In the end, on June 28, 1519, Charles was unanimously elected emperor, and became Charles V. But the damage was already done. The crucial Leipzig disputation was unfolding when the election was held. Frederick had bought Luther enough time to turn his personal crisis of conscience into a mass movement threatening the Church’s entire structure of authority.

During 1520, Luther wrote a series of tracts laying out the core of his ideas. His legions of readers snapped them up like episodes of a serial drama. The Freedom of a Christian described his understanding of God’s free grace in rapturous terms. Other books reviled the Church’s hierarchy and the corruption he thought it had spawned. Luther declared that the Church’s ceremonies and sacraments were an elaborate confidence trick, fleecing Christians before abandoning them to hell. All Christians, he insisted, had both the right and the responsibility to reform the Church, and they should act on that right whatever the priests say. In fact, the distinction between priests and laypeople was meaningless. All Christians are priests. At the end of the year, he defiantly burned the papal bull that had condemned him as a heretic.

By then, his enemies were finally assembling. The new emperor formally assumed his imperial title in October 1520. Luther had had a magnificent run, but justice was closing in on him. An imperial Diet, the empire’s highest legislative body, was planned at the southwestern German city of Worms. Luther was summoned to attend and, undoubtedly, to be condemned. He was promised safe-conduct from Wittenberg to Worms and back, but promises made to convicted heretics were not necessarily binding. Jan Hus, whom Luther had praised in Leipzig, had been burned despite just such a safe-conduct promise. Luther fully expected the same fate, and friends urged him not to go. His correspondence as the Diet approached shows a man torn. Naturally, he was frightened and agitated. He prayed urgently for safety and doubted his prayers would be granted. Yet in another mood, he relished the Diet as an apocalyptic confrontation, at which he would at last testify to his doctrines, seal them with his blood, and win a martyr’s crown. And so he went to Worms as Christ went to Jerusalem, a three-hundred-mile journey, pausing to preach on the way. When warned of the dangers ahead, he replied that if there were as many devils in Worms as there were tiles on the roofs, he would still go. He arrived on 17 April 1521, to find the rooftops crowded, not with devils, but with supporters and spectators. The streets were so thronged as to be impassable. He was borne through to the Diet and brought before the estates of the empire.⁸

Luther expected to have his long-delayed argument about God’s grace. Once again he was denied. He was simply presented with his books and asked to repent of the heresies in them. To everyone’s surprise, including perhaps his own, Luther asked for twenty-four hours to think it over. This unexpected request was granted, and it raised some hopes that he might actually concede. The one surviving letter which he wrote that night suggests such hopes were not entirely foolish. “With Christ’s help,” he wrote, “I shall not in all eternity recant the least particle.”⁹ Apparently, he feared that he might crumble. He could be forgiven for finding the empire’s assembled glories a little overbearing.

He returned the following afternoon and was kept waiting outside the palace for two hours. The crowd pressed about him. Voices shouted that he should stand firm. One called out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you.”¹⁰ Finally, he was allowed in, and the previous day’s question was put to him again. He answered carefully. Yes, they were his books. Would he disown them? Only if it could be shown to him, on the basis of the Bible and the Bible alone, that he was wrong. Otherwise, his conscience was captive to the Word of God. He might even – as one witness claimed, many years later – have concluded with a famous declaration of helplessness: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

Luther often looked back on that moment. In retrospect, his “humility and deference” troubled him: he reproached himself for having “held my spirit in check”. He promised that “they would hear other things, if I would come before them again.”¹¹ In other words, Luther at Worms was not quite the roaring lion of Protestant legend. He spent a week after that famous exchange locked in debate with a formidable roster of German prelates and princes. They had enough to talk about that the emperor extended his safe-conduct for forty-eight hours to allow the discussions to continue. But in vain. Neither side would budge. So Luther was condemned as a heretic and outlawed. The young emperor, principled, prudent and a touch naive, honoured the safe-conduct. Luther left Worms on 26 April, having been granted neither his argument nor his martyrdom. Even so, the Diet of Worms would be the epicentre of his life and of what would become the Reformation: humble, unyielding defiance of the whole world in the name of Scripture and conscience.

