Chapter Three—
The Catholic Dilemma

For almost two years the vernacular press of Strasbourg had been virtually silent on the growing estrangement between Luther and the papacy. The silence came to a strident end in the fall of 1520. In a series of vernacular pamphlets Luther rejected the authority of the papacy, claimed that pope and curia had perpetrated a series of frauds on Christendom, and called for Christendom's liberation from a papal captivity that distorted the sacraments and subordinated the laity to a clerical tyranny. In rebuttal an anonymous author issued a series of counterattacks that portrayed Luther as "the destroyer of the faith of Christ," and as "a seducer of simple Christians,"^[1] seeking to overturn all authority in society by inappropriately involving the common people in a debate over traditional belief and practice. The propaganda battle was joined, and at its crux lay the issue of authority: who was to decide the true content and character of Christendom. From the outset the Catholic apologist was at a serious disadvantage in this battle, for both the medium and the message favored the Evangelical position.

By their very nature as objects, vernacular pamphlets were the physical embodiment of a message. Multiplied by the art of printing into hundreds of exact copies, cheap to buy and handy to pass around, these pamphlets were in some sense what they contained: an address to the laity to become involved in an unprecedented way in their own religious destiny. Anyone could buy a pamphlet. And anyone who could read it, or have it read, became a participant in the debate and

was asked to take sides. A pamphlet was not privileged communication. It circumvented discussion and decision in narrow circles—it opened to scrutiny papal fiat, conciliar decrees, city council rulings, and princely mandates—and asked the public to make up its own mind. Even if it urged ultimate deference toward hierarchy and authority, as most of these pamphlets in fact did, by presenting the issues to the public it implicitly invited the public into the discussion to a degree unprecedented in Western history.

In Luther's case, there was a congruence between the means—pamphlets addressed to the laity of the empire—and the message—that lay people should not allow the clergy fraudulently to claim that they mediated between the laity and God. By their very nature as an address to a large (and largely lay) audience, they were subversive of the hierarchical views of many contemporaries. And their message reinforced that potential, for it urged an end to the many distinctions that had grown up between members of what were termed the "spiritual" and "worldly" estates, the clergy and the laity.

It is this subversion of traditional views of authority, both by means of pamphlets and by means of the pamphlets' message, that became the target of the Catholic counterattack. Yet by a subtle irony, the very means chosen to rebut Luther—vernacular pamphlets attacking him and his message—undercut the message the authors intended to convey, namely, that it was dangerous and inappropriate to air before the "common people" disputes over religion. By their very existence the Catholic pamphlets did what they argued should not be done.

The rebuttal itself posed a further dilemma, for to refute Luther Catholic controversialists had to describe the position they opposed. The controversialist would of course present Luther's message in unfavorable terms. But even in the most damning of presentations, readers would learn of Luther's radical reformulation of Christian teaching and practice. In the early years of the Reformation movement, Luther needed above all to get his message out. Even a distorted account could peak interest and lead readers to seek out the source of the dangerous but nonetheless intriguing ideas. Inadvertently and ironically, the Catholic counterattack necessarily helped propagate the very message it wished to expunge.

Not to reply was to surrender much of the vernacular reading public to Luther and his friends. To reply was to further by both message and medium the position of the Evangelicals. This was the Catholic dilemma.

The Fall Publications

The first person to reply to Luther in the Strasbourg vernacular press was the Franciscan jurist, theologian, and satirist Thomas Murner. In quick succession he issued five anonymous treatises, the titles of which illustrate the progression of Murner's concerns. His first treatise suggested in its title both qualified deference to the "highly learned doctor" and a concern that at least in regards to the Mass, Luther had parted company with common Christianity: A Christian and Fraternal Admonition to the Highly Learned Doctor Martin Luther of the Augustinian Order at Wittenberg, That He Distance Himself From Several Statements He Made Concerning the New Testament of the Holy Mass and That He Join Himself Once Again With Common Christianity . It left the press of the Strasbourg printer Johannes Grüninger on 11 November 1520.^[2]

This treatise was in fact largely a reply to Luther's A Sermon on the New Testament, That Is, On the Holy Mass , his To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation , and his On the Papacy in Rome, Against the Highly Famous Romanist at Leipzig . Murner's first effort generated sufficient interest to warrant a second, slightly revised edition, that appeared on 21 January 1521. His next treatise, Concerning Doctor Martin Luther's Teaching and Preaching, That They Are Suspicious and Not To Be Considered Completely Trustworthy , was published on 24 November 1520.^[3] Its title alerted readers to approach Luther and his teachings with caution. The treatise itself was largely a response to an anonymous defender of Luther whom we know was the Nuremberg city secretary Lazarus Spengler and whose treatise we examined in the last chapter.^[4]

The third treatise, Concerning the Papacy, That Is, the Highest Authority of Christian Faith, Against Doctor Martin Luther , issued from Grüninger's press on 13 December 1520.^[5] A reply to the Latin Luther's Resolutions on the Power of the Pope of 1519, and to the German To the Christian Nobility and On the Papacy at Rome , its title indicated that Luther opposed the papacy. The fourth treatise of this anonymous series appeared in 1520 around Christmas and was entitled To the Most Mighty and Enlightened Nobility of the German Nation, That They Protect the Christian Faith Against the Destroyer of the Faith of Christ, Martin Luther, a Seducer of Simple Christians .^[6] Its title summed up the underlying message Murner was attempting to convey to the reading public in all his treatises, namely, that Luther

threatened the destruction of Christian authority through a seductive but heretical appeal to "simple Christians." The concluding and somewhat anticlimactic treatise of Murner's series, How Doctor M. Luther, Moved by the Wrong Reasons, Has Burned the Canon Law , appeared on 17 February 1521, and attacked Luther's justification for this act of defiance.^[7]

