German History Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 290–303
The Twenty-First-Century Luther
Marc R. Forster
Der katholische Luther: Begegnungen—Prägungen—Rezeptionen. By Daniela Blum. Paderborn:
Ferdinand Schöningh. 2016. 221 pp. €24.90 (paperback).
Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer. By Scott H. Hendrix. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2015.
368 pp. $35.00 (hardback).
Martin Luther. By Michael Mullett. London and New York: Routledge. 2nd. ed. 2015. 396 pp.
£90.00 (hardback).
Brand Luther. By Andrew Pettegree. New York: Penguin. 2015. 400 pp. $29.95 (hardback).
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. By Lyndal Roper. London: Bodley Head. 2016. 592 pp.
£30.00 (hardback).
Martin Luther. Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs. By Heinz Schilling. Munich: Ch. Beck. 4th ed.
2016. 728 pp. €19.95 (hardback).
I: Introduction
2017 is a Lutherjahr (Luther year), an anniversary of the posting and publication of
Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517, the event traditionally considered to mark the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. The anniversary has, of
course, prompted the publication and republication of scholarly studies about Luther,
both traditional biographies and other works aimed at explaining the significance and
influence of the German friar and professor, religious rebel and magisterial reformer.
Reading and evaluating this cluster of new Luther studies has provided me with an
opportunity to see the state of this field at this particular historical moment. It is this
general discussion I will focus on in this article, not the more specialized debates about
Luther’s theology, his intellectual forerunners or the details of his personal life. The
authors of these works have much to say about those issues as well, but all these studies speak to non-specialists, all successfully locate Luther in the context of his time and
place and all seek to evaluate his place in history more broadly.
Have the views of scholars changed dramatically since the last great Luther anniversary, in 1983, the anniversary of the reformer’s birth? On the one hand, it is clear that
there is little new information to be mined about Luther. His biography is well known
and his writings have been edited and published (and widely translated), most notably
in the definitive Weimarer Ausgabe, which started publication in 1883. Modern biographers are not likely to identify new sources that will drastically change our understanding of Luther, and none of the scholars reviewed here attempts to do so. Furthermore,
beyond the stability of his biography, there is even a certain consistency about the readings of Luther, or at least a limited range of possible interpretations of the great man.
There is a consensus in these works that Luther was a seminal figure, a renegade
and rebel, but also a prophet and visionary who transformed his world and altered the
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.
All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghx045 Advance Access publication 7 April 2017
The Twenty-First-Century Luther 291
course of history. There is also broad agreement that Luther’s impact was to a great
extent a consequence of his intellectual gifts and efforts, perhaps a conclusion that
warms the hearts of modern professors. Luther’s personality, the strengths and weaknesses of his character, has always fascinated educated readers of all kinds, and continues to be examined deeply in these studies, in more nuanced and more sophisticated
ways than employed by earlier generations of Luther scholars.
These new studies of Luther all respond, in various ways, to recent trends in historical writing. For decades historians have worked to put Luther into the context of his
time and place. Aided by the opening up of East German archives since 1989, social
histories have given us a deep understanding of Mansfeld where Luther was born, of
Eisenach where he grew up, of Erfurt where he studied and, most of all, of Wittenberg
where he lived his whole adult life, married, raised a family and led the local church.
New scholarship has modified and broadened our understanding of German and
European politics and has placed Luther in both his German and his wider European
settings. Our grasp of the wider cultural world Luther lived in, the development of
printing and communication, the cultural exchanges across regions, countries and continents has also advanced dramatically in past decades and all these biographies reflect
those contexts.
In all these ways, the Luther of 2017 is more complex and more multi-sided than
the heroic intellectual and religious reformer of traditional Luther studies. Yet that
tradition lives on here too, most of all in the deep interest each of these scholars takes
in Luther’s theology as reflected in his writings. None of them doubts that Luther’s
significance is above all due to his theological insights and innovations, expressed in his
forceful writing style, fuelled, particularly in the key years between 1517 and 1521, by
his amazing productivity and his remarkable confidence as a scholar and writer. Each
of these new studies spends considerable time analysing Luther’s writings, seeking to
understand the appeal of his ideas, as scholars have been doing since the sixteenth
century.
II: Two Important Books
Two of the books reviewed here stand out. Heinz Schilling’s Martin Luther: Rebell in einer
Zeit des Umbruchs (an English translation will appear in 2017) is a magisterial study covering Luther’s whole life in all its facets and contexts. Schilling, professor emeritus of
early modern history at the Humboldt University in Berlin, is a distinguished and influential political historian. His biography stands in the venerable tradition of Protestant
Luther scholarship, but moves consistently beyond that sometimes limiting framework.
Lyndal Roper, the author of Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet and Regius professor of
history at Oxford, comes out of a different tradition. A scholar of women and gender
who has written influential books on the witch craze, sexuality, gender and religion in
Reformation Germany, Roper brings a psychological and cultural perspective to her
examination of Luther’s life.
