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Martin Luther

Discontent among Catholics

Learned Roman Catholics saw their Church as more than a collection of Christians. They saw the Church as divine as well as human, as a community united with Christ and the grace of God. They saw their Church as following the authority that Christ had given to the Bishop of Rome, the Church as built upon the tomb of Peter, and as such they believed there could be only one Christian Church.

The Roman Catholic Church had troubled itself to maintain an identity in belief, purging from its ranks those it had deemed mistaken in their opinions about the nature of Christ, the nature of property and the authority of the Church, among other views, such as those of the Gnostics, Donatists and the Pelagians. But within the Church remained a diversity of opinion and dissatisfactions. For centuries, Catholics had been calling for a return to the more simple religion of earlier Christianity, for the laity having more influence within the Church and for appointment to the higher clergy being more of a matter wisdom and morality than class and wealth. Some in the Church still believed that good Christians should live simply, as they believed Jesus and his disciples had lived. Also of concern was the low standard of ordination into the priesthood. People found fault with priests for drinking, gambling and living with concubines. Some complained also about priests and monks being exempt from taxation and civil responsibilities.

In the 1300s in Britain the rebellions of John Wycliffe and his followers rejected the Latin Bible in favor of English translations. The Wycliffe rebellion spread to the Czechs, and Church persecution and military assault by the Holy Roman Emperor produced the Hussite wars of 1420 to 1434 and the creation of the Hussite church.

The 1500s began with the Renaissance underway on the Eurpean continent. Scholars rediscovered Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of Scripture, and printing presses made the mass production of the new translations possible.

By the 1500s, discontent within the Church had turned much of Christendom into an arena of debate, and much of the debate was bitter and with name calling, while influencing the debate was the rise of humanism. Europe was entering a new age of vanishing tales of chivalry replaced by memoirs and essays. It was the time of the famous Roman Catholic theologian named Desiderius Erasmus, from Rotterdam. Erasmus published an edition of the Greek New Testament, which included a Latin translation. In the debate raging across Europe, Erasmus denounced what he called absurd superstitions, and he declared almost all Christians enslaved by blindness and ignorance. But Popes consulted with him, and he was offered bishoprics. Erasmus believed that many common people had the capacity to understand Christianity as well as did priests. He doubted the need of the intercession of priests, and he hoped for more education for common people. He advocated making the scriptures available to people outside the clergy by translations from Latin into local languages. He saw the Roman Catholic Church as a necessary source of idealism and as an educational institution that stood above secular government and politics.

Another humanistic Roman Catholic was an Englishman named Thomas More. More was thirty-eight when, in 1516, King Henry VIII of England sent him as ambassador to Flanders, and there Thomas More found time to write his version of the perfect society. His Utopia was a move away from the view that the world of mortals was the product of corruption through sin. According to More, vices and civil disorders were the product of greed and private property protected by governments. Thomas More favored sharing property. He was a communist - as had been Plato in his Utopia and as had been the early Christians. But, unlike Plato's Utopia, in More's ideal society all adults worked and everybody spent a part of the day in intellectual activity. In More's utopia all children were educated, with education and the nurturing of reason continuing into adulthood.

The Papacy to 1517

The pope from 1492 to 1503, who took the name Alexander VI, patronized the arts and was appreciated by some for his humanism. Alexander promoted peace between Spain and Portugal. And, it is said, he was kind toward Jewish refugees from Spain. But some Roman Catholics were unhappy with the pope because of the mistress and children he had acknowledged.

Alexander VI was followed by Pius III, another pontiff from a family of great wealth. Pius III had been an archbishop without having taken a priest's order - which he took on becoming pope. Then, within a month he died and was followed by Julius II. Julius was ill-tempered, concerned with art and with Italian politics. He made Rome a Mecca for artists and art lovers, moving the capital of the Renaissance from the city of Florence to Rome. In 1505 he summoned Michelangelo to Rome, eventually to put him to work on the Sistine Chapel. And he put the artist Raphael to work on the Vatican. Julian was interested in extending the boundaries of the Papal States and expelling foreigners from Italy, and in 1506 he put on his armor and led papal troops against French forces that had invaded Italy. Julian II was followed in 1513 by Leo X, who belonged to the powerful Medici family of Florence. He too was concerned with Italian politics, and he remained interested in advancing opportunities for the House of Medici. Also he loved hunting, games, the performances of plays and going to the ballet. He was a patron of the fine arts and of humanists, none of which detracted from his saying his prayers regularly and fasting three times a week. But he spent the papal treasury dry. His lack of funds kept the artist Raphael annoyed in idleness. And Pope Leo was in need of money with which to pay off a bank loan for construction of Saint Peter's Basilica.

