How Luther Became the Reformer

Christine Helmer

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611649376
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire du Christianisme

No story has been more foundational to triumphalist accounts of Western modernity than that of Martin Luther, the heroic individual, standing before the tribunes of medieval authoritarianism to proclaim his religious and intellectual freedom, Here I stand! How Luther Became the Reformer returns to the birthplace of this origin myth, Germany in the late nineteenth century, and traces its development from the end of World War I through the rise of National Socialism. Why were German intellectualsespecially Protestant scholars of religion, culture, and theologyin this turbulent period so committed to this version of Luthers story? Luther was touted as the mythological figure to promote the cultural unity of Germany as a modern nation; in the myths many retellings, from the time of the Weimar Republic forward, Luther attained world-historical status. Helmer finds in this construction of Luther the Reformer a lens through which to examine modernitys deformations, among them anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism. Offering a new interpretation of Luther, and by extension of modernity itself, from an ecumenical perspective, How Luther Became the Reformer provides resources for understanding and contesting contemporary assaults on democracy. In this way, the book holds the promise for resistance and hope in dark times.

1. History and Story

An Introduction

1. Celebration

The year 2017 was marked by unprecedented political and cultural shifts across the globe within the enveloping context of immediate climate disaster. Neoliberal interests contested the role of governments to negotiate the common good; the relatively new democracies of the European Union, those founded after 1989, began to renege on their promises for a clear and open public space. At the same time, resistance awakened to challenge the emergent global order of illiberal democracies and complacent technocrats. The values of democracies were reviled, often by those chosen to protect them, and undermined. Public decency was eroded by abusive discourse; the new technologies of social media were manipulated to incite paranoia and sow seeds of chaos to benefit the interests of the powerful. The temperature of the planet became hotter than ever; violent weather events displaced populations, creating a new category of refugees. New movements cast a bright light on the sexual abuse of women in the workplace. Activists banded together within and across national boundaries in solidarity and protest. The unprecedented upheavals and challenges of 2017 precipitated a profound contestation of what it means to live in the world at this phase of the modern era.

Also 2017 was the year in which all around the world people celebrated the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Exactly five hundred years earlier, on October 31, 1517, an obscure Augustinian friar and theology professor nailed a list of ninety-five statements to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. Martin Luther soon saw his carefully articulated protest against what he saw as the excesses of the Catholic Church translated from Latin into German, published, copied, and disseminated all over Europe. His protests would be read and discussed throughout Germany and in neighboring countries of France, England, Switzerland, and Bohemia. Soon enough, the little village on the Elbe River in the territory of Electoral Saxony was plunged into geopolitical upheaval that implicated the grand ambitions of the papacy.

Pope Leo X was the second son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, called the Magnificent, one of the most powerful and influential men of the sixteenth century. Leo aspired to build the central church of Christendom in the Holy City of Rome. This would require vast sums of money. In a story familiar to all Protestant schoolchildren, Leo granted special indulgences to those he commanded to contribute money for his architectural plans. It was this economic scheme that incited Luther’s theological and existential ire. The crisis Luther’s protest precipitated quickly drew in the Archbishop of Mainz, also an Augustinian friar, whose own political ambitions required borrowing money from the Fugger banking family in Augsburg in order to meet the pope’s demand, and the emperor, Charles V, who presided over territories from Bohemia in the east to the Americas in the west. Luther’s Ninety-five Theses on the Power of Indulgences caught and contributed to a moment of theological questioning that came amid a complex swirl of late medieval church politics, expansions of empire, and economic exploitation.¹

Luther’s call for church reform has resounded down the ages. All around the world, Christian, post-Christian, and non-Christian people celebrated the five-hundredth anniversary of his protest as significant for the modern world order. With Luther, as the history is told, the political and cultural shift from the medieval to the modern had begun. The values of religious freedom and the autonomy of the individual that Luther was said to have introduced with his treatise on Christian freedom from 1520 had come to characterize modernity.² The politics of social contract and democracy, the emergence of the guilds and of new forms of capitalism, social developments in which knowledge became a matter of public negotiation, legal openness to human rights, and guarantees of religious toleration—these were all modern developments that owed their origins to Luther, asserted Protestant historians. Not only the man was celebrated, but also what he had come to stand for.