“Captive to the Word of God”

Part of Luther’s achievement at Worms was to enact, with unforgettable vividness, a new way of doing theology, which has defined Protestantism ever since. At the Diet, the archbishop of Trier’s secretary, Johann Eck (a different Eck from Leipzig) accused Luther of being “completely mad”. This was not just abuse. Eck was genuinely shocked. Luther had demanded to have his errors proved to him, from the Bible, to his own satisfaction. Eck pointed out the obvious problem:

If it were granted that whoever contradicts the councils and the common understanding of the Church must be overcome by Scripture passages, we will have nothing in Christianity that is certain or decided.¹²

If individual consciences are sovereign, then how can Christians ever again agree on anything? Eck’s point was essentially unanswerable. Much of the rest of this book is about the endless arguments that he correctly predicted. Some Protestants have tried to evade his charge. Others invert it: if the individual conscience is not sovereign, how can anyone call themselves Christian at all?

But it is worth noticing the detail of Luther’s position at Worms. He took his stand on two authorities, which he saw as intimately linked: his own conscience and God’s Word. The Word, he said, had his conscience captive, and it was neither safe nor right to disobey conscience.

The Bible’s role here was crucial. To appeal simply to inner conviction would have indeed looked like madness. But for Luther, an acknowledged expert in biblical interpretation, to take his stand on the Bible was altogether different. His stirring, empty offer to submit himself to its correction was widely imitated in the years that followed. This is the “Scripture principle”: the conviction that the Bible is the only and absolute source of authority and that all believers are equal before it. It is often taken to be Protestantism’s central, unifying idea.¹³ But, while it is certainly a pervasive one, it is not the whole story. Luther’s own relationship with the Bible was subtler than that.

What made Luther’s stance so outrageous was not that he valorized the Bible. That is hardly unusual for Christians. What was shocking was that he set it above everything else. He treated the views of the early Church fathers, of more recent scholars, even of Church councils, with great respect, but he would not be constrained by them. In the end, anything outside the Bible, including anyone else’s interpretation of the Bible, was a mere opinion. This was the true and enduring radicalism of Protestantism: its readiness to question every human authority and tradition. The formulation of the English Thirty-nine Articles, half a century later, captures the same spirit in a careful double negative:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be . . . thought necessary or requisite to salvation.

Not, everything in the Bible is essential; but, nothing that is not in the Bible is essential.

On the crudest level, this was a brilliant manoeuvre. In a Christian society which had always revered the Bible, which was rediscovering its original text in the midst of a scholarly vogue for ancient truths, which was ready to measure the Church’s hierarchy against its own ideals and find them wanting – in this context, for a monk and doctor of theology to stand alone, at risk of his life, and wield the Bible against all the forces of the establishment was dreadfully persuasive. Erasmus had called for a simple Christian life informed by Scripture. What could be simpler than the cry “Scripture alone”? It allowed Luther to shrug off every authority the Church could throw at him while still submitting to the highest authority of all. Best of all, the authority to which he was submitting could not answer back. As Erasmus would soon argue, this is Scripture for brawlers: turning the Bible into a stick with which to beat your enemies. Protestants have been weaponizing Scripture ever since, for use against outsiders and each other.

But this is too cynical. Luther was a superb scriptural street fighter, but that was not why he valued the Bible. We need instead to notice how apparently free and easy Luther could be with the Bible, to an extent that would shock many modern Protestants. It is not so surprising that he threw out the so-called deuterocanonical or apocryphal books of the Old Testament, the books such as Tobit, Ecclesiasticus and Maccabees, which survive only in Greek, not in Hebrew. Plenty of biblical scholars agreed with him on that, though it conveniently got rid of some theologically awkward passages. Yet he also dealt robustly with the rest of the Old Testament. He wanted to expel the book of Esther altogether. He thought that the books of Kings were more reliable than the books of Chronicles, doubted that large chunks of the Old Testament were actually written by their supposed authors, and reckoned that many of its texts were corrupted. He thought that most of the book of Job was fiction and that the prophets had sometimes made mistakes. He poured cold water on the huge numbers in the Old Testament narratives.¹⁴

On the New Testament, Luther was only a little more restrained. He was famously scathing about the Epistle of James, whose teaching on the role of faith and good works does not sit entirely easily with his doctrines. He called it an “epistle of straw”, claimed that it “mangles the Scriptures” and “doesn’t amount to much”. Once he told a student, “I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove.” In Luther’s Bible, James was yanked out of its normal place and sent to the end of the New Testament, along with three other books that he doubted were written by apostles (the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of Jude, and Revelation). His habit of singling out other parts of the Bible for special favour was almost equally unnerving. John’s Gospel was for Luther “the one, fine, true, and chief gospel, and is far, far to be preferred over the other three”.¹⁵ All of which suggests a Humpty-Dumptyish readiness to ignore what he disliked, choose what he wanted, and call it the Word of God.

That very brazenness tells us that this was not the whole story. Luther treated the Bible this way because of his understanding of what the Bible was. There is no doubting his profound debt to the Bible, where he had found the doctrines that shaped the rest of his life. Those doctrines were, for him, the Bible’s true heart. As he advised Bible readers in 1530,

Search out and deal with the core of our Christian doctrine, wherever it may be found throughout the Bible. And the core is this: that without any merit, as a gift of God’s pure grace in Christ, we attain righteousness, life, and salvation.¹⁶

That was the message: the Gospel, the good news of Christ crucified and risen. The reason he called the Epistle of James straw was that for all its earnest moralizing “it contains not a syllable about Christ.”

This is why, at Worms, Luther said his conscience was captive to the Word of God, rather than to the Bible. The two were not quite the same. John’s Gospel teaches that Jesus Christ himself is the Word of God made human. The Bible, Luther argued, was the same Word of God “enlettered”, clothed in a body of ink and pulped rag.¹⁷ Therefore much of its content was incidental and unimportant. If that included some factual errors or contradictions, they did not matter any more than the fit of Jesus’ clothing. The message was what counted.

Luther used his Bible to fight his battles, and did so with relish, but before he was a brawler, he was a lover. The Bible had taught him about his beloved, and so he treasured it as a love letter. He understood it through the prism of that love. Everything that could not be read through this prism was unimportant. The Bible was not to be analysed like a scholarly text but to be gazed at like a great work of art.¹⁸ This was the only way that the Word of God could speak to your soul, and this was why every outside authority had to be rejected. Like that of a great work of art, the Bible’s power was to Luther self-evident. Unless, impossibly, you could persuade him that he had not seen what he had seen, there was nothing more to be said. The difficulty, inescapable after Worms, is that not everyone who gazes on a great work of art sees the same message.

Although Luther was allowed to leave Worms in safety, he was merely given a head start. For the rest of his life, he was a wanted man, and to the end of his days he was conscious of the Diet’s still-active condemnation hanging over him. The immediate effect was that halfway home he was kidnapped on the road by what seemed to be a band of brigands. His companions were aghast, but Luther had been warned to expect it. The “kidnappers” worked for his protector, Elector Frederick. They spirited him away to the Wartburg castle, near Eisenach, where he remained in hiding for nearly a year. His captors took elaborate steps to conceal his whereabouts, even spreading rumours that he had fled to Bohemia.¹⁹ He changed his monk’s habit for the clothes of a country knight and grew his hair and beard: a disguise, but also an assertion of the Christian liberty he preached. Yet, as he joked, in his confinement he was now more truly a monk than ever. He did not waste his time in captivity; he translated the New Testament into German, among other projects. But he chafed. In the first few weeks he was “drunk with leisure”.²⁰ Soon he was brooding over what was happening in his unexpected absence.