Protest by Martin Luther

Germany was divided into hundreds of states, many of them only semi-independent and belonging to what was called the Holy Roman Empire. Each of the states of the Holy Roman Empire was ruled by a prince, also called an "elector," whose powers were limited by powers that belonged to cities and ecclesiastic establishments within the Prince's realm. One of the Holy Roman Empire's more powerful elector-princes was Frederick of Saxony, who forbade the sale of indulgences within his realm. Indulgences involved payment in coin to a priest for the purpose of relief from guilt of sins, release from purgatory and assurance of a place in heaven. And defying Frederick, many people were crossing Saxony's border into Jüterbog or Thuringia to buy these indulgences.

Another who disliked indulgences was an Augustinian friar and professor of theology at a university founded by Frederick, in the town of Wittenberg. This was Martin Luther, who disliked seeing poor Germans giving up scarce coins that would be going to Rome. But rather than economics, Luther's foremost concern was religion. Luther approved of the view of the humanist priest Jacques Lefever d'Etaples that more devotion to reading the Bible and a more accurate reading of the Bible would lead to people living better lives. He had been tormented by whether he was worthy of salvation. Then he found assurance in the Bible in the idea of forgiveness of sins: that God forgave individuals by their faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, without the intercession of a priest. Luther found in the Scriptures no support for indulgences and believed that indulges were of no value to a sinner. He worried over his questioning of the Church, asking himself whether he alone was so wise and whether centuries of Church policy could be wrong. But he answered his own question, concluding that authority lay in the Bible.

Then, in 1517, a priest arrived in Wittenberg selling indulges for the sake of raising money for Leo X and the construction at the Vatican. Luther's response was to write a letter, sent at the end of October, 1517, to Germany's most powerful churchmen, the twenty-seven year-old Archbishop of Mainz, Albrecht of Hohenzollern. The letter was received on November 17 - the speed of mail in those times. The letter was respectful, asking the "Lord God to guard and guide" the Archbishop and without sarcasm Luther described himself as "the scum of the earth." He asked the Archbishop to look at the propositions he had enclosed - the 95 theses that Luther is rumored to have also nailed to the door of the Wittenberg church. - propositions that included Luther's opposition to indulgences.

The Archbishop responded to Luther's propositions by writing a letter to Pope Leo X. Much letter writing followed as Luther's propositions stirred much debate. Some complained that to deny the legality of indulgences was to deny the authority of the pope who had authorized them. Luther acknowledged this, saying that the pope had no such authority. The Church demanded that Luther retract a number of his protests. And rather than retract, Luther described the Church as its people. He announced that he was bound by Holy Scripture alone and that it was neither safe nor right for him to go against his conscience.

It was an age when diversity in opinion was less expected and less tolerated, giving Luther more attention than would any dissenting professor, for example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. And Luther had at his disposal what dissidents had lacked in previous centuries: the printing press. Luther wrote pamphlets explaining his positions. Printing in Europe was by now around seventy-five years old and had been largely of expensive ecclesiastical books in Latin, which few people read. Luther's pamphlets were only a few pages, quickly printed for little money, and they cost little to buy. From the year 1518 to 1520, thirty of Luther's pamphlets were printed, while those wishing to counter Luther's opinions had difficulty getting published - publishers having little interest in publishing pamphlets for which there was little demand.

On June 15, 1520, the papacy ordered Luther's works burned, and the papacy gave Luther sixty days to recant if he were to prevent his being excommunicated. After the sixty days passed, Luther was ordered to appear before representatives of the Pope and before the Holy Roman Emperor - scheduled for April, 1521 at Worms. That year, as Luther passed through towns on his way to his appointment, jubilant crowds turned out to see him. The emperor, Charles V, now twenty-one, had just been made king of Spain and Holy Roman Empire, inheriting these positions as the head of the Habsburg family. He looked down upon Luther but had more troubling concerns. At the meeting, Luther was accused of heresy, and Luther announced that he could not and would not recant anything, "for it is neither safe nor right," he said, "to go against conscience. God help me. Amen."

Luther's statement rang across Europe. Luther was declared a heretic. Luther went into hiding in one of Frederick's castles, and the Church declared Luther an outlaw. Charles left Germany and would not return for a decade. Unofficially a war between Charles and the King of France had begun with the French invasion across the Pyrenees into Navarre and a French march eastward against Luxembourg. It was the beginning of an exhausting war that was to last nearly forty years. Charles left Germany in turmoil and fragmented. And some Princes in northern Germany sided with Luther, hoping to strengthen themselves as the expense of Charles.

While in hiding, Luther began translating the New Testament from Latin into German, to make the Bible available to more people. Luther pursued his belief that people found grace through faith and study rather than through sacraments performed by priests. God, he held, was gracious rather than vindictive. And by now he was also advocating marriage for the clergy. He saw celibacy as a cruel defiance of the sexual drive that God had ordained for the purpose of begetting children.

Luther was appealing more to individualism than the community of faith practiced by the Church, and he appealed to the empire's individualistic-minded middle class (the bourgeoisie) who preferred his appeal to intelligence rather than to childlike obedience. The bourgeoisie found Luther's belief in an individual's direct access to God attractive. They shared Luther's nationalism and indignation at the sight of Italian clerics taking money from Germans. They shared Luther's brand of discipline as opposed to the tradition of saintliness through poverty. And, with the help of the bourgeoisie, Protestantism spread, while the Church was maintaining its internationalism and maintaining its hold on the landed wealthy - the owners of estates.