While many celebrated, however, others commemorated the Protestant Reformation, bringing a more nuanced and even chastened sensibility to the year’s events. Some historical theologians carefully noted that Luther’s initiatives were more ambiguous, less brash and provocative than has been claimed. Luther did not intend to start a new church after all. He protested specific abuses in the late medieval Catholic Church.³ Nor did Luther promote anything resembling modern values. He was politically conservative and pastorally compassionate. He advanced some reforms while blocking more revolutionary programs as he saw expedient or appropriate. A number of historians and theologians are careful to distinguish Luther’s agenda from the modern project. This is especially so with regard to religious toleration: all of Luther’s works were laced with ugly polemic against those who disagreed with him, among them the pope and his theologians, Zwingli and the peasants, the Turks and Jews. All were objects of Luther’s outraged scatology. Toward the end of his life, Luther’s writings were permeated with obscene vitriol against Jews, in language so violent and ugly that one 1543 work in particular, About the Jews and Their Lies, was used by the National Socialists to promote anti-Semitic racism and murderous pogroms.⁴

The commemoration in 2017 thus offered scholars, ecumenically minded Christians, and people involved in Christian-Jewish dialogue the opportunity for a reconsideration of Luther’s ambivalent legacy. If Luther was to be regarded as a figure heralding modernity, then it was only right that he be identified with its complications, namely, with the division of the Western church into two mutually exclusive confessions, Roman Catholic and Protestant; with the rise of slavery as the obverse of freedom; and eventually with the emergence of genocidal anti-Semitism and the architecture of the Shoah.

Celebration contributed to the myth making; commemoration counseled a more profound and searching reevaluation. Both together reinforced the global attention on one late medieval doctor of theology. Martin Luther remains a familiar name after five hundred years, a remarkable longevity for one man’s protests, albeit brilliant and biting, against the church’s abuse of power. When compared to John Calvin—the younger French reformer of Swiss Geneva, whose world-historical impact is more evident, certainly, when measured in terms of global diffusion——Luther’s achievements seem rather circumscribed and local. His followers did not settle a continent! And yet, it is Luther—a coarsely garbed, dyspeptic former friar reeking of the squalor of the medieval household—rather than Calvin who appears in the public imagination as the instigator of modernity. Luther likewise towers over his fellow monk, Thomas Aquinas, whose work funded the intellectual culture of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church. Luther, not Aquinas or Calvin, is the subject of bestselling biographies and popular movies.⁵ Luther has been uniquely generative for modern historiography that traces the sources of freedom and individualism. Of all the theologians in the West, Luther is known as the Reformer.

How Luther became the Reformer is this book’s question. In running text throughout the book, I use the uppercase form, “the Reformer,” when I am referring to the early twentieth-century construction of Luther that is the subject of this book. I use lowercase, “the reformer,” to name the historical figure who drew on the Catholic theological and philosophical arguments of his time to propose reforms to the church of which he was a member. This puts him in the company of Saint Catherine of Siena and more recently Hans Küng. Through the centuries, and particularly since the previous centenary of the Protestant Reformation in 1917, Luther as the Reformer par excellence has been endowed with world-historical status. How Luther Became the Reformer examines how the history and the legend of Luther as Reformer have been inextricably linked to modernity. There appears to be no feature of modern consciousness or value that has not, at one time or another, been identified with Luther as its source, inspiration, or provocateur. These include the modern subject and the modern state, the modern citizen of that state and his or her attitudes toward religion, modern Christianity, and by extension modern variants of other religious traditions. Every religion in the past five hundred years seems to have had its Luther! Even the modern theological notion of the death of God claims Luther’s cross-centered Christology as its center. How Luther has come to be connected to some of the most significant ideas informing theories of the modern West is the subject of this book’s historical explorations.

The titles of recent biographies illustrate my claim! Luther rediscovered God and in the process changed the world. Luther began the fight for the Western mind. Luther’s historical interventions have made him the most famous man in Europe! Luther is rebel, renegade, and revolutionary. These sobriquets and others have appeared on numerous book covers throughout 2017.⁶ Even those storytellers who attribute to Luther a more ambivalent role in modernity’s development sign on to the central plot. Luther is linked in a special way to the unfortunate decline of medieval Christendom, with disastrous consequences, it is said, for contemporary life. Remarkable about the literary productions in 2017 was the fact that Luther remained emblematic of modernity in a way that is not true for any other historical figure, not David Hume, not René Descartes, not Thomas Hobbes, not Immanuel Kant, not Giovanni Boccaccio, nor any other likely contender!

The story of how Luther was made the Reformer is a historical question. Or more precisely, the making of Luther the Reformer has to do with two questions. One concerns why Luther’s story has been told as so singularly significant for modernity. The other has to do with what Luther intended for the late medieval Catholic Church. These questions were not given at the moment Luther reached down for his hammer and took the first nail out of his mouth at the Wittenberg church door. Rather, both questions are themselves historical creation.