Luther was already displaying what would become an enduring feature of Protestantism: a queasy mixture of humility and arrogance. The humility was real. Luther knew that he was the worst of sinners. He begged his followers to call themselves Christians, not “Lutherans”:

What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone. . . . How then should I, poor stinking maggot-fodder that I am, come to have men call the children of Christ by my wretched name?

He denied that his movement’s success was his own doing. In 1522, he gave this account of how it happened:

I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends . . . the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses on it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.²¹

Vintage Luther, including the beer. But for all the humility, there are some bold claims here. His teaching is Christ’s teaching, and he writes God’s Word. Increasingly, Luther saw himself not merely as a theologian but as a prophet, called by God to overturn the papacy. For one obscure professor to mobilize an unprecedented mass movement, to defy all the forces of Church and empire, and to feel them crumbling at his touch – this was heady stuff. And yet his confinement had sidelined him. His books still churned out, but there was a dangerous vacuum – especially back in Wittenberg, the eye of the storm.

Wittenberg was by now dominated by Luther’s allies. The most important of them was Philip Melanchthon, acknowledged on all sides to be one of the most brilliant minds of his age. The unpronounceable name is a sign of the times. He was born with the solid German surname of Schwartzerd, but Johannes Reuchlin, who happened to be his great-uncle, suggested he adopt the Renaissance fashion of translating his name into Greek. In 1518, Reuchlin also secured the job of professor of Greek at Wittenberg for his nephew. Luther was immediately in awe of Melanchthon, who, at only twenty-one, was thirteen years his junior. He claimed that he had never written a book as good as Melanchthon’s Commonplaces, published in 1521. It was Melanchthon who fashioned Luther’s vivid, chaotic theological insights into a coherent system. But while the two men were always close, Luther’s faith in his younger colleague was shaken during his confinement in 1521–22. Melanchthon had not kept a grip on Wittenberg. Where Luther was immovably stubborn, Melanchthon was calm and reasonable – to the point, his enemies muttered, of timidity. Luther compared their respective styles by saying that Melanchthon pricked their enemies with pins, while he himself stabbed them with pikes.²²

If Melanchthon was timid, others in Wittenberg had the opposite problem. After Luther’s condemnation at Worms, some of his fellow-travellers began to take matters into their own hands. In September 1521, Luther’s fellow Augustinian monks changed the way they were celebrating the Catholic Mass, the most prominent daily symbol of the theology they now questioned, eventually rewriting the service in German rather than Latin. Some began to abandon their cloisters. In January 1522, the university’s chancellor, Andreas Karlstadt, even got married, in defiance of the long-standing Catholic requirement that clergy remain celibate.

A nervous Elector Frederick called for restraint, but these new radicals were only just beginning. In December 1521, three men from the mining town of Zwickau arrived in Wittenberg: a former student and two weavers. They claimed that God had called them to be prophets, predicted the imminent end of the world, and demanded further dramatic reforms. In particular, they criticized the practice of baptizing infants, which, as they rightly said, has no direct biblical basis. Meanwhile, Karlstadt and his allies were demanding the destruction of Catholic images, altars, and relics in the town’s churches, so as to “cleanse” the buildings of idolatry and fit them for reformed worship. This was controversial in itself, but when the elector forbade it and some of the more excitable townsfolk started smashing images on their own initiative, it looked less like holiness and more like rioting.²³

Luther was horrified. Partly this was because, for all his spiritual radicalism, he was deeply socially conservative. His instinct was to obey rightful authorities, to respect social hierarchies, and to preserve good order. For him, Christian freedom meant inner liberation, not political upheaval. He had defied established authorities, but he was a professor and had in any case been called by God. Self-appointed prophets like the Zwickauers and the iconoclasts had no excuse.

More significantly, Luther hated these impatient reformers’ ideas. He wanted to set Christians free from rules and laws, but Karlstadt and the Zwickauers were burdening Christian consciences with new rules about baptism and images. They had missed the point. Luther wanted not to replace bad laws with good ones but to lift believers above the realm of law altogether, into the light of the Gospel of love. For him, these law-mongers were Schwärmer, “fanatics”. It was a capacious category, which expanded over the coming decades to include almost everyone Luther disagreed with.

