Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet

"The reason people around the world—and particularly in Germany—are talking about the Reformation in 2017 is that it’s 500 years since Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses attacking indulgences to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. It’s a moment that we can commemorate, and it’s conventionally seen as the start of the Reformation. One could have a long argument about whether it is actually useful to think of it as the ‘start’ of the Reformation, or if the Reformation as a longer process of social, cultural and political transformation goes back some centuries beyond Luther. Nonetheless, Luther is hugely important to this story. You can pose the counterfactual question, ‘Would there have been a Reformation without Martin Luther? The answer to that is, ‘Who knows?’ But, without Martin Luther, it would certainly have been a different kind of Reformation. He clearly is a very important figure. At the risk of sounding pedantic, he was actually a friar. Like monks, friars are part of religious communities, but they had more pastoral functions. They were more likely to be preaching, hearing confessions and engaged with the outside world. In Luther’s case, that’s important—because he turns out to be such a brilliant communicator and preacher and writer. He’s not a completely cloistered figure. Luther’s own personal story is an extraordinarily interesting one, which we don’t know as much about as we would like. Luther tells us quite a lot about his own life but in fragments revealed over many decades, which are not always consistent with each other. What is clear is that Luther’s decision to become a friar is, itself, an act of rebellion. His family originally came from peasant stock, but by his generation was rather well-to-do. His father was an entrepreneur with a mining business in the eastern part of Germany known as Saxony. Luther is brought up in the mining town of Mansfeld at the beginning of the 16th century, and his father wanted his clever son to become a lawyer. Luther defies his father and enters the church instead. He tells us this is as a result of a vow made to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, during a terrifying thunderstorm—that if she saves his life then he will devote himself to God. That may well be true, but may also be an embroidered story used to justify this rebellion. Luther tries hard to be a good friar, but it leads him into spiritual crisis. Luther is, I suppose, confronting the question all medieval Christians faced, which is ‘What do I need to do to be saved?’ There were answers to that—obey the teaching of the Church, be open to receiving God’s grace through the sacraments. There was a rather touching motto among mediaeval theologians: ‘Facere quod in se est’ or ‘Do what lies within you.’ If you try your best to be a good Christian, that will be enough for God. God doesn’t demand from people more than they can actually give. But this makes no sense to Luther. He becomes convinced of his own intrinsic sinfulness and unworthiness, even though, as far as we can tell, he was a good, pious and celibate friar. He becomes obsessed with the problem of righteousness or justification, what he needs to do to be acceptable in the eyes of God. He tries all the remedies that the Church suggests—frequent confession, charitable good works of various kinds—but cannot understand how God could possibly be willing to save someone as wretched and sinful as him. And I suppose it was one of those coincidence moments, this extraordinary conjunction in Western Christianity of the internal spiritual crisis of an obscure friar in an obscure town in eastern Germany, with what becomes a very public debate about indulgences. This probably isn’t the occasion to talk everybody through the complicated theology of indulgences. It was one aspect of the Church’s teaching on sin and penance which had, to some extent, been corrupted or monetized by the papacy and other institutional forces. The impression that was being received—not just by Luther but by a whole number of reputable theologians and preachers—is that the real moral demands on the Christian of penance were being undermined by what seemed like a ‘cheap’ offer of grace and forgiveness. Inevitably it’s more complicated than that, but that’s certainly part of the perception. It’s actually not as a Protestant dissident, but as a serious-minded Catholic theologian that Luther takes up this quarrel. Although 1517 is seen as this great moment of revolution—and countless books will tell us this is when the Protestant Reformation started and Luther raises the standard of rebellion against Rome—that’s a fundamentally retrospective view. In 1517, Luther is not denying the authority of the papacy. He is not denying the existence of purgatory, which later Protestants—including eventually himself—do come to reject. He’s not even rejecting the value of indulgences themselves. He is objecting to the way that they’re being presented and preached in Germany. And although the tone is certainly combative, there is nothing at that moment which makes it look like a split in the church is inevitable or even likely. In fact, although I’m in the camp that thinks that Luther didn’t post the Ninety-five Theses to the church door, even if he had, it wouldn’t have been a particularly revolutionary act. Theses were propositions for a public, academic debate and in a medieval university that was where you advertised them. The door of the Castle Church is basically the university notice board for the University of Wittenberg. It’s through a whole series of lenses of hindsight that this comes to seem as a radical moment. Not