The treatises to which Murner replied were for the most part published in Strasbourg, and it is quite possible that Murner was using Strasbourg editions in preparing his rebuttals. Luther's A Sermon on the New Testament, That Is, On the Holy Mass was reprinted in Strasbourg sometime after July 1520.^[8] In it he challenged the traditional understanding of the Mass and offered an alternative vision that undercut many traditional practices and seriously enhanced the religious status of the laity at the expense of the clergy.^[9] In On the Papacy at Rome, Against the Highly Famous Romanist in Leipzig , printed sometime after the Wittenberg first edition of 26 June 1520,^[10] Luther disputed the assertion that the papacy was of divine institution and that those who did not adhere to Rome were necessarily heretics and schismatics. It was followed by To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Improvement of the Christian Estate , which appeared first in Wittenberg on 18 August 1520. In this impassioned treatise Luther attacked the "Romanists" for claiming that the "temporal power" had no jurisdiction over them, that only the pope might interpret the Scriptures, and that no one but the pope could call a council. It aroused such interest among the reading public that it was immediately reprinted in Strasbourg at least once and perhaps as many as three times in the space of just a few months.^[11] Sometime after 6 October 1520 this treatise was joined by two or three printings of a German translation of On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church .^[12] As the title suggests, it argued that the church was being held prisoner in exile like the people of Israel. Luther proceeded to free it from its captivity by assailing the institutional church's claim to act as a sacramental mediator between God and humanity.^[13] Surprisingly, given Murner's published views about exposing Luther's subversive ideas to the general public, it was Murner himself who apparently translated this treatise into German! Two of these treatises—To the Christian Nobility and On the Papacy at Rome —may also have appeared sometime in the late fall in a collection that included Luther's A Sermon on the New Testament, that is, the Holy Mass .^[14]

It is striking that Murner chose not to reply to, or for that matter even to mention, the highly influential On the Freedom of a Christian , which appeared in Luther's own German translation in one or two printings in the last month or so of 1520 (and several subsequent printings in 1521, 1522, and 1524).^[15] I have no explanation for this remarkable omission.

"Matters of Faith Should Not Be Disputed before the Ignorant Common Folk"

Murner generally replied point-by-point to Luther's arguments. For our purposes, however, the details of his refutation are less important than the general message he attempted to convey. That message can be briefly summarized and broken into several components. Luther was a religious demagogue whose writings challenged traditional authority and threatened to overturn the established order. First, although Luther was a highly learned and skilled theologian, his theology offered a mixture of truth and falsehood that could easily mislead "simple Christians" not only into religious error but also into rebellion against authority. Second, despite his claims to the contrary, Luther would not submit his theology to any authority, be it the papacy, ecumenical councils, the Greek or Latin Fathers, scholastic theologians, or ecclesiastical law. This unwillingness promoted a disregard for authority among the common people. Third, Luther attacked a number of widely recognized and deplorable abuses within the institutional church, but the existence of these abuses did not justify his changing the traditional faith. His attack on abuses did, however, gain Luther a popular following that could easily be incited to violence and rebellion against proper authority. Fourth, Luther was attempting to subvert the traditional order of society and promote rebellion when he challenged the authority of the papacy and when he asserted that the distinction between the spiritual and temporal (worldly) estate was a deceit intended to enrich the clergy at the laity's expense and that, in fact, all baptized Christians were priests.

With each of these four points Murner emphasized the effect of Luther's teachings on the common people. It was highly inappropriate and dangerous, Murner insisted in each of these treatises, that Luther was involving what Murner termed the "rebellious and ignorant commoners [gemein ],"^[16] the "unlearned and rebellious commoners

[gemein ],"^[17] or "Karsthans"—the eponymous hoe-carrying peasant^[18] —in a debate over religious issues. Commoners could not separate the "sound and Christian" from that which was "false and mixed with poison [and] also pungent with acidic comments [auch vff den essich stechend ]."^[19] The "pious simple Christian" did not understand how subtly falsehood [unwahrheit ] is mixed with truth and the devilish angel transforms itself into the angel of light."^[20] Even worse, a public debate encouraged the commoners to take matters into their own hands, thereby subverting proper authority and promoting rebellion. Even legitimate reforms, as some of those Luther listed in his book "to the German nobility," Murner insisted, should not be paraded before the ignorant common folk, who might, like the Bohemians before them, attempt to undertake the reforms themselves and end up murdering priests and monks, whom Luther had sharply criticized.^[21]