Written as a traditional biography, Schilling traces Luther’s life with great verve
and with sympathy for his subject, but without papering over Luther’s less attractive
characteristics. Luther’s combativeness and stubbornness, his authoritarian streak and
his antisemitism are all here. So are his talents, his vivid writing style, his conviviality
292 Marc R. Forster
and loyalty to his friends, his determination and his self-confidence. As his subtitle signals, Schilling is intent on placing Luther in the context of a period of Umbruch, a
time of dramatic change, which Schilling identifies as the beginning of the modern
world. Furthermore, for Schilling Luther is not just a witness or participant in this weltgeschichtliche Wende, this world historical turning point, he is a leading figure in bringing it
about. In this way, Schilling’s book is deeply imbedded in the German (and Protestant)
historical tradition of seeing Luther as an exemplar of a great man who changed history through the force of his intellect and personality.
Schilling’s book is, however, very up to date. A deeply knowledgeable scholar of
early modern political history, Schilling presents clear and nuanced explanations of
the many contexts in which Luther lived and worked. For example, his discussion of
the 1521 confrontation between young Emperor Charles V and the young reformer
at the Diet of Worms is presented from the perspective of both protagonists, asking
the reader to understand the wider European and even worldwide concerns and
interests of the Habsburg Emperor. Schilling’s explanations of other issues, from the
politics of the Holy Roman Empire, to the Turkish threat, to economic developments
of the sixteenth century, are deeply informed, wide ranging and sophisticated. His
interest in political developments, particularly in the development of the modern
state, means he pays particular attention to Luther’s relationship to secular authority.
Schilling also moves beyond traditional confessionalized history. If Luther is for
Schilling a world-historical figure, and even in some ways a hero, this is not primarily
because he rebelled against the papacy and founded a new, Lutheran, church. Instead,
Schilling returns frequently to the idea that Luther’s religious revolt prompted a religious revival across Christendom. Not only did his revolt lead to a full-fledged evangelical movement and in the long run the development of new Protestant churches, but
it also broke the logjam that prevented the reform of Catholicism. In this view, the
Christian confessions moved in parallel in the direction of confessionalization, that is
the cooperation of church and state to impose (relatively) uniform religious and social
norms, enforced through stronger administration of church and state. These developments were far from Luther’s mind, but Schilling argues that they formed one of
the pillars of modern European politics and society. Catholic and Protestant Europe
both experienced confessionalization—in this sense (among others) Schilling’s book has
a different perspective and tone from older Lutheran biographies of the Wittenberg
reformer.
In the introduction to Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, Roper states that ‘Luther’s
inner development ... is the abiding focus of this book’.1 She acknowledges that ‘bad
press’ has dogged this kind of psycho-history, but argues that the wealth of source
material about Luther allows historians to trace his emotional development and can
lead to a ‘richer understanding not only of Luther the man but also of the revolutionary religious principles to which he dedicated his life’.2 This is an ambitious goal, but
one that Roper undertakes with enthusiasm, deep knowledge and (in the best sense)
imagination.
1Roper, Martin Luther, p. 9.
2Ibid., p. 11.
The Twenty-First-Century Luther 293
Like Schilling, Roper has considerable sympathy for her subject. She, like all of
Luther’s biographers, is impressed with his determination and work ethic and with the
energy and clarity of his writing. As a psycho-history, her book is also, almost by definition, speculative. One overarching theme of Roper’s analysis of Luther’s early life is her
interest in ‘the emotional underpinnings of his later theological development’.3 As one
might expect, an important aspect of this discussion is Luther’s relationship with ‘father
figures’. These included his actual father, Hans Luder, ‘an irascible, competitive man’
who resented Martin’s decision to pursue an education rather than remain in the family
business of mining. Roper speculates Martin felt guilty about the cost of his education,
‘something his father doubtless made sure he never forgot’.4
Chapter seven, ‘The Freedom of a Christian’, is about Luther’s famous 1520 pamphlet of that name, but it is also about Luther freeing himself from his confessor and
mentor within the Augustinian order, Johann von Staupitz. Roper postulates that as
Luther developed his theology he moved away from the mystical spirituality he had
explored with Staupitz, and he broke his personal relationship with Staupitz. Luther
even wrote to Staupitz in October 1520 about a dream he had had of Staupitz ‘retreating’ from him while also asking Luther to ‘be calm’.5 This report about a dream is, of
course, great grist for Roper, who emphasizes that Luther did not want to be calm—this
was, after all, the period of his open break with the church, which led to his excommunication in 1521. The break with Stauptiz was a break with a father figure, and the
emotional toll of that estrangement was reflected, Roper argues, in Luther’s theological
moves of that period.
Roper also presents Luther’s time in hiding in the Wartburg as life changing. She
points, as do all his biographers, to the enforced leisure that gave him the opportunity
to translate the Bible, but she also discusses his psychological transformation, mostly
drawn from Luther’s later memories. She discusses, for example, his attacks of severe
constipation:
But perhaps, after the fevered rush of the period leading up to the Diet of Worms, the constipation may
have reflected his own turning inward, entering a period of inactivity as essential as it was difficult, before
he could become creative again.6
He was also plagued by ‘attacks of the Devil’, a consequence, Roper suggests, of his solitude, so different from the bustling life of the monastery and university in Wittenberg.