just because it’s one of the more recent, nor because it’s by a woman, though that’s not irrelevant. Nearly all the serious English language biographies of Luther have been written by men. Many of them have also been inside accounts written by people who are themselves Lutherans or Protestants, or at least very politically or culturally sensitive to that point of view. Lyndal Roper is a wonderful historian. She is Regius Professor of History here in Oxford and is not, so far as I understand, a Lutheran or a practising Christian. She is a self-declared feminist historian and an Australian. It’s an outsider’s view and properly critical, but also takes that imaginative leap and empathises with this strange world. It would be very easy to do a hatchet job on Luther from a modern, liberal outlook. Lyndal Roper does not do that. It’s a very rounded, complex and fascinating portrait of Luther, who Roper herself says is a difficult hero. There are things in Luther that are very hard to get around for modern people. Certainly a strain of misogyny, which was pretty much par for the course in the early modern period. In fact, for a feminist historian, Roper makes rather less of that than one might expect. Yes. It had become almost an article of faith among historians that the last thing we should try and do is psychoanalyse or ‘get inside’ our subjects. An earlier biography of Luther from the late 1950s called Young Man Luther —by an American psychoanalyst called Erik Erikson—was a very Freudian reading of Luther’s development. It almost became a byword for how not to do a biography . Roper is not afraid to try to get inside the mind of her subject. It’s bold, daring and imaginative. There are aspects of it we might not always agree with, but it’s exciting to see a historian use modern insights from psychology to understand a subject, and set them in their context. Roper takes very seriously the social, the cultural, and indeed the doctrinal context of Luther, although she is looking to understand Luther’s own psychological drives and his relationship with his father—the overbearing mine owner. “The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany has had a real impact on Reformation scholarship” The other thing that is interesting and important about Roper’s biography of Luther—which perhaps could not have been written 30 years ago—is that it doesn’t see Luther in the way that a number of earlier biographies had, as a kind of man for all ages, a lone hero, almost existing outside of time and place. It locates Luther. It locates him physically in those small towns in eastern Germany where he was brought up, and in the small university town of Wittenberg where he spent his entire career, first as a Catholic friar and then later as an evangelical, to use a slightly anachronistic word—a Protestant preacher and a minister. Interestingly, he lived in the same building throughout. The former Augustinian monastery is gifted to Luther and Mrs. Luther by the Elector of Saxony. Before 1990, all of this was in the German Democratic Republic, a place where it was hard for historians to gain access to the archives. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany has had a real impact on Reformation scholarship. It enabled Roper to locate Luther within that social context, and a whole web of relationships with friends and enemies. The enemies are, in some ways, as important as, or more important than, the friends. Roper gets us round the paradox of Luther, which is that in 1517 he was really just a somewhat earnest Catholic friar protesting against abuses within the system and seeking to reform it—but in no way looking to tear up the entire book. How do we get, within a few years, to an open schism? Why did Luther’s theology radicalise so quickly? A lot of that is down to the way that he is energised by opposition. And Roper, I think, is very good at tracing how that works. Luther has really quite an extraordinary capacity for both friendship and hatred, and often people who had been friends become bitter rivals. At the heart of the book is a rather sad story of the relationship between Luther and his former disciple and friend Andreas Von Karlstadt, who starts taking a politically more radical line than Luther’s. Luther sees this not only as a deviation from God’s word as he understands it, but as a personal betrayal. His hatred for Karlstadt was even important for doctrinal questions. For example, Luther retains, in his version of the German communion service, the lifting up of the bread after its blessing. Nearly all Protestants were very uneasy about that because they thought that it would encourage worshipping of the bread, an ‘idolatrous’ practice that mediaeval Catholics had indulged in. But Luther retained it—principally because Karlstadt removed it. Only when Karlstadt is dead does Luther take that extra step himself. He’s extraordinarily stubborn. At one point she writes about his utter inability to see other people’s point of view, which makes him, in some ways, unattractive from a modern perspective. On the other hand, somebody who always does see other people’s point of view, who is by instinct a conciliator or a collaborator—like Luther’s younger friend and colleague Philip Melanchthon—could not have achieved what Luther achieved. This is where the stubbornness becomes more admirable. Who the hell does Luther think he is? He’s somebody who believes he’s right and has God’s word on his side. After the posting of the Ninety-five Theses, the most famous moment in Luther’s career comes in April 1521 when he stands up at the Diet of Worms, the parliament of the Holy Roman Empire, in front of the most powerful man in the world, the Emperor Charles V, and the