So in March 1522, Luther decided to risk returning to Wittenberg to take charge. Symbolically, he arrived in his monk’s habit, shaved and tonsured. For a time, it worked. Karlstadt was reined in and then exiled to an obscure country parish. Luther’s success in whipping his recalcitrant colleagues into line only confirmed his sense of his unique calling.

Yet while Luther could impose order on one town, the wider movement he had sparked was now beyond anyone’s control. The early 1520s in Germany were revolutionary years. Priests, printers, peddlers, even (shockingly) women could all make themselves heard. In a ruthless, scurrilous and almost ungovernable book market, talent rose rapidly to the top. Between 1518 and 1525, fifty-one editions of anti-Catholic works by a Nuremberg shoemaker, Hans Sachs, were published in Germany: not far off Philip Melanchthon’s total of seventy-one. In parts of Germany’s jurisdictional patchwork, reformist preaching and printing were banned, but preachers were hard to keep out, and books almost impossible. Those cities where the reformers found support were confronted with Wittenberg’s dilemma: How was this Reformation actually to be implemented? By the time Luther himself finally abandoned his monk’s guise, sealed his departure from the vowed life by marrying a former nun, and promulgated a German order for the Mass, he was scrambling to catch up with a splintering, restless, hydra-headed movement, offering a hundred different local Reformations in the name of the same Gospel.

The Fanatics’ Reformation

With hindsight, we can see three broad strands of reform emerging from this chaos. One strand looked directly to Luther, with his appealing blend of spiritual radicalism and social conservatism. The other two strands were less unified. One, rooted in Switzerland and southern Germany, looked primarily to Huldrych Zwingli, the city preacher of Zurich, and several other loosely allied leaders; we will come back to them in chapter 3. The final strand was even more fractious. It lacked shared leaders, origins or doctrines. What united it was a mood, a radically impatient determination to take Luther’s insights about the futility of the old ways and to press them to their extremes. Karlstadt belonged to this radical strand. So too did Thomas Müntzer, a former pastor in Zwickau who became notorious after he was blamed for burning down a shrine to the Virgin Mary in March 1524. That summer, he publicly demanded that the princes of Saxony take up arms on the reformers’ behalf. Luther denounced him as another fanatic.

Müntzer was starting to ride something bigger than he could control. It is still unclear quite how the religious turmoil that Luther had unleashed was connected to the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25, the largest mass rebellion in European history before the French Revolution of 1789. The peasants had long-standing grievances about rents, rights and property, but reforming preachers were a vital catalyst. Suddenly peasants were denouncing serfdom as incompatible with Christian liberty, demanding that the people be able to elect their priests, and claiming that the Church’s riches ought to belong to everyone. None of this was what Luther had meant, but you did not have to stretch his ideas very far to get there. The most widespread set of demands, first adopted by the peasants of Swabia, ended with a deliberate echo of Luther at Worms: they offered to desist if they could be proved wrong from the Bible.

Some of the rebels, influenced by preachers like Müntzer, wanted much more. Abolishing private property – didn’t the Bible record that the early Church had held all goods in common? Killing monks and priests – didn’t the Bible teach that idolaters should die? Overthrowing princes – didn’t the Bible promise a future kingdom of the saints? Even if these radicals were only clinging to the rebellion’s tail, they gave the whole enterprise an apocalyptic feel. Something more than rents and landholding was at stake. It was a moment to establish a just social order in anticipation of Christ’s imminent return.