In the same period Luther struggled with what he called his ‘untamed body’. He wrote,
‘I should be ardent in the spirit, but I am ardent in the flesh, in lust, laziness, leisure and
sleepiness.’ Roper argues that ‘the transformation of Luther was as much physical and
emotional as it was theological’.7
In chapter fourteen, ‘Breakdown’, Roper proposes that Luther’s conflicts with other
evangelical leaders led him to a major psychological crisis. These conflicts began with
his disagreements with Andreas von Karlstadt over the role of images in churches and
continued with the ongoing dispute with Ulrich Zwingli and many other southern
3
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 33.
5
Ibid., pp. 148–9.
6
Ibid., p. 199.
7
Ibid., p. 199.
4
294 Marc R. Forster
German and Swiss evangelical leaders over the nature of the Eucharist. Luther’s insistence on the real presence was under increasing attack from Zwingli, who insisted that
the bread in the Eucharist only ‘signified’ Christ’s body. These disputes meant that
Luther’s ‘mood became increasingly apocalyptic’, Roper argues. ‘Then, on 6 July 1527,
Luther suffered a complete physical and spiritual collapse, experiencing an Anfechtung
[challenge, attack] so severe that he fell and lost consciousness.’8 Roper interprets this
collapse as a reflection of Luther’s fear that he was losing his faith, something for which
there is considerable evidence in the sources. But she also goes further and returns
(more speculatively) to the Oedipal theme:
Perhaps he also unconsciously feared that the kind of attacks he had unleashed on paternal figures might
now be in store for him ... Luther had once been the prodigal son: now he was the father whose wayward
sons showed no signs of returning to him.9
In the same period, Luther was obsessed with martyrdom, reacting emotionally to
reports of the murder of several evangelical acquaintances. He himself stayed in
Wittenberg to nurse the sick during an outbreak of the plague. Was he perhaps seeking martyrdom, Roper asks, or was this ‘another example of the remarkable courage that enabled him not to shirk what he felt to be his pastoral responsibility to his
flock’?10
This section demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Roper’s method.
On the one hand, many of her points are quite speculative, set apart for the reader by
perhapses and maybes. On the other hand, throughout Luther’s life there were clearly
important links between his emotional state and his responses to opponents, which
were so often personal and sometimes quite violent in their language. Roper goes a
step further in seeking to link his personality and his moments of psychological crisis to
his theological positions. ‘His position on the Real Presence, after all, was not rational:
Christ’s presence in the sacrament could not be explained, but must simply be believed;
it was a matter where argument ceased.’ At the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 there could
be no compromise on this issue, and Roper emphasizes that the meeting ended bitterly,
with Zwingli in tears and Luther refusing to shake the hands of the Swiss leaders. ‘He
was, however, shattered by the debate, and the “angel of Satan, or whoever the angel
of Death is” was attacking him so severely that he worried he would not reach home
alive.’11 The reader gets a strong sense of who Luther was and what motivated him at
that moment.
Despite my initial scepticism about this kind of history, Roper’s book is a powerful
study with many new insights. While older Freudian categories are used, they are usually handled with nuance and care. For example, she convincingly shows how Luther’s
positive conception of physicality and his open pleasure in food, drink and sex informed
a theology that was deeply embodied. His unyielding defence of the real presence in
the sacrament and his unwillingness to separate spirit and flesh in his theology were
further reflections of these character traits. These, and many other insights, mean that
8Ibid., p. 312.
9Ibid., p. 314.
10Ibid., p. 318.
11Ibid., p. 320.
The Twenty-First-Century Luther 295
Roper’s Luther seems more real, alive and human than the Luther found even in a
deeply informed and sympathetic biography like Schilling’s.
III: Luther’s Thought
Not surprisingly, there are few, if any, new insights in these studies about Luther’s theology. Yes, Roper opens some new perspectives in connecting Luther’s physical and emotional states to his theology, but scholars have delved into the sources of Luther’s ideas,
the influences on his thinking and the precursors of his theology for centuries. Luther
scholars have long illuminated and evaluated the role of Augustinianism, German spiritualism, humanism, scholasticism and so on in Luther’s theology.
Daniela Blum’s Der katholische Luther does put an innovative twist on this tradition
by examining Luther’s Catholic interlocutors in three groups, those who came before
Luther, his contemporaries and those who responded to Luther in later centuries. Blum,
a professor of Catholic theology in Tübingen, is committed to a post-confessional, ecumenical evaluation of Luther. This structure—before, with and after Luther—is effective in placing Luther in a variety of new intellectual and theological contexts. Her
emphasis on the deeply Catholic character of Luther’s Lebenszusammenhang, his ‘life context’, is a useful reminder, even if it is not an original insight. Indeed the most innovative part of Blum’s analysis is her discussion of later Catholics like Ignaz von Döllinger,
the early nineteenth-century theologian and church historian. Here she examines the
complex ways Luther was understood by serious Catholic scholars.