assembled princes and ecclesiastics of Germany. He is ordered to retract his writings and admit that he was wrong. Absolutely knowing that his life might be forfeit as a consequence, he gives this tremendous speech in which he may or may not have said ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ He does say that his conscience is captive to the word of God, and that it is not safe or right to act against one’s conscience. There we recognise something modern and admirable in Luther—this sense of the sovereignty of an individual conscience. Perhaps less familiar to us is the idea that you can’t just believe whatever you like—your conscience needs to be captive to the word of God and not all consciences are equally valid. Nonetheless, the heroism that drives Luther to take on the most powerful forces in the world of his time is still admirable. Another of Luther’s less attractive traits is his virulent anti-Semitism . This is something that a number of other Luther biographers have not necessarily sought to ignore or explain away, but the line has been that, ‘of course this is terrible, but he’s conventionally anti-Semitic in the way 16th century people were.’ Roper suggests, I think rather convincingly, that Luther’s hatred of the Jews goes beyond what was normal, even in the 16th century. Central to his religious identity is the idea that the Jews are standing in the way of the gospel movement, the evangelicals or Protestants being the new chosen people of God. Luther is famous for writing what appears to be a rather tolerant and friendly pamphlet in 1523 with the title “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew”—in other words, recognising a kinship with the Jews. What Roper brings out is that, basically, Luther was offering the Jews a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to convert. His offer of friendship to the Jews is entirely conditional, and when it’s rebuffed, he reacts with that sense of hostility and betrayal that one sees in other aspects of his career. There are certainly scholars who think that. As I said earlier, I don’t think Luther publically posted his theses on October 31, 1517. But what we know for a fact is that, on that day, he wrote to his ecclesiastical superior, the Archbishop of Mainz. He says—in respectful but robust terms—that these indulgences are being preached in a terrible, commercialised, crude way. He requests that the archbishop do something about it but that he will hold off from opening a public debate. Had Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, or the other German Catholic bishops, reined it in, then it’s certainly conceivable that the furore that we have in Germany in the 1520s would not have taken that form. Of course, this is extraordinarily hypothetical. Luther is a pious Catholic friar. Archbishop Albrecht is a career politician. His sense of religious vocation is probably a little bit underdeveloped, to put it mildly. He got the archbishopric at the age of 24. He’s the youngest son of one of the great German noble families. I’m not sure there’s a realistic scenario in which all the great vested interests—ecclesiastical and economic—could have reformed indulgence selling in 1517. It’s tied up with all kinds of political and commercial interests, including huge debts that Archbishop Albrecht has to the Fugger Bank of Augsburg. It’s a nice fantasy and often indeed a Catholic fantasy that Luther was potentially a great Catholic reformer. There’s been a stream of biographies—including a very recent one by the Catholic journalist Peter Stanford —saying that this is the great tragedy of the Reformation. It certainly has some merit, but I think it may be idealistic to imagine a scenario in which everybody would have jumped to it at that moment."

"The Reformation era in general and Martin Luther in particular are absolutely decisive for the history of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. And Lyndal Roper approaches the man Luther from the perspective of gender history. She is not just a historian of gender, but of the body, and also of witchcraft, as well as the Reformation. So, she has a very original perspective, different from how many church historians would describe Luther and the evangelical movement. The biography goes far beyond the history of theology or church history, although she includes these as well—she is an expert on Protestant theology—and this makes the book particularly valuable. She looks at the man Luther from the perspective of his body. She describes his physical suffering, his diseases, his emotions. She reads his innumerable letters that contain, for example, descriptions of his dreams, which are very telling. She writes a lot about his marriage, his personal relationships, his anger, his anxieties. And about his hatred of Jews. She does not downplay this in any way, but describes it in very sharp terms. She is interested in his sexuality. What makes it special is that she is able to connect his personal, physical and emotional life to his theology and his plans for Church reform, showing that these are closely intertwined. For example, take his marriage to a former nun, which was an absolute taboo and a breach of one of the Church’s most fundamental norms. Lyndal Roper shows why and how this transformed Christian anthropology. She’s also interested in his conflicted character, and in his flaws, and his idiosyncrasies. From the perspective of gender history and the history of the body, she sheds new light on this person, but also on his times. Since the Reformation is so crucial for the political, economic, and social history of the early modern Holy Roman Empire, I put it on my list, because it is far more than just a biography."