Chapter 64. Luther: Indulgences, the Ninety-Five Theses and the Princes’ Reformation

Few figures on the library’s shelves are drawn in such opposite colours as Martin Luther. To the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica he is the professor whose Theses struck “sledge-hammer blows” at the worst abuse of his age. To Monsignor Patrick O’Hare, writing in 1916 under the imprimatur of Cardinal Farley, he is a man whose real character lies hidden behind a “Luther of fiction”. Karen Armstrong sees a pioneer of modernity, Helen Ellerbe an intolerant authoritarian, and Mitchell Heisman the founder of an aristocratic German Protestantism. This chapter sets these portraits beside the reference shelf’s chronology, from the indulgence campaign to cuius regio, eius religio.

The indulgence trade and the “monopoly” of the Church

The editors of the Encyclopedia of World History introduce their reprint of the Theses with a structural point: “At this time in history, there was only one church in Europe, which amounted to a monopoly.” Anyone who wished to be forgiven “had to be absolved by the church” [Social, Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “Martin Luther: The Ninety-five Theses, Date: October 31, 1517”]. Charles Freeman describes how the practice changed over time: “Indulgences originally involved some form of onerous act, such as a pilgrimage, but later they could be bought for cash, the scandal that gave rise to Martin Luther’s protest” [Freeman, The Reopening of the Western Mind, #64786].

The reference shelf supplies the occasion. In 1515 Leo X granted a plenary indulgence to finance St Peter’s in Rome, valid for almost any sin. Johann Tetzel preached it in 1517 near Wittenberg, where sales were banned, and Luther was alarmed when parishioners returned claiming they no longer needed to repent. The saying “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs” had already been censured by Paris theologians. Rulers, the article adds, disliked indulgence money leaving their lands [Wikipedia: Ninety-five Theses].

Avro Manhattan, whose Vatican Billions is a sustained indictment of papal wealth, treats the explosion as overdue. Many “marvelled that the explosion had not occurred much earlier. The phenomenon of Martin Luther, consequently, was not unexpected” [Manhattan, The Vatican Billions, #64831, ch. 36]. For William Bernstein, “Luther was simply the right man at the right time in the right place”, since the printing press had cut the cost of a pamphlet “by a factor of approximately thirty” [Bernstein, The Delusions of Crowds, #73904, ch. 1].

31 October 1517: two readings of the Theses

The Britannica of 1911 gives the classic Protestant-liberal description:

“The theses were singularly unlike what might have been expected from a professor of theology. They made no attempt at theological definition, no pretence at logical arrangement; they were anything but a brief programme of reformation. They were simply ninety-five sledge-hammer blows directed against the most flagrant ecclesiastical abuse of the age. They were addressed to the ‘common’ man…” [Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed., vol. XVII, #72810, “Luther”].

The text itself, as reprinted in the Encyclopedia of World History, is more measured than the image of hammer-blows suggests. Thesis 24 holds that “the greater part of the people are deceived by that indiscriminate and highsounding promise of release from penalty”. Thesis 25 says that the pope’s power over purgatory is “just like the power which any bishop or curate has… within his own diocese” [Social, Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, Theses 24-25]. The reference article adds that the Theses were propositions for an academic disputation that apparently never took place, and that on 31 October Luther sent them with a letter to Archbishop Albert of Mainz. Melanchthon was the first to mention the famous posting on the church door, and his account conflicts with Luther’s own statements; a posting, if any, may date from mid-November [Wikipedia: Ninety-five Theses].

O’Hare answers the Britannica line by quoting Lindsay, “the non-Catholic writer”, who called the Theses “the ninety-five sledge-hammer strokes delivered at the grossest ecclesiastical abuse of the age”. O’Hare’s reply is that they “terrified nobody. They only emphasized the boldness and rashness of their author in abandoning teachings he once firmly held” [O’Hare, The Facts about Luther, #50994, p. 78, “Luther and Indulgences”]. This is the core of the Catholic case: the Theses were not a protest against abuse within an accepted doctrine but, in practice, a renunciation of a doctrine Luther had once held. O’Hare argues that a sermon Luther preached at the Castle Church, in which he denounced “not only Tetzel, but the formalism” of the practice, shows that “this was in reality his doctrinal position at the time” [O’Hare, #50994, p. 76].