By all accounts, Luther was an innovative thinker and a scholar with deep knowledge of theology and Scripture. After 1517, he also moved rapidly beyond his intellectual influences and mentors. Whether one analyses him primarily as an intellectual
(Schilling) or as a thinker whose ideas were deeply shaped by his emotional makeup
(Roper), all Luther scholars have identified inconsistencies and contradictions in his
thought. Even the power of his writing can lead to misunderstandings by seeming to
give greater importance to ideas than they deserve. In any case, Luther was not a systematic thinker like Calvin—he produced no Institutes of the Christian Religion. Instead,
his ideas came out in a series of theses, pamphlets and treatises, many of them highly
polemical and almost all of them written in response to events or in reaction to writings of his opponents. The result is that Luther scholars can, and do, debate what was
central or most important in Luther’s thought.
The studies reviewed here continue this unsolvable debate. In his heavily historiographical study, Michael Mullett emphasizes Luther’s promotion of Christian liberty in
his attack on papal authority. ‘Early reformers’, he writes, ‘saw themselves as proclaiming a libertarian jubilee of freedom from centuries of Catholic enslavement as well as
corruption.’12 Luther consciously contributed to this understanding of his movement,
but, as Mullett emphasizes, he restrained this freedom with the authority of Scripture.
Over time, of course, Scripture turned out to be a poor source of authority, open to
a wide range of interpretations, ‘a miscellaneous argosy from which individuals and
groups could unload their doctrinal, ecclesiastical, moral and ideological preferences in
12Mullett, Martin Luther, p. 4.
296 Marc R. Forster
a bewildering and profoundly liberating experience’.13 Once again, the long-term consequences of Luther’s ideas went in directions he had not anticipated and did not like.
Schilling also points to the importance of the notion of Christian freedom that came
out of the indulgence controversy for the development of Luther’s ideas and, particularly, for his reputation in the wider world.14 The indulgences issue and the Ninety-Five
Theses obviously led Luther to first question and then attack the authority of the church
and the papacy. Luther’s confrontation with Thomas Cajetan in Augsburg (1518), his
disputation with Johannes Eck in Leipzig (1519) and, finally, his dramatic appearance at
the Diet of Worms (1521) all circled around his rejection of papal authority and linked
Luther to a idea of (religious) freedom and liberty.
Mullett’s emphasis on freedom and liberty has a particularly British feel to it, reflecting perhaps the way in which Protestants in Britain have received Luther over the
centuries. Schilling’s focus on freedom reflects a (German) Lutheran tradition that has
a strong dose of anti-Catholicism and anti-papalism. In contrast, Scott Hendrix’s focus
on the centrality of salvation by faith in Luther’s theology may have an American twist,
a reflection of a deeply American interest in individuals and their potential.
According to Luther, faith was hard, but it was the only sure foundation of a religion that was both humble
and hopeful: humble about its own power to remake the world and yet hopeful about a power—greater
than that of religion itself—to save us from ourselves.15
Schilling similarly highlights Luther’s theological insight that led him to insist on the
primacy of salvation by faith. Schilling is sceptical that Luther found this insight in a
‘tower experience’, as Luther himself claimed years later. Instead, Schilling postulates
that this new theology developed over time before Luther presented it publically in
spring 1518.16 Schilling does see this idea as central to Luther’s thinking and to later
Protestant identity more broadly.
This was a change in the very principles of piety, indeed of Christian culture as a whole, one that was
to leave a profound mark on the modern European period. Piety changed from an emphasis on religious
duties and the market value of performing them, all the way to a piety centred on faith and reliance on
grace that made all the options offered by the medieval church look like ineffectual Band-Aids.17
This is a strong statement and one that echoes a Protestant scholarly tradition that is
more anti-Catholic than the tone of most of Schilling’s study. It also reflects the tendency of most of the studies examined here to emphasize Luther’s intellectual development. Schilling points to a Grundsätzlichkeit (thoroughness) to Luther’s writings and
sermons from early in his life that came out of his education as a theologian, but also
‘more precisely from his very individual understanding of the Bible [Bibelwissenschaft],
mostly developed in personal study’.18
Roper’s study also recognizes Luther’s intellectual development as central to his
wider influence. Although evangelical ideas remained fluid in the period before 1521,
Roper argues that Luther moved away from early influences like Tauler’s spiritual piety.
13Ibid., p. 9.
14Schilling, Martin Luther, pp. 157–67.
15Hendrix, xiii.
16Schilling, Martin Luther, pp. 147–52.
17Ibid., p. 152.
18Ibid., p. 161.
The Twenty-First-Century Luther 297
Luther’s increasing inclination towards a more intellectual engagement with the Bible may have been part
of the change of direction in his thought. What he lost was the emotional dimension of faith, the potential
for radical critique of institutions and the meditative dimension of religion that we are more familiar with
in Hindu or Buddhist devotional practices. Instead the side of Luther which was more concerned with
action, scriptural exegesis and authority won out.19
Roper, whose study emphasizes the emotional and psychological influences on Luther’s
thinking, still recognizes that Luther considered himself above all a professor of the
Bible and a theologian. He lived much of his life in the world of ideas and he, like his
biographers, believed that it was his ideas that changed the world.
