Luther and Calvin

Religious revolutionaries

Charlotte Methuen

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780745958613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia del cristianesimo

Martin Luther and John Calvin have both left dramatic and lasting influences on Christianity and on European society. Their calls for reform led to the church breaking off in different directions, and people and nations believed so passionately for or against their causes that wars ravaged Europe for decades. But what exactly did they teach? This book presents Luther and Calvin in context, looking at the work and ideas of each in turn and then at the making of Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition, showing how the sixteenth-century Reformation began a process of political and intellectual change that went beyond Europe to the New World. The result is that today its influence is tangible all over the Western world. Perfect for those who want to understand and engage with what Luther and Calvin thought, and with the debates surrounding interpretation, this book is an excellent introduction to two of Christianity's most famous thinkers. Charlotte Methuen teaches Church history at the University of Glasgow, and has also worked at the Universities of Hamburg, Bochum, Oxford and Mainz. She specializes in the Reformation period and is the author of numerous books and articles.

PART I

MARTIN LUTHER

CHAPTER 1

LUTHER’S CONTEXT

The late-medieval church in the German lands

The church in the late fifteenth century elicited mixed reactions. Articulate critics such as the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus painted a shocking picture of corruption and excess, with bishops and abbots living lives of luxury, uneducated clerics holding multiple offices, and friars arguing about the number of knots in their belts. There was some truth in these criticisms, especially the first: cardinals and archbishops, bishops, abbots and abbesses wielded considerable influence, both ecclesiastical and political. Indeed, in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the archbishops of Trier, Mainz, and Cologne would cast three of the seven votes which served to elect the emperor. Noble or up-and-coming families might well see such influential posts as appropriate for younger sons, and feel it worth spending a great deal of money to acquire one.

Albrecht of Brandenburg came from such a family. His father was the Elector of Brandenburg, one of the four secular rulers who had a vote in imperial elections, along with the Elector of Saxony, the king of Bohemia, and the Elector of the Palatinate. Albrecht’s father died when he was just nine years old. Together with his elder brother, Joachim, who inherited the duchy of Brandenburg and with it the electoral title, Albrecht received a humanist education. In 1506, the brothers founded the University of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. Albrecht, the younger brother, was destined for a clerical career. In 1509 he was appointed to a canonry at the cathedral in Mainz. In 1513 he was ordained priest, and in that same year made Archbishop of Magdeburg and Administrator of the Diocese of Halberstadt. A year later, aged twenty-four, Albrecht also became Archbishop of Mainz, Imperial Elector and Primate of the German Empire. The debt he and his family incurred in acquiring this, their second imperial electoral title, and paying the fines which allowed Albrecht to break canon law by holding senior posts in three different dioceses, was considerable. It was in the hope of paying off some of this debt that Albrecht applied for permission to preach the indulgence campaign against which, in 1517, Luther would direct his Ninety-Five Theses.

Albrecht’s biography illustrates the problem of generalizing about the state of the Church in the early sixteenth century. Although his ecclesiastical offices were bought for him, Albrecht, as we have seen, was humanist educated. He was critical of corruption within the church, and to some extent a reforming bishop. Albrecht shared an interest in and commitment to the church as the means of salvation which was common to many of his contemporaries. Church building flourished in the fifteenth century, paid for by wealthy families, monastic orders, merchants and all manner of other people as a way of glorifying God. Lay involvement in church life took very varied forms. Societies and confraternities for lay people were a central part of the life of almost every parish. Craft guilds financed altars at which masses could be said for their members, whether living or dead. Wealthy families extended churches or built chapels. Princes such as Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, Luther’s patron, invested huge amounts in collecting and displaying relics. Local people gave to their parish churches statues of their favoured saints, or clothes and jewellery to decorate them. Societies of men or women, or teenage girls or boys raised money to keep lights burning in front of the statues. Nearly everyone went on pilgrimages according to their means: the wealthy to the Holy Land or to Rome; the less well off to local shrines. In Wittenberg, a great attraction was the amazing collection of relics assembled by Frederick the Wise. A properly prayerful tour of this collection could secure the pilgrim a reduction of hundreds of years off their time in purgatory.

Late-medieval people were avid to assure themselves of their salvation, and the church offered ways for them to gain that assurance, generally to the great financial benefit of the church and the clergy. The piety of many people centred on the mass, and in particular the visual moment at which the priest elevated the unleavened communion bread – the host, which had now become the body of Christ – for all to see. Most people went only to look, and actually received communion – offered to them in the form of the bread – only annually, if at all. The celebration of mass, however, was frequent. Indeed, in larger churches or cathedrals with many chapels and altars, several masses would often be being said at different altars at the same time, offered for the benefit of souls in purgatory, and paid for by funds given to the church by relatives or left by the beneficiary themselves. The Latin words were not always understood particularly well by the priest himself, who might have received a minimal education. They were spoken under his breath at an altar obscured by a screen, on top of which a cross was placed – the rood screen. A bell, rung at the most holy points of the mass – the consecration and the moment of elevation – alerted the people in the church that these points had been reached. Sometimes there might be no congregation present. In churches with multiple altars, the congregation might move from altar to altar as they heard the ringing of the bells, hoping to catch a glimpse of the body of Christ in the hands of the priest. The literate and pious might pray before an image, or study a popular devotional work such as Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, looking up when the bell rang and being assured of Christ’s presence with them. The illiterate could puzzle out the biblical stories painted on the walls of the church.

