Luther nails the 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral 31 Oct. 1517, Ferdinand Pauwels, 1872, Eisenach, Wurtburg The modern world was born with the publication of Luther’s 95 theses, writes Fintan Lyons
The year beginning October 13, 2016 was chosen to mark the fifth centenary of the Protestant Reformation because of Martin Luther’s posting of his theses against indulgences on that date in 1517, putting him squarely at the heart of this commemoration.
Luther was indeed the dominant figure at the beginning, but even within his lifetime the movement became a multi-faceted one with other leaders and other centres of action. Luther himself was left out of negotiations, while the next couple of generations saw the emergence of separate denominations. Friedrich Schleiermacher in the 19th Century believed the Reformation still went on.
It is worth considering then how relevant Luther is to the story of this huge event in the history of Christianity and whether this relevance continues today. There had been movements of a similar type earlier than the 16th Century: the Waldensians in Italy in the 12th, the Lollards in England in the 14th and especially the Hussites in Bohemia in the 15th.
Relevance
Luther’s relevance to religious history begins with how in his attempt to remedy what he saw as corruption in the Church he unintentionally unleashed forces which ruptured a monolithic Christian society, leaving it divided and prone to continual fissiparous forces.
In some ways he is still relevant, if only because the issues with which he attempted to deal have never fully gone away and the contemporary project to bring Christianity back to a recognisable state of unity will require re-visiting many of the issues on which he challenged his contemporaries, and not just the ecclesiastical authorities, because religion and politics affected each other very much.
His relevance to the religious and cultural issues of today can be distinguished from the historical question of what were the immediate effects of his career. He accepted at the end of his life that only limited success had attended his efforts, yet the change that took place in Christendom after Luther was obviously real.
But it is hard to estimate how much of it was actually due to Luther or his immediate successors in the Reformation movement. Wilhelm Dilthey (1883-1911) saw the beginning of a new social order stemming from the writings of Luther, a society marked by the recognition of the autocracy of the human person, an appreciation of the secular world and the fostering a new kind of personal religion free from the influence of repressive institutions.
Much interest has also focused on the kind of society, its moral values and economic outlook, which existed in the period following the second stage of the Reformation, that influenced by Calvin. In the late 19th Century, Max Weber advanced the theory that capitalism flourished because of the Protestant ethic that emerged from Calvinism in the 16th and 17h Centuries.
Ernst Troeltsch agreed with Weber about later Protestantism, but held that Luther’s Reformation remained pre-modern, creating a religion that was still Church-dominated, in which life was still ruled by supernatural revelation, but based now on the Bible rather than papal hegemony and subservient to the princely, or later state, authorities.
All these attempts to identify the influence of the Reformation on society have had their critics; capitalism already operated in the society into which Luther was born and it was also the system that obtained in Renaissance Italy. The Medici family, which gave the church Pope Leo X, Luther’s protagonist, were financiers with branches in various parts of Europe.
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By the beginning of the 16th Century, the prohibition of usury in Christian tradition was breaking down as low-interest lending to people in need became part of normal living and Luther would come to accept the practice as part of his distinction between the two kingdoms, the realms of Church and state, or more exactly, the two sets of relationships within which the Christian lived, usually described as the two kingdoms.
On the one hand, the law of the Gospel required forbearance, forgiveness, refusal to exploit another’s condition; on the other, the common life of mankind required regulation by just laws to ensure justice was available to all.
While he had no systematic teaching on these matters, in later centuries Luther came to be criticised for apparently granting to the state an autonomy which could leave the community passive in face of the state’s control of culture and this was held to explain the failure of Lutherans to adopt a critical attitude towards the policies of Germany’s National Socialist government before and during World War II.
Such criticism hardly took sufficient account of the emergence of the Confessing Church, the movement against Nazism in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was committed to Luther’s theology rather than liberal versions of it, played a prominent part.
What Luther’s movement brought to early modern society in Germany was an emphasis not just on the national culture and economy but also on the local community including the promotion of family life even though he denied marriage was a sacrament.
The Bible in his vernacular translation took a prominent place in the family, bridging the gap between home and church and giving literacy a boost; Luther is credited with contributing considerably to the emergence of the German vernacular and its literary riches.
His contributions to hymnody further enriched the culture which went on to produce the monumental figure of J. S. Bach in less than 200 years. This was quite a legacy for someone who even as a national figure and religious leader took pride in claiming he was of farming stock, going back to his grandfather and great-grandfather.
To speculate on what would not have happened without Luther may be a futile exercise, nor is it clear, according to Carlos Eire, whether the ‘Reformations’ which did occur changed the world for the better or for the worse – a legitimate question, he maintains, most historians prefer to avoid.
It seems clear, however, that even without the upheaval of the Reformation the Church’s structures and administrative control would have been put under enormous strain as a new world opened up through revolutionary developments, technical and social, at the end of the 15th Century.
Principles
It is interesting that contemporaneously with Luther’s promotion of Augustine’s Neoplatonist theology, though from a different perspective, an Aristotelian philosophy of nature with beginning to be replaced with more Platonist ideas as a foundation for science and technology. Not that the world of commerce and politics reflected on these deeper principles; rather it was a case of the new technologies such as astronomical and navigational equipment favouring voyages of exploration and the expansionist policies of old Europe’s states.
This resulted in rapid growth in trading activity and a new commercially-focused society. Medieval thinking in religion as in much else would have found itself less and less relevant in this new situation, while on the other hand it is clear that the theology and the ecclesio-political structures generated by the Reformation movement had significant effects on European culture.
It is true that the early Reformation churches were inward-looking rather than missionary-minded, so there is certainly a question as to whether what Luther inaugurated left Christianity less adapted to the task of bringing the Gospel message to this new world, new in culture and new in geographical extent. At first sight, negative effects of the Reformation are apparent.
The wars now known as the ‘Wars of Religion’, which devastated much of Europe and sparked off a secularisation process in European culture so evident today, could hardly have happened, at least not under a religious banner, if Christianity had remained united. But would the health of Western Christianity have declined even more from its fragile state in the 16th Century and would the divided witness of West and East have continued to be an obstacle when facing the spread of Islam? These are fascinating questions, but impossible to answer.
A study of Luther, and his effects on Church and society, leads in the end to recognising that issues which existed then are endemic to Christianity in every century: ecclesiological issues in the sense of the Church’s self-understanding but also broader ones concerning religion in a secular society.
In modern times, this was the agenda for Vatican II, where the Council’s theology endeavoured to be creative by privileging mystery over institutionalism with its attendant drawbacks and adopted a ‘People of God’ perspective.
The Church can learn from how Luther had to cope with the unexpected consequences of his focusing on the individual rather than the institution and the divisions which soon appeared. Luther’s concentration on the individual act of faith, through making justification by faith the main principle of his theology, brought a subjective dimension of religion to the forefront in a way that made a sense of corporate belonging more difficult to retain.
Personality
Contemporary theology’s aspiration to enfranchise fully the individual believer raises questions about the psychological as well spiritual state and indeed educational status of the believer. Much has been written about Luther’s attempts to deal with an anarchic movement claiming to be guided by the Spirit and about his own personality.
An issue which has come more into focus with Pope Francis’ papacy is the relationship between central authority and the local Church. This question was of course central to the Reformation movement and then involved the question also of the relationship between a council of the church and the papacy. Expanding the present-day discussion to include this perspective could be helpful, especially when synods are regularly held and local episcopal conferences are brought into the reckoning. The ambiguities of Luther’s attitudes in this regard could profitably be borne in mind.
Turning to the external issues, the context in which Luther’s movement grew was highly political in the sense that alliance with rulers or military force at times determined its growth or threatened its existence. In relation to social justice, his tendency to favour the rulers against the demands of the peasants at the time of the Peasants’ War of 1525 came from his dissociation of religion from social issues, which today seems simplistic, though the distinctions he made echo in some way the ideals expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. Today, church-state relationships encounter added difficulties because of ethical issues unknown in Luther’s time and require even more discernment than his perspective could provide.
One lesson the Reformation taught is that neither patronage nor hostility advances the Church’s position and that the relationship between Church and state depends on many factors, in particular nationalism. In Germany, the strong sense of being German led to a ‘Germexit’ in relation to Rome (as happened in England under Henry VIII).
There was also a degree of populism, whipped up by Luther’s publications, but also by the rapid growth of pamphleteering in the early 16th Century, of the Flugschriften or short, cheaply produced pamphlets (a phenomenon corresponding to the similar growth and influence of the social media today). How social media and populism affect not just the Catholic Church but religion generally should not be underestimated.
The problems besetting the well-being of Christianity as a cultural phenomenon, as giving a ‘tone’ to society, can be seen reflected in the story of Luther and a society which became Lutheran in tone. It can be helpful to take account of the many-sided cultural, economic and political contexts in which his theology developed and the interaction between them.
Five hundred years later, it is both important and challenging to understand the world in which Luther grew up, one which looked back on centuries of an unchanging culture steeped in Christian tradition, but was now undergoing sudden change at the level of thought and social and political structures, much like what has happened in the Western world in recent times.
The economy of a world unaccustomed to technological discovery was jolted and forever altered in the late fifteenth century by the discovery of printing, a technology derived from weaving and multiplying the results of the physical effort previously put into manuscript production. That this benefited the Reformation is clear – though it also benefited its opponents in the dispute – but its effects on the culture generally were enormous because of the spread it brought to existing knowledge and new thinking, hitherto the preserve of the few. New thinking developed in economics, science, technology, politics and of course theology.
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Printing was a hugely important factor in the emergence of the era known as modernity. An interesting example relating printing and modernity – and by chance in the context of the Swiss Reformation – can be found in the story of church life in the town of Zürich in the early stages of its Reformation. The priest Huldrych Zwingli was administrator at the Great Minster – an important church, with its own chapter. In his preaching he drew attention to the contrast between law and Gospel; the church laid down many laws whereas the Gospel conferred freedom on Christians, freedom to judge for themselves.
A crisis arose on March 5th 1522, Ash Wednesday, and was recorded in a contemporary chronicle: Elsi Flammer, maidservant of the printer in the Niederdorf, said she had by her master’s orders cooked some sausages on Ash Wednesday, and that the People’s Priest of Einsiedeln, Bartholomew Pur and Michael Hirt had eaten of them.
The printer, Froschauer, was subsequently hauled before the town council, where in his defence he said: “Prudent, gracious, pious and dear Lords, as it has come to your knowledge that I have eaten flesh in my house, I plead guilty, and in the following manner: I have so much work on hand, and it is costing me so much in body, goods and work, that I have to get on and work at it day and night, holy day and work-a-day, so that I may get it ready for the Frankfurt Fair.”
The work in hand was the Epistles of St Paul, presumably in the interests of the new reform movement or, more accurately perhaps, arising from the humanist movement’s drive to make the Scriptures available, but the defence the printer gave provides a very early glimpse of the culture we have come to call modernity.
The scientific revolution that formed that culture fully had yet to come, but the relationship between man and the world is already altering here, 40 years after the invention of printing. The machine is beginning to impose its rhythms on human life and Froschauer feels its pressure. Modernity’s philosophy will in time subscribe to the idea of an unending cycle of production and consumerism affecting all of religion.
- Fintan Lyons OSB is a monk of Glenstal Abbey who has taught at the Angelicum University and the Pontifical Liturgical Institute in Rome. The above is an edited extract from Martin Luther: His challenge then and now, published by Columba Press.