Andrew Pettegree examines Luther’s ideas and his influence from a somewhat different perspective. In Brand Luther he develops the notion that Luther was exceptionally
modern, innovative and effective as a publicist. Historians have long recognized that
Luther benefitted from the rise of the printing press and that his writings were printed
and read in record numbers by an increasingly literate public. Pettegree further shows
that Luther and his collaborators, particularly the Wittenberg painter and illustrator
Lucas Cranach, quickly developed a look for Luther’s writings, so that each of his works
could be easily recognized. Cranach’s portraits of Luther, reproduced in pamphlets and
books, helped make Luther a kind of early modern media star. This status that may well
have protected him from his enemies, particularly at the Diet of Worms, where he was
greeted by large and adoring crowds.
Pettegree’s description of how Luther and his supporters branded his work adds an
important twist to Luther’s story. Ultimately, however, Pettegree also presents Luther as
an intellectual who made his mark with his writings. Pettegree demonstrates well how
the circumstances of 1520 led Luther to publish To the Christian Nobility, The Babylonian
Captivity of the Church and The Freedom of a Christian, which he calls ‘the three great works
that have come to define his movement’.
Although sometimes considered as three components of a program or agenda, they were, in fact, very different, all responding, as was Luther’s way, to different aspects of the situation in which he found himself:
the complex problems of authority and jurisdiction; the profound implications of his soured relationship
with the church hierarchy; and the fundamental theological reflections on which Luther based his new
understanding of the Christian relationship with a merciful God.20
This approach does not seek to find a central idea in Luther’s thought, but instead points
to the improvisational nature of Luther’s thinking and writing at this time. Luther was
an energetic and enthusiastic thinker and writer, not a careful, rational and organized
one. To the Christian Nobility was a powerful attack on the papacy and appealed widely
in Germany. It had a ‘sharply polemical tone’ and contained ‘a potpourri of radical
recommendations’ about how to remake the clergy. ‘But it was the “priesthood of all
believers” that would be the radical time bomb ticking away at the heart of this work, a
loose phrase that Luther would have plentiful opportunity to regret.’21
Schilling, who is especially inclined to emphasize Luther the intellectual, recognizes
the wide appeal of the 1520 pamphlets. These were, he says, ‘robust, popular journalism ... that violated contemporary conventions and at the same time exposed the
19Roper, Martin Luther, p. 103.
20Pettegree, Brand Luther, p. 125.
21Ibid., p. 127.
298 Marc R. Forster
world of the educated’.22 Erasmus, the leading intellectual of the period was indignant,
writing,
Luther in his torrent of pamphlets has poured out all at once, making everything public and giving
even cobblers a share in what is normally handled by scholars as mysteries reserved for the initiated;
and often a sort of immoderate energy has carried him, in my opinion at least, beyond the bounds of
justice.23
But Luther was not just a writer and thinker. In December he and his supporters organized a public burning of the papal bull Exsurge Domine, which had condemned Luther. It
was a carefully managed event, publically announced in advance and tacitly approved
by the Elector. ‘Once again, Luther had staged a “happening”, a public act that conveyed his theological convictions irrevocably and memorably.’ University students then
conducted a full-blown anti-papal festival, mocking the works of Luther’s opponents.24
Roper highlights how much Luther himself enjoyed laughter and satire, writing a number of outrageous satirical works making fun of the papacy.25
So, in important ways, there was more to Luther than an intellectual and theologian
and newer scholarship has highlighted these aspects of his life and work. Whatever he
became later in life, in his early years Luther was a performer and a preacher, as well
as a writer, with a popular touch, someone with a strong sense of how to reach a wider
public. These strengths were in some ways the result of the improvisational nature of
his early thinking and of the situations, particularly the public appearances before cardinals, princes and Emperor, in which he found himself.
IV: The Peasants’ War
1525 was a big year for Luther, probably a major turning point in his life as he moved
from being a renowned rebel and religious prophet to a leader of an increasingly established movement tied closely to the secular authorities. In June he married Katharina
von Bora, a marriage that turned out to be, by all accounts, companionable and
happy. As Luther adjusted to his new domestic arrangements, he came into conflict
with Erasmus in an exchange of increasingly bitter tracts about free will. Luther’s final
contribution, On the Bondage of the Will, was, according to Pettegree, ‘a crushing, comprehensive restatement of Reformation doctrine ... Luther is here a master theologian,
rebuking a well-meaning but lazy amateur for a lack of serious engagement with theological truth.’26
Luther also engaged in exchanges of polemical writings with two former allies who
now espoused more radical positions than Luther, Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer.
These conflicts were both theological and personal for all parties, as friendships collapsed over theological differences. Meanwhile, Frederick the Wise, the elector of
Saxony and Luther’s long-time protector died.
22Schilling, Martin Luther, p. 174.
23Ibid.; translated in Erasmus to Justas Jonas, letter no. 1202 in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8: Letters 1122 to
1251, 1520 to 1521, trans. R. A. B. Maynors (Toronto, 1988), p. 203.