“Two Luthers”: the Catholic counter-portrait

The preface to O’Hare’s book, written by the Church historian Peter Guilday, sets out its method. It quotes an older tract by “a Prelate of the Church” to the effect that there are “two Luthers—the Luther of panegyric, of romance, and fiction, and the Luther of history and fact.” The second is found “above all from his private letters, of which former devotees of Luther would only publish what they thought to his credit, garbling or suppressing the rest” [O’Hare, #50994, Preface]. Guilday argues that scholarship since the Weimar Edition (begun 1883) has destroyed the heroic image: the “Protestant Rebellion” “did not fashion a separation of secular from ecclesiastical power” and “did not establish liberty of conscience” [O’Hare, #50994, Preface].

Worms, Augsburg and the princes

The political sequence is set out on the reference shelf. In June 1520 Leo X’s bull Exsurge Domine condemned 41 propositions drawn from Luther’s writings, and Luther was excommunicated in January 1521. Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, secured him a safe-conduct to the Diet of Worms, mindful of Jan Hus’s fate at Constance in 1415. Before the Emperor Charles V on 17-18 April 1521, Luther acknowledged his books, among them To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, and refused to recant. The Edict of Worms condemned him as “a notorious heretic” [Wikipedia: Diet of Worms]. Freeman notes that Frederick “remained a Catholic, at least until his deathbed” and protected Luther out of a sense of duty as his ruler [Freeman, #64786, note].

Bernstein stresses what this protection cost: “To accomplish his reformation, Luther needed the support of the aristocracy, and so he rigorously confined his dissent to the theological and eschewed the political,” citing 1 Peter 2:13, “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake” [Bernstein, #73904, ch. 1]. Heisman draws a political sociology from the same alliance. In the Address to the Nobility of the German Nation (1520), “the nobles were representatives of the German nation in contradistinction to Rome. For Anglo-Saxon Puritans, the Norman-based nobility overthrown in 1649 were” foreign [Heisman, suicide note, #38252, part 673]. On this reading Luther made German Protestantism compatible with aristocracy, while English Puritanism, facing a nobility it saw as foreign and Rome-like, became democratic [Heisman, #38252, part 673; study-guide summary, section 99]. Heisman places this inside his broader thesis that Christianity carries “the foundationally anti-kin selective values of Jesus” and “helped oppose the nepotistic values that one would normally predict on the basis of kin selection” [Heisman, #38252, part 201].

At the Diet of Augsburg on 25 June 1530 the Lutheran princes and free cities presented the Augsburg Confession, drafted by Melanchthon. Luther, still an outlaw under the Edict of Worms, stayed behind at Coburg [Wikipedia: Augsburg Confession]. The Peace of Augsburg of 25 September 1555 then wrote the princely settlement into imperial law: cuius regio, eius religio let each ruler choose Lutheranism or Catholicism for his territory. Calvinism had no legal standing until Westphalia [Wikipedia: Peace of Augsburg].

The Peasants’ War and the charge that “the civil powers obeyed Luther”

Bernstein dates the start of the rising to 1523-24 in Swabia and says that some 100,000 poorly armed rebels were slaughtered in 1524-25. Of the Twelve Articles of Memmingen (March 1525) only the first was theological; the rest demanded the abolition of serfdom, lower rents and the return of common lands. In Bernstein’s judgement, “Thomas Müntzer’s apocalyptic theology was merely tacked onto what had initially been a largely secular populist uprising, with disastrous results” [Bernstein, #73904, ch. 1]. Freeman states the reformer’s position flatly: “Martin Luther condemned, rather than sided with, the peasant revolts of his day” [Freeman, #64786].