Piety and devotion were an important aspect of many people’s lives, as shown by the popularity of religious works and of personal religious images. Those who wished to understand more about their faith might study and pray together. Some formed religious communities and lived together without taking life vows; one of the more widespread groups was the Brothers of the Common Life. The growth in popular piety was not unrelated to humanism. It came to be known as the modern devotion, or devotio moderna.

The saying of frequent masses was supported by endowment from the faithful which not only paid the livings of many priests, but was put to use in supporting education and church embellishment or refurbishment. In a society in which money was by no means the only medium of trade, endowing masses often meant the transfer of goods or land to the church. Gifts of land not only benefited the institutions of the church, but removed that land from the jurisdictions of local princes, who under the terms of canon law were unable to tax income arising from church lands. The fulfilment of the church’s promise of repose for the souls of its people came at a cost of property in this world to families and local rulers, and some of them were beginning to resent it. Princes had good economic reasons for seeking to wrest back land from the church, or at the least negotiating rights to some proportion of the taxes levied by Rome on income from ecclesiastical property, which were known as annates. In Spain in the late fifteenth century, and in France in the early sixteenth, monarchs signed agreements with the papacy which allowed them to do that, and which also allowed them to determine the candidates for senior church appointments. In the German lands there was resentment that Italian noblemen were too often given prime ecclesiastical posts, but the political system there made the situation difficult to change. The emperor’s authority was more indirect than that of the monarchs in Spain or in France. The rulers of local German territories were subject in different ways to both emperor and pope; increasingly they sought to assert their independence of both. This would be a crucial factor in protecting Luther from both papal and imperial punishment.

Criticism of the church was nothing new, but the growth of towns through the late Middle Ages had brought with it a growing need for people who could read and write to serve civic functions, and to work in crafts and trades. The new city and town councils saw education as part of their responsibility to their communities, and the establishment of new schools to some extent removed responsibility for education from religious orders. Education still tended to have a definite Christian aspect, but the Renaissance interest in the texts of classical Greek and Roman culture was a strong influence on humanist learning. Boys – and, to a far lesser extent, girls – were taught Latin according to the rhetoric and style of Cicero rather than the barbaric Latin (as it was coming to be seen) of the Middle Ages. Members of this new educated class had access to a growing range of texts which were emerging from the newly invented printing presses. These were the people who were most likely to give money and endowments to the church, but they were also able, and increasingly willing, to think critically about the institution to which they were giving, and to make new demands of it. They expected the church to educate them in matters of salvation, and if those employed by the church could not or would not, then they would take steps themselves.

By the end of the fifteenth century, a number of town and city councils across the German lands, and particularly those of the imperial free cities, which were largely self-governing, were employing a friar or a secular priest to preach to the people in the vernacular. It might even be laid down that the city preacher’s words should be evangelisch – evangelical, literally, “of the Gospel” – in response to the growing influence of biblical humanists. City councils sought to demonstrate their ability to exercise responsibility for the well-being of their people, often asserting their independence against a bishop who sought to retain his authority over them in matters both spiritual and temporal. Consequently, the Reformation frequently took hold in towns and cities. Huldrych Zwingli’s Zürich, Martin Bucer’s Strasbourg, and later John Calvin’s Geneva were notable examples among many others.

The late medieval church was an integral part of a society in which people saw considerable continuity between this world and the next. People knew that what they did could affect their salvation, and the teaching and practices of the church encouraged this belief and codified it, offering ways of reckoning up grace against sin. It was this world into which Martin Luther was born, this world which he would encounter in his time as a monk, and this world against which he would rebel, splitting the Western church.

Martin Luther: From childhood to professor of theology

Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben in Thuringia to Hans Ludher (as he spelt his surname), the second son of a family which owned a farm in Möhra, near Eisenach, and his wife Margarethe Lindemann, whose family also came from Eisenach. He was baptized the next day, on 11 November, St Martin’s Day, and given the name of the saint. Soon afterwards, the family moved to Mansfeld, where Hans Ludher managed a series of copper mines. Luther attended the Trivialschule or elementary school in Mansfeld from the age of about seven, where he would have learnt the classical trivium: grammar, rhetoric and logic, all taught in Latin. When he was about fourteen, he was sent to the cathedral school in Magdeburg, where he boarded with the Brothers of the Common Life. A year later, in 1498, he moved on to St George’s parish school in Eisenach, where he seems to have been impressed by the spiritual depth of Johannes Braun, one of the priests. In the spring of 1501, Luther signed the matriculation book for the Arts Faculty at the University of Erfurt: Martinus ludher ex mansfelt. Here he was introduced to the so-called “modern way”, the via moderna or nominalist school, of philosophy. He studied the works of Aristotle, and particularly the Nichomachean Ethics. In 1502 he was awarded his Baccalaureus Artium or Bachelor of Arts, and in January 1505 his Magister Artium, or Master of Arts, placed second in his class. Luther was later to be extremely critical of the medieval system of education, believing that it led people away from a dependence on the Gospel and grace to a belief that they could play a part in their own salvation. But there can be no doubt that Luther’s own education equipped him well. He acquired good Latin, a love of Latin poetry, and an appreciation of the importance of definitions and of logical arguments, all of which would be most useful to him in his career as a reformer.