24Roper, Martin Luther, p. 169.
25Ibid., p. 170.
26Pettegree, Brand Luther, pp. 233–4.
The Twenty-First-Century Luther 299
The peasant uprising that exploded across mostly southern Germany in late 1524
was a great challenge to Luther. The peasant manifestos, most famously the Twelve
Articles of the Swabian Peasants, clearly used the language of Luther’s evangelical movement. Most provocatively, the Twelve Articles appealed to Scripture to justify the abolition of serfdom, echoing Luther’s earlier statements about the freedom of Christians.27
Müntzer meanwhile became a leader of the Thuringian rebels, publishing further
manifestos and moving in an increasingly apocalyptical direction in his thinking.28
The Peasants’ War appears to have come at a bad time for Luther. Perhaps, as Roper
seems to suggest, Luther was distracted by his new marriage and local developments in
Wittenberg, particularly the death of the elector. Certainly Luther saw the uprising in
apocalyptical terms himself, calling it a work of Satan aimed at destroying the evangelical movement. As was usually the case, he also personalized this development, focusing
on the role of his former friend Müntzer.
Luther engaged the Peasants’ War in two pamphlets. The first of these, Admonition
to Peace, condemned violence on all sides, warning the princes that the rebellion was a
punishment for their sins, while telling the peasants to obey their superiors. Of course
no one was satisfied.29 Perhaps under direct pressure from a new duke in Wittenberg,
Luther’s next intervention, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, was a
clear attack on the peasants. ‘In this highly intemperate work, which appeared in May’,
Roper writes, ‘Luther likened the peasants to “mad dogs” who did nothing but “pure
devil’s work” and were all driven “by that archdevil [erzteuffel] who rules at Mühlhausen
[Müntzer], and did nothing except stir up robbery, murder and bloodshed”.’30 The
peasant rebels should all be killed, wrote Luther.
The pamphlet was widely published, and although (as Schilling reminds us) the princes
and nobles needed no encouragement to suppress the rebellion in the most brutal fashion
possible, Luther’s violent rhetoric did much to damage his reputation across Germany.
‘Luther’s call to slash and stab became a gruesome reality at Frankenhausen [where the
peasants were defeated and thousands massacred] ... and many considered his “hard little
book”, as the pamphlet came to be called, the cause of the rage of the princes’ army.’31 And
perhaps, as Schilling also suggests, the pamphlet was a calculated move that cleansed the
evangelical movement of the stain of rebellion and distanced Luther from the losing side.
But Pettegree seems to be closer to the truth: ‘One senses a man driven to the limits of his endurance and understanding, exasperated and petulant, utterly unwilling
to acknowledge any link between his evangelical teaching and the hopes that fueled
the tragic mobilization of the revolt of 1525.’32 The consequences were clear. ‘This
was the year when the movement finally lost its innocence; the soaring hopes inspired
by Luther’s leadership of a national movement of regeneration and renewal were
dashed.’33
27Ibid., pp. 226–37.
28Roper, Martin Luther, p. 271; Pettegree, pp. 238–40.
29Pettegree, Brand Luther, p. 240.
30Roper, Martin Luther, p. 266.
31Schilling, Martin Luther, p. 313.
32Pettegree, Brand Luther, p. 244.
33Ibid., p. 244.
300 Marc R. Forster
V: Friends and Enemies
All modern scholars discuss Luther in the context of his friends. From his early
days he was surrounded by friends and supporters. Pettegree gives pride of place to
Philip Melanchthon, Johannes Bugenhagen and Justus Jonas. Each had a role to play,
Melanchthon as the intellectual and precise theologian, Bugenhagen as the organizer
of the church and Jonas as an editor and translator.34 Furthermore, Luther’s success
owed much to his protector, Frederick the Wise, and to a large number of sympathizers
and supporters across Germany. Luther was not the independent hero, the voice in the
wilderness, of older histories.
Luther was even more attentive to his enemies than to his friends. When he broke
with them, Karlstadt and Müntzer became, in Luther’s mind, servants of the devil. He
seemed at times obsessed with other enemies, Catholics like Johannes Eck or Johannes
Cochleaus. Perhaps most damaging to the evangelical movement was his unwillingness
or inability to compromise with Zwingli at Marburg in 1529. Luther’s stubbornness
and self-assurance, positive aspects of his character at Worms, became liabilities later
in his life.35 Luther was a man of strong emotions, and his temper and mood did not
improve with age. Roper emphasizes what she calls ‘the painful ruptures [that] punctuated the 1530s and 1540s’. He broke in 1537 with Johannes Agricola, an old friend
and ally from Luther’s early years in Wittenberg. He was even critical of Melanchthon
during his last year, something his loyal lieutenant certainly did not deserve.36
Luther’s writings against the Jews are one of the more controversial aspects of his
life and work. Since the Holocaust these writings have led some to draw a straight line
from Luther to Hitler. Other traditional scholarship excuses Luther’s rhetorical excesses
by stating either that they show that he was a man of his time or that they reflect his
frustration that the Jews had not converted to evangelical Christianity.
Roper argues that Luther’s antisemitic works were all of a piece. She emphasizes his
1543 Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of
Christ), a nasty work that repulsed many Protestants. The work ‘reaches a crescendo of
physical revulsion’, and, says Roper, ‘his deepest impulses are on display ... as if caught
in a fantastical nightmare’. She argues that this nightmarish work ‘is the crazed fantasy
that underpinned the apparently rational On the Jews and their Lies, which advocated
the burning of synagogues, schools, the Talmud and the destruction of the houses of
Jews’.37 On the Jews was ‘integral to his thought; his insistence that the true Christians—
that is the evangelicals—had become the chosen people and displaced the Jews would
become fundamental to Protestant identity’.38
Hendrix, by contrast, struggles with Luther’s antisemitism. On the one hand, his
discussion of this issue focuses on Luther’s conviction that the Jews were wrong for
rejecting Christ. On the other hand, he engages the vehemence of Luther’s writings.
Luther was, surely, ‘a prisoner of his age and its prejudices’. And, of course, he ‘was
34Ibid., pp. 170–80; Roper, Martin Luther, chap. 17.
35Pettegree, Brand Luther, p. 250.
36Roper, Martin Luther, chap. 17.
37Ibid., pp. 392–4.
38Ibid., p. 395.
The Twenty-First-Century Luther 301
also infected by the anti-Jewish virus that had inflicted Christianity ever since its beginning and had permeated late medieval Europe’. Furthermore, Hendrix points out that,
while Luther’s language was hardly merciful, he did not advocate murdering Jews.39
Schilling tries to find a place somewhere between these two views.40 He recognizes
and laments Luther’s hate-filled later writings and acknowledges his desire to expel Jews
from Germany. He also explains the context of Jewish life and Christian-Jewish relations
in great detail. The decline of the papacy and Emperor weakened the two authorities
that had traditionally protected Jewish communities. The rise of princely authority, with
which Luther was allied, meant new expulsions and stricter regulation of communities
that were allowed to survive. Growing interest in the study of Hebrew, including at the
University of Wittenberg, potentially meant that there were opportunities for ChristianJewish dialogue, but these contacts also caused conflict and misunderstandings.
Schilling sees Luther’s antisemitism coming from his apocalyptical thinking. For
Luther the Turks were the enemy from outside, while the Jews were the enemy within.
Luther had little personal experience with Jews, so they were mostly an abstraction
to him, people who should convert but did not. By the 1540s, when Luther wrote his
antisemitic tracts, he was convinced that the Jews ‘were agents of Satan, who one must
unconditionally suppress, so that their malicious twisting of Scripture would not lead
faithful Christians into error’.41 The Jews, Luther now believed, were dangerous for
Christianity. Schilling insists that this perspective was not a forerunner of the racial
antisemitism of Nazi Germany, and he is correct. But Luther’s language and the
policies he advocated neither were good for the experience of German Jews, nor put
Luther himself in a good light. Luther’s engagement with his enemies says a lot about
the weaknesses of his character that ultimately limited the movement he began.
VI: Contexts: Wittenberg and Germany
A further explanation for Luther’s viscerally negative attacks on the peasants and the
Jews is that his whole life he was a townsman, with little experience of rural life and very
few contacts with Jews. He was a Saxon born and bred who was always uncomfortable
outside his home region. The self-confident, often self-governing peasants of southern
and western Germany were totally unfamiliar to Luther, and he could only understand
their rebellion as the devil’s work. The large and sophisticated Jewish communities of
cities like Frankfurt and Worms were even more alien.
All the works examined here insist on the importance of Wittenberg for Luther’s life
and work. After attending the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther rarely left Wittenberg.
He settled into his routines as pastor and university professor and enjoyed the pleasures
of domestic life. As Roper suggests, ‘He had ... become less mobile, intellectually as
well as physically, as he ensconced himself in his study and held court at his table.’42
Wittenberg was a small city, dominated by the elector’s court, unlike the free imperial
cities of southern Germany. Luther became an important figure in Wittenberg, as pastor of the main church as well as the leader of the evangelical movement.
39Hendrix, Martin Luther, p. 276.
40Schilling, Martin Luther, pp. 550–73.
41Ibid., p. 566.
42Roper, Martin Luther, p. 305.
302 Marc R. Forster
Luther’s presence and his steady output of publications were good for Wittenberg’s
economy. Pettegree describes how Wittenberg’s printers and Cranach’s studio expanded
and prospered.43 Luther’s brand included not just his name and the Cranach portraits
that illustrated his publications, but also the city itself. ‘Wittenberg was now an essential
part of the brand—the seal of quality and authenticity’, and printers in other cities
sometimes printed ‘Wittenberg’ on their printings of Luther’s works as well. Luther and
Lutherstadt Wittenberg were, and remain, ‘indelibly associated’.44
Luther was clearly good for Wittenberg. Was this little Saxon city good for Luther?