So concerned was Murner about the subversive potential of airing such disputes in vernacular publications that he devoted a whole section of Concerning Doctor Martin Luther's Teaching and Preaching to the proposition that "matters of faith should not be disputed before the ignorant common folk."^[22] In this section he marshaled the objections also found scattered through his other treatises. He started with a blanket assertion. Whether Luther's teachings were true, as Spengler in his Defense asserted, or false, as Murner was convinced, they should not in principle be discussed before the common people because they dealt with matters of faith. To defend this principle, he offered the analogy that city councils should not discuss their business publicly even though they dealt with issues touching on the welfare of all.^[23] Imperial law forbade open discussions of faith because, among other things, "such public justification of the faith causes great scandal among Jews and other unbelievers" and also caused "great scandal and disobedience among ignorant Christians." "As we unfortunately now can clearly see," Murner continued, "not many Christians have been moved to reverence by doctor Martin's teaching but only to rebellion [and] to stealing two of the pope's crowns," that is, to a denial of papal authority in both spiritual and temporal realms. The "ignorant Christians" had been moved "not to obedience but rather to despise the ban along with the bishops, to electing bishops themselves 'behind the oven and over wine' [that is, informally and frivolously], [and] to priests marrying their maids in a thievish fashion." To put the matter briefly, people had now turned away from the good, paid no attention to bishops or anyone else, and simply announced, "I no lon-

ger obey anyone, I am a good Lutheran." That was the end result of Luther's teachings. That was its fruit. And for this reason everyone should be kept from teaching such things publicly. "I am concerned that Luther's teaching will soon prove with deeds whether it is of God or of the devil," Murner wrote, "for the teaching of God serves peace and unity and [the teaching] of the devil [promotes] contempt of authority with rebellion."^[24]

Murner had put the Catholic case clearly. Matters of faith should be left to proper authority to decide. To bring the common people into the debate, even on legitimate reforms, was to subvert proper authority and to promote rebellion. Murner was especially upset that Luther had decided to air these issues in the vernacular. "Previously you have published Latin books that have brought you much fame," Murner wrote at one point, "But now you have begun to answer every cuckoo in its own terms, to repay each insult with an insult, to speak slanderously and unworthily of the pope and the highest authorities of faith in Europe, to your own disgrace, so that I pity you greatly that you have so completely forgotten your moderation.^[25]

This concern for the deleterious consequences of vernacular pamphlets in which religious issues were debated runs like a red thread through Murner's treatises. It is a concern voiced repeatedly by other Catholic publicists in subsequent years,^[26] a concern that made the Catholic counterattack in the press so conflicted. We may wonder what the "common people" thought of this argument when they read or heard it in the vernacular. Even if they agreed with Murner or the other early Catholic controversialists in principle, in the very reading or hearing they were violating this principle. The medium subverted the message.

The Catholic Dilemma, Part Two

We have already noted the irony that by entering the public arena to refute Luther's views, Murner and other Catholic publicists ran the risk of promoting and propagating what they opposed. To refute Luther, first Catholic publicists had to explain what Luther was about. In so doing, they conveyed information that might actually attract readers rather than repel them. This has important implications for the historian attempting to understand the progress of the Reformation movement. It is common in historical accounts to start with Luther's treatises and then describe the Catholic replies. But if we ask how

Luther's contemporaries learned of his views, we cannot assume that they always started with Luther's own works. To be sure, publication statistics—the large number of printings and reprintings—suggest that as a matter of probability most readers did start with Luther's own publications. But some Strasbourg readers may have first learned about the substance of these challenging new publications not from Luther but from his anonymous critic.

Historians also need to remember that to live in the middle of great events is to live in confusion. It takes time to separate the significant from the unimportant, the lasting from the ephemeral. Accordingly, we need to be careful not to allow the knowledge of the outcome of these crucial months to get in the way of recapturing the shock and surprise of late 1520, the feeling that things could go in many directions, the uncertainty about how the public controversy would be resolved. The Strasbourg reading public and those with whom they shared their reading were sufficiently taken with several of Luther's treatises that their demand prompted several reprints. But they did not know, as we know now, that three of these treatises—To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church , and On the Freedom of a Christian —would be among the most important treatises Luther ever published. They did not know, as we know now, that these treatises marked a turning point, perhaps the turning point that led to the Reformation movement and the eventual foundation of Protestantism. They did not know that the anonymous author who replied to Luther was the Franciscan author, satirist, and doctor of theology and both laws, Thomas Murner.^[27] They did not know who would prevail in this public confrontation, whose words would last and whose words would soon be forgotten. They did not know which position would be more appealing or convincing until they read or heard about Luther's views and read or heard about the views of his challenger.

Even if Murner's rebuttals were a reader's first detailed introduction to Luther, the reader would have nevertheless learned a great deal about Luther and what he stood for, albeit through a hostile lens. Consider, for example, Murner's first treatise, A Christian and Fraternal Admonition .^[28] If readers had gotten no further than the foreword,^[29] which was addressed to Martin Luther, they would have still learned several things about Luther. For example, they would know that Luther had recently published some theses. He had repeatedly appealed to the pope, to a better informed pope, and to a council, and

had then criticized even the council's authority. He had issued "one book after another."^[30] In these books he attacked abuses in the church, arguing, among other things, that it was better to believe Christ than the pope and better to accept the Bible alone than the decisions of councils or church fathers. Others, under Luther's influence, had also been publishing on these issues.^[31] In the body of the treatise, readers would learn that Luther taught that the community could select its preacher and that once the priest gave up his office, he was no longer a priest.^[32] Luther attacked abuses in the holy Christian church,^[33] and in his book To the Christian Nobility he offered numerous suggestions for reform of the papacy.^[34]

Since it was the target of a large section of the treatise, readers would have learned that Luther had written a treatise about the Mass, which he called the "new testament." In this work he apparently suggested that priests had fabricated their view of the Mass simply to gain money, that the Mass was no good work, and that masses read for their benefit were in fact of no value to the living or the dead.^[35] The Gospel and its words, Luther argued, should be preferred over honorable custom or tradition.^[36] He criticized "human additions" to the Mass and would allow people to participate without the traditional preparation.^[37] He favored using German in the Mass.^[38] He charged that it was the devil that inspired the silent recitation of the canon of the Mass.^[39] He argued that the Sacrament should be used in an assembly of Christians to strengthen and awaken faith, to admonish one another, to promote the "new testament" concerning the forgiveness of sins; in so doing each Christian acted as a priest or priestess.^[40] The Mass, according to Luther, was neither a sacrifice nor a good work of use to another.^[41] He objected to withholding the cup from the laity.^[42] Finally, Luther advocated a "spiritual" church with Christ at its head rather than the rope.^[43]

The trick for the reader of A Christian and Fraternal Admonition or any of Murner's other pamphlets was, of course, to separate the relatively neutral information from the heavy freight of his criticism. It was an even greater challenge for the reader to see through the distortions that may have entered into Murner's re-presentation. A few examples on a common theme may illustrate the difficulties as well as the possibilities.