O’Hare makes this the heaviest Catholic charge. He quotes Luther: “Like the mules… who will not move unless you perpetually whip them with rods, so the civil powers must drive the common people, whip, choke, hang, burn, behead and torture them” [O’Hare, #50994, p. 240]. He reports that Müntzer, at his last breath, “accused Luther, whose fanatical teachings he unfortunately imbibed and advocated, of having been the cause of all his misfortunes,” and concludes: “The civil powers obeyed Luther. They wielded the sword” [O’Hare, #50994, p. 240]. Ellerbe makes a similar point in a single sentence: in 1525 Luther “supported the merciless suppression of the Peasants’ War, a rebellion that his own spirit of independence from the Roman Church had helped to ignite” [Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History, #6699, ch. 7, n. 11].

Jews, Anabaptists, women, and two modern re-readings

Ellerbe groups Luther’s harshest views together. “Although Luther could find no scriptural warrant for exterminating Jews, he believed that they should be enslaved or thrown out of Christian lands and that their ghettos and synagogues should be burned” [Ellerbe, #6699, ch. 7, n. 12]. “He thought that the rebellious Anabaptists should be killed and even publicly affirmed a 1531 edict by Wittenberg theologians sanctioning their execution” [Ellerbe, #6699, ch. 7, n. 13].

Armstrong places Luther at the start of modernity rather than in the dock. “In Luther’s writings, God had begun to retreat from the physical world, which now had no religious significance at all. Luther also secularized politics.” She presents the reformers as men who made “one of the earliest of the declarations of independence that would punctuate Western history”, and holds that “the secularization of politics began as a new way of being religious” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. Guilday’s preface to O’Hare directly denies that the Reformation brought about any separation of secular and ecclesiastical power, so here the two sources contradict each other.

Benedict XVI’s last writings give the modern Catholic re-reading. His interlocutor recalls Ratzinger’s comment on the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on Justification, which noted a “difference of mentality”: “Luther’s religious experience was dominated by terror before the wrath of God, a feeling quite alien to modern men, who instead sense the absence of God” [Benedict XVI, What Is Christianity, #73099, part 63]. Benedict sums up the theological gap in this way: “According to Luther… the saving gift of Jesus consists in our being justified sola fide—by faith alone,” whereas “The early Church never thought of this relation as a contrast between justification by works and justification by faith alone” [Benedict XVI, #73099]. He calls the unresolved Reformation question about the priesthood “a wound that silently continues to make itself felt” [Benedict XVI, #73099, part 71].

Key points

• The Encyclopedia of World History frames the indulgence crisis as the product of a church “monopoly” over absolution. Freeman traces the shift from onerous penitential acts to cash payment.
• The 1911 Britannica calls the Theses “ninety-five sledge-hammer blows” addressed to the “common man”. O’Hare quotes Lindsay’s version of the phrase and replies that they “terrified nobody”.
• The Theses were academic propositions sent to Albert of Mainz on 31 October 1517; the church-door posting is disputed (reference shelf).
• O’Hare’s preface (by Guilday) argues for “two Luthers”, the fictional and the historical, the latter recovered from private letters that devotees “garbled or suppressed”.
• The princes made the Reformation politically possible: Frederick of Saxony at Worms (1521), the Augsburg Confession (1530) and cuius regio, eius religio (1555).
• Freeman and Bernstein say Luther condemned the peasant revolts. O’Hare and Ellerbe say he incited their bloody suppression, and Ellerbe records his calls to enslave or expel Jews and to execute Anabaptists.
• Armstrong reads Luther as secularising politics “as a new way of being religious”. Heisman sees his appeal to the German nobility as the root of an aristocratic German Protestantism opposed to democratic English Puritanism.
• Benedict XVI’s late writings, recalling his comment on the 1999 Joint Declaration, describe Luther’s religious experience as dominated by terror before divine wrath, alien to modern man’s sense of God’s absence, and contrast sola fide with the early Church’s view.