For the 21-year-old Luther, however, no such ambitions were in the air. Following his father’s plans for him, in May 1505 he began to study law. He seems to have had doubts about this choice from the start. An outbreak of plague or another epidemic illness confronted him with death, and made him fearful for the state of his soul. Returning from a visit to Mansfeld on 2 June 1505, he narrowly escaped being struck by lightning, praying to St Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary: “Help me, and I will become a monk.” Despite the disapproval of his father, just six weeks later, on 17 July, Luther applied to the Erfurt house of the observant Augustinian hermits, entering the order later that autumn.

As a novice, Luther dedicated himself to keeping the rule. Prayer, fasting, regular self-examination and confession to a superior were an integral part of his life. Despite his efforts, however – and both Luther and his superiors remembered him as extremely, even overly, conscientious in all that he did as a monk – Luther was unable to experience a sense of certainty that he was saved. His situation was made more complicated by the decision of his superiors in 1506 that he should prepare for ordination to the priesthood. As part of his preparation he read the Explication of the Canon of the Mass by Gabriel Biel, which emphasized the importance of a precisely correct manner of celebration and the need for the priest to be at one with God. This increased Luther’s sense of inadequacy and unworthiness, and his first mass on 2 May 1507 was a difficult experience. Over the years that followed, his fears and uncertainties – what he called his Anfechtungen – shook his confidence in all that he had been taught about how salvation might be achieved.

During his novitiate, Luther also began to study the Scriptures. It is possible that he encountered a Bible for the first time in 1505, perhaps on entering the monastery, although it may simply be that this was the first time he had had an opportunity to read biblical texts without the textual glosses and commentaries commonly found in medieval Bibles. His interest and ability were such that after his ordination Luther was instructed by Johann von Staupitz, Vicar General of the Augustinians in Germany, and the “Professor for Bible” at the University of Wittenberg, to take up the study of theology at the University of Erfurt. At the same time, he was made responsible for teaching philosophy to students in the Augustinian house. He was clearly successful, for in 1508 he was sent to the University of Wittenberg to share responsibility for teaching philosophy there, while continuing with his own studies. In 1509 he was awarded his Baccalaureus biblicus, or bachelor of the Bible, in Wittenberg, and later that year his Baccalaureus sententiarius, or bachelor of the Sentences, in Erfurt. The first of these degrees qualified Luther to lecture on the Bible; the second to lecture on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the standard medieval textbook which for most medieval students of theology was the key to understanding theological – and, with it, biblical – truth.

Before he took up a teaching post, however, Luther went to Rome. Staupitz was seeking to reunite the different strands of the Augustinian order in Germany, and the Augustinian house in Erfurt had opposed his efforts. In 1510 Luther was sent as a representative of those opposing voices to negotiate with the head of the order in Rome. He seems to have been struck both by the amazing range of possibilities – holy places, pilgrimages, relics, masses, and simply the churches – offered by Rome to the pilgrim, of which he made full use, and also by the extravagant and corrupt pomp which surrounded the papal court. In the short term, Luther came to be convinced that Staupitz’s endeavours should be supported rather than opposed. On their return to Germany, Staupitz, whose other commitments had never given him time to take seriously his responsibilities as Professor for Bible at Wittenberg, sent Luther to take over that post.

This appointment, which Luther took up in 1512, marked the beginning of a long association between Luther, the University of Wittenberg and the successive Electors of Saxony: at this time Frederick “the Wise”; from 1525, his brother John “the Steadfast” or “the Constant”; and finally, from 1532, John’s son John Frederick “the Magnanimous”. The University of Wittenberg had been founded in 1502 by Elector Frederick. At the same time, an Augustinian monastery had been established, in which Luther now lived. Luther was awarded his Doctorate in Theology in October 1512, taking an oath in which – among other things – he swore that he would preach and teach the Scriptures faithfully. Luther would hold the post of Professor for Bible for the rest of his life.

He began, in 1513, by lecturing on the Psalms. In 1515 he started to lecture on Romans, turning to Galatians in 1516, and to Hebrews in 1517. Luther’s lectures, especially those on the Psalms and Romans, witness to the development in his thought on matters of free will and justification, and hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Martin Luther
• Part II John Calvin
• Conclusion
• Further Reading