Roper argues that Luther’s experience, both in Mansfeld and in Wittenberg, led him
away from the communal aspects of evangelical reform and towards an alliance with
authority. In 1522, after considerable waffling, he sided with the elector and against the
more extensive reform of religious life and practice instituted by Karlstadt and others
in Wittenberg. Following the elector’s wishes, Luther now condemned the removal of
images, communion in both kinds and the abolition of private Masses, among other
things.45 In doing so, Luther asserted his authority as first and foremost leader of the
Reformation—as Roper insists, ‘Luther insisted on his leadership, not collective action’.46
If this authoritarian aspect of Luther’s personality and public persona is unattractive
to modern observers, he is perhaps redeemed by his commitment to his role as pastor
of his Wittenberg parish. He remained dedicated to his parishioners, engaging in the
daily work of consoling the sick and hearing confessions. Luther chose to stay and
attend to his flock during an outbreak of the plague in 1527. Luther also wrote a large
number of letters of comfort (Trostbriefe) to friends and acquaintances who had suffered
losses, letters that were so appreciated that they were often passed on to others. Schilling
argues the effectiveness of these letters owed much to Luther’s sympathetic presentation of evangelical Christocentric piety.47 Luther wrote a groundbreaking catechism
and was deeply engaged in writing and encouraging the development of church music,
all reflections of his pastoral engagement.48
Of course, Luther’s primary pastoral activity was preaching. His sermons had an
impact far beyond Wittenberg, as many of them were printed. They were powerful
and effective. Schilling records, ‘He spoke freely, with notes or from memory, lively and
often improvising, in a kind of living dialogue with the words of the Bible.’49 And, like
any pastor, relations with his congregation, ‘his Wittenbergers’, were not always cordial.
At times he found his parishioners ungrateful and so sinful that they deserved God’s
wrath, and in early 1530 he went on a ‘sermon strike’. His anger abated, but even in
princely Wittenberg, the capital of the Reformation, Luther’s parishioners were sometimes disobedient and often inattentive.50
Luther’s family, particularly his energetic wife and partner, Katharina, also set a
model for Lutheran pastors’ families. Luther’s house was always filled with guests and
boarders, often students from the university, and the great man held forth at the dinner
43Pettegree, Brand Luther, chap. 6.
44Ibid., p. 163.
45Roper, Martin Luther, p. 232.
46Ibid., pp. 234–39, quotation p. 236.
47Schilling, Martin Luther, pp. 364–5.
48Mullett, Martin Luther, pp. 291–7.
49Schilling, Martin Luther, p. 370.
50Ibid., pp. 372–4.
The Twenty-First-Century Luther 303
table as often as possible. As his disciplines recorded every pearl of wisdom that came
from his mouth, Katharina kept the household running, managed a variety of side businesses and earning the admiration of her husband and the many guests in her house.
Perhaps Luther’s experience as a pastor contributed to the inconsistencies and
improvisations in his theology. Just as he had to respond to events in the wider world—
the Peasants’ War, the rise of Zwingli and the controversy over the sacrament, the
Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster, the bigamy of Philip of Hesse—so he also had to
engage with the day-to-day problems and challenges of his parishioners’ lives. In his
sermons Luther focused on the message of Scripture and the promise of Christ’s sacrifice, and as pastor he was open to compromise about the details of local religious
practice. This flexibility would be both a long-term characteristic of Lutheranism and
a source of extended conflict among church leaders after his death.
Although Schilling insists on Luther’s world-historical importance, he also recognizes
another aspect of Luther’s parochialism. Ultimately, Luther’s religious movement resonated almost exclusively in Germany. After all, the future Lutheran church was mostly
a German phenomenon, with outposts in Scandinavia and North America. Schilling
attempts, with some success, to explain and transcend this apparent contradiction
about Luther’s historical importance.
From the perspective of European history, one has to agree with the French historians ... [that] the
Reformation was always a German and therefore a limited event, and one should not speak of the
Reformation, but rather of a ‘period of reforms’ [temps des Réformes], a period of church and religious
reforms that lasted from the fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century. Luther stood
in the middle of this change. He was its product, and he drove it forward and shaped it like no other.51
VII: Conclusion
So, the twenty-first-century Luther is more complex and contradictory than ever and
perhaps more interesting than ever as well. Schilling’s effort to rehabilitate him as a
world-historical figure is not completely successful, in part because the density and honesty of Schilling’s engagement with the sources means that he recognizes the contexts
that limited the impact of the historical Luther. Roper, like all recent historians but with
greater nuance, shows the ways that Luther’s personality gave him strength to lead a
movement in his youth, but also limited him in his mature years.
Reading these fascinating studies of Luther, even a sceptic may well come to admire
Martin Luther. He was irascible, stubborn and at times mean spirited, but he was also a
man of conviction and determination. He lived his life in the public sphere, expressed
his feelings openly and honestly and presented his religious convictions in a powerful
way that was convincing to many of his contemporaries. We know so much about him
that he, more than almost any figure of his time, comes across as a complex, flawed,
passionate and appealing person. Perhaps even Luther, who was often both arrogant
and insecure, would himself be happy with his place in history.
Connecticut College
[email protected]
51Ibid., p. 614.