The three major targets of Murner's disapproval—A Sermon on the New Testament, On the Papacy at Rome , and To the Christian Nobility —have one important motif in common: each insisted that

since faith alone saved, every baptized and believing Christian was a true priest and there was no difference between Christians in this regard. Accordingly, Luther denied the validity of the contemporary distinction between the spiritual and secular (lay) estate and argued that it served only to allow the clergy to take advantage of the laity.

In re-presenting this argument, Murner confused Luther's distinction between the two realms—that is, the two ways in which, Luther said, God ruled the spiritual and secular world—with the traditional distinction between the two estates, laity and clergy. It cannot be determined whether this confusion was willful or inadvertent, a polemical distortion or a "natural" misreading due to Murner's particular mindset. It was a confusion, however, that allowed Murner to conclude that Luther was attempting to do away with the clergy and over-throw all distinctions of rank and hierarchy.

On the matter of the priesthood, consider what Luther said in A Sermon on the New Testament, That Is, the Holy Mass . Here he explained to his readers that in the Mass God offered a divine promise of forgiveness. For their part, human beings simply had to accept this gift and faithfully believe this divine promise.^[44] Therefore Luther insisted that the Mass was a sacrament, not a sacrifice offered by the priest. To be sure, Christians offered through Christ a sacrifice of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving and their very selves.^[45] "Thus it becomes clear," he concluded, "that not only the priest offers the sacrifice of the Mass but each one [offers] his own faith." This was the true priestly office, through which Christ was offered before God as a sacrifice. Therefore, everyone was equally a spiritual priest before God.^[46]

In his restatement Murner understood Luther to say that the sacrament of the Mass should be celebrated "in an assembly of Christians to strengthen and awaken their faith in the promise of Christ, to admonish each other in this regard, and to promote the testament regarding the forgiveness of sins." The reader of Murner would get this part of Luther straight, but that was about all. It did not follow from this, Murner continued, that everyone was a priest or priestess. Only consecration made a priest. "Therefore you have misused in an incomprehensible way the words priest and priestess with the result that the laity has become highly angry about the matter and already thinks that priests are no longer necessary for the practice of the Sacrament."^[47] Consecration was of course, from Murner's perspective, the way a person moved from the laity, the secular estate, to the ordained clergy within the spiritual estate. A person was in either one estate or the

other. So it seemed nonsensical to him to assert that lay people were priests, even "spiritual" priests. Murner and Luther were using the distinction spiritual and secular differently, but Murner did not acknowledge this. Perhaps he was not even aware of the equivocation. If readers were first introduced to Luther's priesthood of all baptized Christians through Murner's re-presentation, they would have learned that Luther taught that all Christians were priests, but they would likely have been at a loss for Luther's rationale.

Murner was even more upset by the way in which Luther drew the consequences from his conviction that faith alone made the true priest. In A Sermon on the New Testament , Luther asserted, for example, that "all Christian men are priests, all women priestesses, be they young or old, master or servant, mistress or maid, learned or lay. Here there is no difference, unless faith be unequal."^[48] In To the Christian Nobility , Luther declared even more pointedly that all Christians were of the spiritual estate and there was no difference among them except one of office, because all Christians had the same baptism, the same gospel, and the same faith, which alone made a spiritual and Christian people.^[49] "Thus it follows from this that there is basically no other difference than one of office or task, and not of estate, between laity, priests, princes, bishops, and, as they say, spiritual and worldly [estates], for they are all of the spiritual estate and true priests, bishops, and popes but not with the same tasks."^[50] From passages like these Murner concluded that Luther sought to erase all social distinctions. As he explained to the emperor in his To the Most Mighty and Enlightened Nobility of the German Nation , Luther was a rebel who stirred up civil uprisings and promoted the downfall of the fatherland, setting "father against his child, brother against brother, subjects against their authorities" and so mixing things up "that neither pope, emperor, king, bishop, bath attendant, or pig-herder will any longer be distinguishable" one from another.^[51] Murner urged the emperor and German nobility to forestall the incipient rebellion and to protect "our faith" against Luther, "who has robbed you all of your noble estate and turned you into priests."^[52] Whether a willful distortion or a misreading that is explicable given Murner's clerical point of view, this re-presentation bears little resemblance to Luther's position.

In On the Papacy at Rome , Luther treated at length "what 'Christendom' and 'head of Christendom' mean" and, in the process, concluded that Christendom was an "assembly of all believers in Christ throughout the earth."^[53] This was a spiritual rather than a physical

assembly; the "natural, real, right, essential Christianity exists in the Spirit and in no external things, whatever it may be called," Luther insisted.^[54] The visible church including pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and other members of the "so-called spiritual estate" and the external worship they produced was not Christendom, although this community and these estates would always contain people who were true Christians, keeping the visible church spiritually "alive" just as a soul animated the body.^[55] It was faith that made true priests and Christians in the soul, not membership in the "so-called spiritual estates" or the institutional church.^[56] Murner once again either did not understand or would not accept Luther's redefinition of the spiritual-secular distinction. "In the same manner in which you [deal with] the spiritual church," Murner wrote, "you also deal with the spiritual Mass [claiming] that it was an assembly of Christians [gathered] to observe the passion of our lord in a strong faith, to promote the new and eternal testament concerning the forgiveness of sin." And this led to a false dichotomy. "You sever the spiritual Mass from all bodily and external things, as if we had no need of bodily ordained priests but rather baptism has made us all priests and priestesses."^[57] Murner of course identified the true church with the institutional church with the pope as its head. To speak of "spiritual Christendom" was to mislead people into believing that they could ignore the authority of the actual, institutional church and its leaders. Murner's reworking would, once again, leave his reader with the bare substance of Luther's position but rather in the dark about Luther's theological reasoning.

So it would appear that readers who were first introduced to Luther through Murner's writings would likely come away with a severely skewed view of some central tenets such as the priesthood of all baptized Christians. They would learn that Luther claimed that all Christians were priests through their faith, but they would have at best a distorted grasp of Luther's rationale. On other, perhaps less theological matters, the readers of Murner's treatises might neither need nor particularly care about the underlying justification—the position itself would be sufficient. Consider two examples: Luther's violent opposition to the papacy and his appeal to the laity to take matters into its own hands.

Luther's three treatises gave Murner considerable reason to conclude that Luther had rejected papal authority. While all three treatises named various abuses within the church and proposed reforms that

drastically challenged current church practice, On the Papacy at Rome and To the Christian Nobility went on to attribute many of these abuses to the papacy. In On the Papacy at Rome , Luther stated openly that "all evil examples of spiritual and worldly knavery flow out of Rome and into all the world as if from a sea of all wickedness."^[58] The papal claims to be of divine order were made for the sake of money, from confirming bishops and priests to issuing indulgences.^[59] "Because money is involved, whatever they think must be of divine order."^[60] Luther attacked, among other thing, the papal demand for clerical celibacy, papal laws regarding fasting, papal claims of superiority over temporal authority, and papal misuse of the keys.^[61] Christ's command to "tend my sheep" meant "in Romanish,"

to oppress Christendom with many human, destructive laws; to sell the bishop's cape for as much as possible; to rip annates from every benefice; to take to themselves all foundations; to turn all bishops into [their] servants through horrible oaths; to sell indulgences; to tax the whole world with letters, bulls, lead [and] wax [seals]; to forbid the preaching of the Gospel, to occupy the whole world with knaves from Rome, to gather all quarrels to themselves [for adjudication], [and thereby] to increase disputes and quarrels. In short [they] do not allow anyone to come to the truth or have peace.^[62]

In To the Christian Nobility , Luther escalated his attack against the "Romanists." He accused them of cleverly constructing three defenses against reform, thus greatly damaging Christendom. He rejected as "a fine fabrication and hypocrisy" [ein feyn Coment^[*]vnd gleyssen ] the Romanists's first defense, their claim to be the "spiritual estate" distinct from the laity and with special privileges.^[63] The Romanists' second defense—their claim that only the pope could interpret Scripture and in so doing, could not err—he labeled a "wanton, made-up fable" contrary to Scripture.^[64] To the third defense—that only a pope could convene a council—he replied that when the pope acted contrary to Scripture, he was to be reproved and corrected by authority of a council.^[65] "It is the power of the devil and the Antichrist that resists that which serves to improve Christendom," Luther stated. "Therefore it is not at all to be followed but rather resisted with body, goods, and all that we are capable of."^[66]

Luther's conclusion was stark. "With this I hope that the false, lying terror with which the Romans have long intimidated us and confused our consciences should lie defeated," he said, adding that he hoped that they would be made subject to the temporal sword "just like the

rest of us," stripped of the power to interpret Scripture "on the basis of mere force without skill" and unable "to fend off a council or to bind or obligate it according to their whims and take away its freedom." Until these changes were made, the Romans were "truly of the fellowship of the Antichrist and the devil" and had "nothing of Christ except the name."^[67]

From the pope's ostentatious style of life to the various ways that the papacy gained control of and taxed benefices and sold dispensations of all sorts from its own canon law, the theme running through the remainder of his treatise was that the papacy was fleecing the Germans and that reforms should be instituted to reduce Rome's centralized authority and to stop the flow of gold from Germany to Rome.^[68] Luther had frequent occasion to characterize the papacy as a band of robbers doing the devil's and perhaps even the Antichrist's work. "Since, then, such devilish rule is not only public robbery, deceit, and the tyranny of the portals of hell, but destructive to the body and soul of Christendom," he summed up, "it is our responsibility to spare no effort to fend off such affliction and destruction of Christendom." He even posed the rhetorical yet still threatening question, "If we properly hang thieves and behead robbers, why should we allow Roman greed to go free, since it is the greatest thief and robber that has or could come to earth, and [it does] all [of its robbery] in the sacred name of Christ and St. Peter?"^[69]

Murner's description of these attacks is reasonably faithful to bare charges while putting a quite different interpretation on the motives underlying the attacks. According to Murner, Luther's attack on abuses within the institutional church and the papacy was a pretext to stir up the common people. Luther, Murner remarked, "under the cover and appearance of doing away with the many abuses in the Christian churches wishes to lead the poor simple [people] into an erroneous faith and errors in Christian truth."^[70] Murner could no longer stand by and watch. Instead, he had "to spring to the rescue and protection of the pious simple Christian man."^[71] Luther and his supporters claimed that they only sought to lighten the monetary burdens imposed by the papacy on the German nation, but in fact they made accusations against the papacy about burdens and exactions in order to protect and maintain among the commoners error and falsehood concerning the Christian faith and to promote disobedience against authority.^[72]

Murner's recurring refrain was that Luther sought to promote rebellion by abusing the clerical estate in writings aimed at the common people. "There are many who think that you thirst for the blood of the clergy since you have thrown such great and, as they say, undeserved ill-will, suspicion, and hatred on them." Luther did not publish anything that did not "slander and abuse the pope, all the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops along with the whole clerical estate."^[73] If, as Luther recommended, the cloisters were closed, churches destroyed, and endowed masses ended, and people deprived thereby of their property, "we would throw things into such confusion that a child would slay or strangle its parents, one brother, the other, a friend, his friend."^[74] The Hussites and their bloodshed served as an admonitory example, and the author repeatedly suggested the parallels between Luther and his followers and Hus and the Hussites.^[75]

Murner certainly did not misread Luther's desire to incite the laity, or at least the lay rulers, to action against the institutional church, although Murner placed it in a most unfavorable light. In On the Papacy at Rome , Luther announced that he would "tolerate" letting kings, princes, and the rest of the nobility keep the "knaves of Rome" from their streets and prohibit papal fees for new bishops or benefices.^[76] In his To the Christian Nobility he announced in its very title that lay temporal authorities had to reform the Christian estate. As he explained in his prefatory letter to the Nicholas von Amsdorf, he was bringing together various suggestions for Christian reform and laying them before the Christian nobility of the German nation in the hope that God might help his church through the laity since the clergy, to whom the task more properly belonged, was faithless and negligent.^[77] The priesthood of all the baptized gave them the right to act since the clergy would not. The temporal authorities were "fellow Christians, fellow priests, fellow members of the spiritual estate [mitgeystlich ], and fellow lords [mitmechtig ] in all things" and were therefore in the best position to call a free council.^[78]

All this was rather heady stuff. No wonder Murner concluded that Luther was attempting to incite the laity to action against the church. He was. But for Murner this was the wrong way to go about reforming abuses. It not only bypassed legitimate authority, it directly subverted that authority. It violated the distinctions of rank and responsibility that Murner believed society depended upon and advocated that the laity leave its proper sphere and interfere in the spiritual estate. As

Murner put it, Luther "has also misused his noble skill and understanding and the Holy Scripture for a rebellious, unpeaceful also unchristian purpose," namely, to use the German nobility "to seduce the other poor sheep of Christ into unbelief."^[79] Worst of all from Murner's perspective, it invited the "rebellious and ignorant common people" to become involved in a debate that was properly the private business of their "betters."

In the early years of the Reformation movement, even many literate people would have had only a vague notion of why Luther opposed the papacy. If Murner was one of their original sources, especially on Luther's opposition to the papacy and to many traditional beliefs and practices of the Western church, they would have learned quite a bit about his positions, albeit in a hostile and frequently distorting light. Still, even a distorted picture could intrigue readers and lead to further exploration in Luther's own writings. And some of the very issues that distressed Murner—Luther's attacks on the papacy and the clergy, and his appeal to the laity—may well have actually recommended Luther to those members of the laity who were themselves hostile towards the papacy or clergy or both. The hook could be set by anti-Roman, anti-papal, and anticlerical appeals, and the theological rationale could follow afterwards as the reader explored what was behind the attacks.

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.

The Catholic Controversial Effort

Murner was only one Catholic publicist among many, but the dilemma he faced was also faced by his colleagues. In entering the publishing arena, he worked, as we have seen, at a substantial disadvantage. Both the medium and his message cut against his cause. He received no support from Catholic authorities and only ridicule and abuse from the various Evangelical publicists who sprang to Luther's defense.^[86] While he continued gamely on for a time, he eventually had to quit Strasbourg and henceforth found it extraordinarily difficult to have any of his works published. His fellow Catholic publicists fared little better.

In the crucial early years of the Reformation, suggestions for a coordinated and well-financed effort to answer Evangelical publications were made but found no response from higher ecclesiastical authorities. Four of the six leading Catholic publicists (see table 10) were supported not by ecclesiastical authorities but by the layman Duke Georg of Albertine (Ducal) Saxony. Other authors outside Albertine Saxony did not do as well. The Catholic historian Hubert Jedin has detailed the difficulties of early Catholic publicists in gaining occasional support or even attention from higher Catholic authorities.^[87]

Although several proposals were made in the mid-1520s to support Catholic publicists, none were put into effect. The papal legate Girolamo Aleander (1480–1542), for example, recommended in 1523 that a list of Catholic controversial writers be compiled for each diocese and that benefices or other forms of remuneration be found for these men.^[88] But his advice was not followed. Similar suggestions in 1524 by the Breslau Bishop Jakob von Salza and in 1525 by the vicar-general of the diocese of Constance, and later bishop of Vienna, Johannes Fabri (1478–1541), met with similar inaction.^[89] Citing Aleander's disparaging evaluation of the Catholic controversial writings published up to 1523,^[90] Jedin observes that this view seems to have been shared by the curia and its representatives throughout the reign of Pope Clement VII (r. 1523–1534). Although they occasionally rewarded the Catholic publicists, for the most part they held them and their services in contempt, and nothing was done to promote or coordinate the Catholic response to the Evangelical use of the press.^[91]

It was under Pope Paul III (r. 1534–1549), more than a decade after the beginning of the Reformation movement, that Catholic publicists first received some regular support from the central authorities of the church. In expectation of the upcoming council, the papal nuncio to Germany, Pietro Paolo Vergerio (1498–1565), requested Pope Paul III at the end of 1534 to choose three or four Catholic theologians skilled in writing who could use their great knowledge of Lutheran writings to refute the heretics.^[92] As a result, the Ingolstadt theologian Johannes Eck, the Saxony publicist Johannes Cochlaeus, the onetime Evangelical Georg Witzel, and several others received pensions.^[93] The new nuncio Giovanni Morone was also instructed to support Fabri, Eck, Cochlaeus, Witzel, and several lesser writers.^[94] Yet in 1540 Fabri could still opine that the Lutherans had won the upper hand

because little or no attention had been paid to the scholars. The capable and steadfast are for the most part dead. Only a very few remain who are able and dare to resist; and those who are able to contradict [the Lutherans] or rather to prevail over them scarcely have the means to feed themselves not to mention the means to pay the printers.^[95]

Cochlaeus, who underwrote the efforts of several Catholic publicists as well as himself, had repeated difficulties receiving support for his printing efforts.^[96]

Although consistent support for Catholic controversial writers may have begun under Pope Paul III, this support did not immediately

translate into an appreciable increase in publications. The printings or reprintings of Catholic controversial works, especially in the vernacular, remained relatively low through mid-century. It was not until the second half of the century, with the end of the Council of Trent and the efforts of the Jesuits, that the institutional church began an organized effort to counter Evangelical controversial writing. A variety of reasons can be advanced to explain this significant lag.

The Roman Catholic church saw itself as the only legal institution of religion. It represented the status quo, and its opponents were rebels, heretics, and outlaws. Moreover the Roman Catholic church possessed both the juridical power and ample precedent to condemn its opponents and hand them over to secular authorities for appropriate punishment. The Peasants' War gave added legitimacy to this view of their opponents and to the conventional method for dealing with such opponents.

Given this "law-and-order" conception of affairs, it should be no surprise that in the early decades when Catholics reflected on the Evangelical propaganda barrage and how to counter it, they thought mainly in terms of intervention by authorities. As Paulus Bachmann, abbot of Altzelle, saw it, it was the authorities' negligence or connivance that allowed the Evangelicals to fill the markets with anti-Catholic writings.^[97] It was up to the authorities to remedy the situation. Even the publicists were slow to realize that more than censorship was called for.^[98] As Jedin pointed out, Eck made no proposal for a program of published replies to the Lutherans in the first draft of his famous memo to Pope Adrian VI (r. 1522–1523).^[99] Instead, he proposed that Lutheran pamphlets should be burned and inquisitors should be established. He also made no mention of publishing duties for the theologians whom he proposed should be taken on as advisors by the bishops. In the second edition of his memo, probably directed to Pope Clement VII, he recommended that scholars should be commissioned to refute the Evangelicals using the Scripture, Fathers, and church councils, but not scholastic theology. They would provide an official justification for the new bull condemning Luther. But even here there is no thought of a comprehensive program of published responses.

Cochlaeus, more than Eck, seemed aware at an early date of the need for a coordinated response to the Evangelical barrage of publications. In his memo of 1522, Cochlaeus in no way precluded the intervention of the authorities, but he also suggested a greater role for publications. He recommended both the assembling of a compendium

of Evangelical error with appropriate Catholic refutations and the composition of books dealing with individual controversies. The counteroffensive, he felt, should not be confined to refutations of the opponents. At least as important was the circulation of German treatises dealing with the Mass, the sacraments, the veneration of Mary and the saints, as well as the explanation of other ceremonies in the worship service. As Jedin noted, this last proposal, to offer the people catechetical and educational literature, found acceptance only decades later.

In evaluating the tardy Catholic response to the Evangelical propaganda effort, it is important to remember that in the early years of the Reformation Catholics were laboring under a severe disadvantage that only time could cure. Unlike their Evangelical opponents, who, at least for the first couple decades, could appeal to ideals and "Scripture alone" without bothering overly much about the intractable reality of real institutions and real people, Catholics were defending, more or less, an existing institution, whose faults and flaws were apparent and had been experienced by their readers. It took some time for the Evangelicals to build their own imperfect institutions and thus become vulnerable to the criticism that reality differed significantly from the ideals they espoused. When this finally happened, Catholics, not surprisingly, took some delight in pointing out the inconsistency between Evangelical theory and practice.

It should also be kept in mind that for the Roman church to engage in organized, "official" polemics with the Evangelicals, it would have to acknowledge that there was something to debate.^[100] Normally one does not even argue with outlaws, which was what the Catholics considered Evangelical publicists to be. The Roman church had acted with authority (auctoritas ) when it had condemned Luther and his teachings. Further debate only gave apparent legitimacy to the Evangelical claim that there was something to debate. A similar logic lay behind the reluctance of the papacy to convene a general council to decide the matters at issue. Such an action gave at least the impression that papal decisions were not final.