Christians with a variety of views were flocking to Luther's banner - the beginning of the fragmentation that would be Protestantism into the 21st century. There were those who found no support for infant baptism in scripture and supported baptism only for believers. They were derisively called Anabaptists. Some of them espoused egalitarianism and other revolutionist doctrines, and they found followers mainly among the poor. They revolted against princely authority, led by Thomas Münzer, the Lutheran pastor at the German town of Zwickau - about fifty miles north of what is now the Czech border.

Luther was unhappy about the diversity appearing among the Protestants. He was no defender of choice in religious conviction. He believed that God had spoken clearly and that no excuse existed for deviation. Truth for Luther was not a matter of interpretation. Truth for Luther was absolute and people who strayed from that truth were in error.

Peasants Revolt and Princes Dominate

Luther's movement coincided with unrest among German peasants and added to their unrest, as did crop failures in 1523 and 1524. Republicanism - opposition to royal authority - also contributed to unrest among the peasants, republicanism in Switzerland spilling northward across the Swiss border into that part of Germany where the peasant uprising in 1524 began. The rebelling peasants denounced feudal oppression. They complained of nobles having seized lands that had traditionally been used by all - a part of the trend of the rich and powerful becoming richer and more powerful. The rebelling peasants complained of new rents and new obligations imposed on them by the owners of land, and of death duties in the form of a peasant's best horses or cows.

Luther approved of the demands made by the protesters - one of which was the right to choose their own ministers. Luther urged the princes to accept those demands that were reasonable. Frederick of Saxony was the only prince who had some sympathy for the peasants, saying that the poor were in many ways oppressed. Frederick hoped for a peaceful settlement with the peasants, but he died on May 4, 1525. Meanwhile, the demands of the peasants had been rebuffed, and protest by the peasants had turned violent and to pillage. Luther feared that the peasants would discredit his movement in the eyes of the princes and the upper classes. Luther took literally Paul's words, described in Romans 13:1-2, that every soul should be subject "to the higher owners." He declared that Christians had to accept the government that was put over them and had to accept with patience their sufferings, that their rulers might be damned by God for their injustices but that nobody fighting these injustices would enter heaven. Rebellion, he added, hastened the end of civilized society.

Luther called on the princes to crush the rising. He declared that if there were innocent people among the rebels that God would save them, that no mercy should be given them. The princes did not need Luther's encouragement. The armies of Protestant as well as Catholic princes overwhelmed the rebels - as armies usually did against pockets of rebels. Historians estimate that over 75,000 peasants were killed in 1525. The victorious German princes claimed the right to determine the religion of their subjects. Those princes who had converted to Lutheranism took control of local Lutheran churches. Ten years later the Prince of Waldeck, would crush the Anabaptist society at Münster, diminishing the Anabaptist movement.

The Lutheranism Spreads, Erasmus Remains Catholic

The Lutherans abolished confession, an abolition that appealed to women wishing freedom from embarrassing observations about their sexual lives. In Lutheran schools, boys and girls became literate in the catechism and the Bible. The Lutherans abolished monasticism and emphasized the home as a special domain of the wife and a place of love, tenderness and reconciliation. The Lutherans allowed their clergy to marry, making it possible for those women who had been the concubines or mistresses of priests to become honorable wives. In 1525, Luther's sexual frustration came to an end: around the age of forty-three he married a former nun, Kathrina von Bora, and he was to father six children.

Luther's movement also proliferated. By 1522 his movement had taken hold in the city of Bremen. By 1523 it had taken hold in the city of Strasbourg, and by 1529 in Hamburg. And Protestantism spread to the Netherlands.

Sweden had freed itself from rule by Danish royalty in 1520, and its new king, Gustavus Vasa, owed much money to his supporters at Lübeck, in northern Germany. To liquidate this debt he raised taxes and asked for a special contribution from the Church. The Church refused. Luther's ideas were migrating to Sweden, and the New Testament was translated in Swedish in 1526. The following year the king, still short of money, decreed that the Church was to surrender part of its income to the Crown, all its castles and all donations it had received since 1454. Church estates were transferred to the crown. The power of the Church in Sweden was broken. Religion was organized along strictly Lutheran lines, and upper clergy were now to have more common origins. As the Church saw it, selfish rulers were increasing their political power and wealth at the expense of the Church.

Arguments between the Lutherans and loyal sons of the Catholic Church continued. In keeping with the custom of debate in those times, spokesmen for the Church hurled vulgar epithets at Luther and his followers and Luther hurled epithets back. Erasmus was an exception and stuck to tempered observations. He saw Lutherans yielding no less to luxury, lust and greed than did Catholics, and he disliked the fanaticism that he saw in Lutheran evangelists. Erasmus saw Catholics that he also disliked, but he said that "one bears more easily the evils to which one is accustomed" and that therefore, he said, he would stay within the Church.

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