Only in early nineteenth-century Germany did Luther appear as protagonist in the modern story. In works on the philosophy of history, philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) first situated Luther at the origins of modernity. Reflecting on the question of “who we are as moderns,” Hegel attributed the break between the Middle Ages and the modern era to Luther’s idea of freedom, and he devised an account of how the modern period emerged from the Middle Ages, with its distinctive values.⁷ Hegel’s emphasis on Luther’s centrality to the making of modern world history was then etched into the German imagination, when the social sciences were emerging as new academic disciplines. Theologians became interested in integrating these disciplines into their method of historical study. They approached the historical study of their major protagonist, Martin Luther, using new concepts from religion, sociology, and the history of economics, and with this new interdisciplinarity they arrived at the view that Luther became the Reformer as a result of a particular experience of the encounter between the human and the divine. Luther became the Reformer because of a unique religious experience. Luther scholars named the experience Luther’s Reformation breakthrough and pointed to it as the definitive rupture between the Middle Ages and modernity. From the turn of the twentieth century, this intellectual group of Luther scholars in the German academy, who comprised what came to be called the Luther Renaissance, dominated the story of how Luther became the Reformer for the next hundred years.

This book’s second question is also historical, but posed from a different angle. It concerns how Luther reformed the late medieval Catholic Church. While the first question approaches the modern story of Luther as Reformer by investigating the ideas and constructs of the Luther Renaissance, the second question is directed to how Luther articulated his reforms in relation to late medieval philosophy within the broader context of Catholic culture. Here we will need to excavate Luther from the modern notion that he was Rome’s implacable foe. By setting his protests more fully into his own time, we will see that another Luther emerges from this procedure, one of whom it cannot so easily be said that he was the first anti-Catholic modern.

The two approaches to the story of how Luther became the Reformer adumbrated here are historical. The first is focused on the period around the fourth centenary of the Protestant Reformation in 1917; the second is concerned with situating Luther’s theology in late medieval thought. Yet they are not easy to differentiate. The Luther Renaissance established the dominant concepts for interpreting Luther as the preeminent modern Reformer. But how can the late medieval Luther be studied when all the categories used to frame his theology are dictated precisely by the story of Luther as modern Reformer? How can the Catholic Luther be retrieved when the categories of this historiography and historical theology are modern and Protestant? Thus the exploration of Luther represented by the Luther Renaissance is tied to the hermeneutical challenge of identifying Luther as a late medieval Catholic. The result might be the discovery of a Luther who does not neatly fit into grand narratives of the West, Protestant or modern. If so, the subsequent and urgent question for today arises: might this Luther challenge assumptions we have about modernity and our place in it?

2. Origins

Origins matter for what follows. The Bible begins with a prepositional denotation concerning origins: “In the beginning . . .” (Gen. 1:1). This grammatical construct denotes a time before the existence of human eyewitnesses who might recount events taking place after the announced beginning. “In the beginning” is a grammatical sign for an origin that begins with God. With this introduction to the entire Bible, the world’s origins are assigned to divinity. God is the origin of all that is. Even when, after all has been pronounced good, human creatures disobey God and brother murders brother, the origins of all that is are with God. Origin is the site of novelty. Once established, origins give way to the life-long process of interpretation.

Religions, like any development, may be interpreted, at least in part or as a start, by examining their origins. Early nineteenth-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) turned this insight into his key methodological presupposition for the study of religion. Schleiermacher was interested in the question concerning what aspect of human experience was to be represented by religion. Was religion reducible to another phenomenon of human thought or action, to politics, for example, or to culture? Or was piety a necessary and discrete aspect of human existence and thereby integral to human development? Schleiermacher answered his question by making a case for religion’s distinctive relevance to human consciousness. Religion’s “province” in the soul, as he called it in his famous speeches On Religion, is catalyzed into personal and social development through historical movements that have taken shape around originary sites of religious novelty.⁸ An original event launches a religious sensibility, which then takes on social forms with historical significance. Dynamic personalities are at the center of these events. Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad, and others are venerated because they had distinctive religious experiences that then drew others into their respective circles. Once societies form around the influence of these persons and around their originary experiences, religions take shape in history.

Martin Luther has attained this kind of originary status in the history of Christianity. He is the sixteenth-century priest from medieval Electoral Saxony who, while intending to reform Catholicism, created Protestantism. Luther was a brilliant theologian, prolific writer, powerful preacher, and vulgar scatological satirist and polemicist. He came to some of the most profound insights into Christ’s gift of freedom ever grasped by a Christian theologian. His clear ideas and sharp words captured the imaginations, hearts, and minds of laity, clergy, nobles, and enemies. Luther translated the Bible from the original biblical languages into early New High German and thereby endowed the German people with the gift of a new language. He gave Protesta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Images
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1.   History and Story: An Introduction
• 2.   The Experience of Justification
• 3.   How Luther Became the Reformer
• 4.   Modernity and Its Contradictions
• 5.   A Test Case of Anti-Judaism
• 6.   How Luther Became the reformer (lowercase) of Catholicism
• 7.   Reformation
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects