You will easily understand this to be true if you firmly hold that the Mass is a divine promise that cannot be of use to anyone else, cannot be provided to anyone else, cannot help anyone else, cannot be commonly shared with anyone else except only those who believe with their own faith.^[85]

With this insistence on personal faith, the traditional claim of the mediatory role of the priesthood was severely compromised and the wealth of traditional practices surrounding the Mass, not to mention the employment of many priests, was thrown in question.

In the course of his treatment of the remaining six traditional sacraments, Luther challenged a range of other established practices and argued for positions more congenial to lay concerns. He insisted, for example, that in baptism Christians were freed and should not have new spiritual obligations imposed upon them. He attacked the customary practices of confession for stressing the human acts of contrition, confession, and satisfaction and suppressing the promise of forgiveness. He proposed relaxing the degrees of relationship that prohibited marriage between even distant relations, and he argued for divorce or even extramarital relations in certain situations. He argued that ordination was not a sacrament and left no indelible mark on the person ordained. All who were baptized were equally priests, and those to whom the public ministry was committed by the consent of the community or by the call of a superior were no different from any other Christian. Their public ministry was to preach the Word. Those who failed to preach the Word—whatever else they might do reading hours or saying mass—were no true priests. Priests should be permitted to marry. These are but a few of a range of challenging assertions this treatise contained.

If Murner translated On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church in the belief that Luther's own argument would bring him into disrepute, which of these many challenges did Murner see as most discrediting? This can only be inferred, but as we shall see in a later chapter, there are two themes in this treatise that were singled out for the most atten-

tion by Catholic writers, namely, Luther's position on the Mass and his position on the priesthood of all baptized Christians. Both arguments undercut the traditional authority and status of the clerical estate, especially the priesthood. This would certainly offend some of the clergy, but did Murner really expect laity would also take offense? Apparently so, which raises once again the fascinating question of how Murner could have read Luther as he did. Did he view matters from so clerical a perspective that he failed to realize that the laity might actually be attracted to this frontal assault on clerical authority? Such naïveté would have been incongruous for a publicist who designated Luther as a "seducer of simple Christians."

Be that as it may, by translating On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church into German, Murner also assured that some laity would be convinced by Luther's position once given the opportunity to become acquainted with Luther's view of the sacraments. Given the numerous reprints of this German translation, it seems likely that it found more interest (and approval) among the reading public than Murner would have preferred.