Moreover, the Catholics were understandably loath to accept the Evangelical contention that beliefs and ceremonies that had, the Catholics believed, existed in the church for centuries should now suddenly be open to question. As the Dominican Johannes Mensing remarked in his defense of the Mass, "It should not be necessary for us now, after so many hundreds of years, to prove the validity of our holy sacrifice of the Mass, held in simple faith by all our predecessors,

both the Greek and Latin Fathers, from the time of the twelve apostles to today, as the heretics demand of us."^[101] The very act of defending and justifying long-standing Catholic practices seemed to some Catholics to acknowledge the Evangelical claim that such practices were subject to the "test of Scripture" rather than to the judgment of the Church.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, had everything to gain by polemics. They had to convince people to change their minds and change their allegiance. To accomplish this, they had to convey to people their new understanding of the Christian gospel. It appears from the sixteenth-century literature, and especially from the very belated introduction of Catholic catechisms to counter Evangelical ones, that it took Catholic authorities some decades to realize that it was not enough to counter Evangelical attacks. They had to match the Evangelical educational enterprise with one of their own. Intriguingly, it was a former Evangelical, Georg Witzel, who was one of the pioneers in producing basic, positive summaries of Catholic theology for the use of simple laity.

The propaganda campaign itself posed a considerable dilemma for Catholics, at least in the initial years of the Reformation movement. For Catholics such as Murner and his fellow controversialists, who opposed in principle the public discussion of matters of faith, to enter the vernacular pamphlet war was to risk compromising their own position, for the medium subverted a crucial part of their message. Authority lodged in the hierarchical church and its head, the pope. Common people had no right even to discuss, much less to debate, matters already decided by the institutional church. Yet those who could get their hands on these angry little booklets were brought into the debate, exhorted to make up their own minds, and urged to take action. Is it any wonder, then, that the dissonance between the medium—hundreds of easily circulated pamphlets—and the message—common people should not discuss matters of faith since such discussions subverted proper authority—may have inhibited the Catholic response?

The Catholic dilemma extended further. The controversialist had to describe the views that he was refuting. The readers of Murner, for example, would have learned a great deal about Luther from Murner's own treatises, and there was no guarantee that they would be offended by what they learned. Murner read and re-presented Luther from his own, hostile point of view. But as his decision to translate On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church so dramatically illustrates, mate-

rial that Murner understood as bringing Luther into disrepute could have just the opposite effect. That which repelled Thomas Murner could ironically intrigue if not actually attract his readers. In the early years when the Evangelical message was just being disseminated and people were just learning what the debate was all about, even a hostile presentation helped propagate the Evangelical message and invited readers and hearers to think about the novel understanding of Christianity that Luther and his supporters were offering.

Finally, there may be some merit to the suggestion that, in a fundamental way, the Evangelical message was more easily propagated by the press than the Catholic message. Evangelical emphasis on the word, and especially the word of Scripture, lent itself to written argument. Catholicism, in contrast, was more "visually" and "ritually" oriented. As Paulus Bachmann put it, "The written word of God, as the Lutherans call the Gospel, cannot always be productively presented to the simple folk according to its bare words or literal meaning but rather requires interpretation and the addition of commentary [menschlicher wort ]."^[102] It was accordingly not a good idea, Bachmann believed, to present everything in German.^[103] Explanations from the Scriptures were suitable for the learned, while those of "little understanding" were best nourished by external pomp and ceremonies.^[104] Perhaps more to the point, much of the Western church's practice and ritual had developed over centuries, often arising first among the common Christians and only later receiving theological explanation. That is, practice preceded theology. To defend theologically practices that had first arisen apart from strictly theological concerns was a difficult task unless one had recourse to the authority of tradition itself. Whatever its ultimate cogency, the argument from tradition was not easily defended solely on the basis of Scripture, which was the only authority that Evangelicals accepted.

The Public Image by the End of 1520

The last chapter examined how the vernacular treatises of Luther's published in the Strasbourg press through July of 1520 were resolutely addressed to the laity. The central message of these early treatises was clear: Christians should humbly rely on God's promise of forgiveness rather than on the mediating power of clerics or clerically sponsored works. In a more speculative vein, I argued that these treatises likely appealed to their intended lay audience because their message ex-

plicitly dignified the spiritual status of the laity at the expense of clerical claims and prerogatives. The laity who took the message of these early publications to heart were freed from the standards of clerical piety, freed from a thoroughgoing reliance on clerical mediation in their relations with God, and freed from concern about their own worthiness and spiritual efforts.

Luther's Strasbourg publications in the fall of 1520 continued these themes. They remained primarily addressed to the laity and, in fact, exhorted the laity (or at least the lay temporal authorities) to undertake religious reforms on their own authority. The central theological message had also not changed though it had been elaborated. As he would for the rest of his lifetime, Luther continued to insist that Christians must through faith rely solely on God's promise of forgiveness. He attacked priestly claims to mediation, and he vociferously assailed the notion that good works, even clerically approved good works, could save. He now added that since faith alone saved, every baptized and believing Christian was a true priest. Accordingly, the existing religious, social, and political distinctions between the temporal and spiritual estates—that is, between the laity and the clergy—were at best inappropriate and at worst a fabrication intended to enrich the clergy at the laity's expense. This new emphasis on the spiritual equality of all believing and baptized Christians only deepened the potential appeal of his message for lay Christians.

There is, of course, a crucial difference between these two sets of publications. While the earlier publications presented Luther as a pro ponent of the lay religious life, these later publications added the image of Luther as the op ponent of the papacy and of many practices of the institutional church. For some readers such as Thomas Murner, these new publications exposed Luther as an opponent not only of the spiritual estate but of social order generally. For all his worthy concerns and great gifts, Luther was at bottom a rebel and "seducer of simple Christians."