To his credit, Luther was torn. In early 1525, he wrote An Admonition to Peace, accepting that many of the peasants’ demands were fair but warning that rebellion was no way to secure them. To follow Christ meant meek submission, not pillage and insurrection. He advised the peasants, sombrely and with a magnificent lack of realism, to return home and humbly petition their betters for redress. Once it became clear that matters had passed that point, Luther’s deep social conservatism took over. His next pamphlet, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, blustered,

Nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog. . . . There is no time for sleeping; no place for patience or mercy. It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace. . . . I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. . . . Stab, smite, slay, whoever can. If you die in doing it, well for you! A more blessed death can never be yours, for you die in obeying the divine Word.

Ironically, Luther justified this in the same apocalyptic terms as Müntzer. This was not a time for soft middle ways: “The destruction of the world is to be expected every hour.” It was time to take a stand against the forces of Antichrist, whatever their guise.²⁴

On 15 May 1525, nine days after Luther’s pamphlet was written, the Thuringian peasants met a Saxon-Hessian mercenary army near Frankenhausen. Müntzer preached before the battle, pointing to a rainbow as an omen of victory and promising the peasants that bullets could not hurt them. Meanwhile, they were encircled with artillery. The peasants tried to flee to the town. Thousands died before they reached it. The wounded were left to die on the field. The town itself surrendered, but not quickly enough. The reprisals were on a genocidal scale. The victorious lords, one witness wrote, “seem bent on leaving a wilderness for their heirs”. Müntzer himself was found hiding, in disguise, and was beheaded. A few weeks later, the southern German peasants suffered equally catastrophic defeats. The total number killed during the whole appalling business is probably well over eighty thousand. And while the peasants would certainly have been crushed with or without Luther’s blessing, his moral responsibility for the slaughter is inescapable.

For the reforming movement as a whole, the Peasants’ War was a calamity. Fairly or not, it was widely blamed on reformist preaching. By no coincidence, it was in September 1524, as the violence was bubbling up, that Erasmus finally decisively distanced himself from Luther. He argued, all too plausibly, that Luther’s teaching on God’s grace left no room for personal responsibility and so threatened moral anarchy and social collapse. If this was where conscience governed by Scripture alone led, perhaps the authoritative, binding interpretation of the Church was not so bad after all.²⁵ In the early 1520s, it had been possible to hope that one of the various strands of the reforming movement might take over the old Church wholesale. That hope died on the battlefields.

The radicals, those who survived, now began to preach withdrawal from Christian society, to form perfect communities of saints in expectation of the imminent Last Judgment. For many of them, the symbol of this withdrawal was adult baptism. All the baptisms described in the New Testament are of adults able to confess their own faith. So perhaps infants should not be baptized? In which case, all Christendom had been in error since at least the second century, and the community of the faithful could only be a small, self-selected group. This meant abandoning the ideal of a universal church, to which Luther and most other reformers still aspired, for sectarianism. Beginning in Zurich in January 1525, the radicals began to mark that withdrawal by baptizing adults. “Anabaptists”, or rebaptizers, their enemies called them, and they were not short of enemies. To the old Church, they were heretics like the rest. To Luther and other reformers who desperately needed to be thought respectable, the radicals risked discrediting the reforming movement as a whole. A sharp line needed urgently to be drawn in these shifting sands.

That effort to differentiate between radical “Anabaptists” and safe, mainstream reformers was strikingly successful. To this day, it remains controversial to describe the radicals as Protestants. Yet their shared heritage is unmistakable. The Anabaptists’ doctrines were very similar to those of establishment, “magisterial” Protestantism. Even infant baptism was openly questioned by some “mainstream” reformers, before the subject became too hot to touch. One hundred and twenty years later, the Baptists, a new group with its roots firmly in mainstream Protestantism, followed the Anabaptists in renouncing infant baptism, despite coming from a distinct theological tradition.

Like Luther’s moderates, the radicals claimed to base their doctrines wholly on the Bible. But like Luther, they did so as lovers, perceiving the Bible’s core message by God’s grace and using it to interpret the rest. Some were more explicit about this than Luther. The south German radical Jörg Haugk complained that “many accept the Scriptures as if they were the essence of divine truth; but they are only a witness to divine truth which must be experienced in the inner being”. Hans Hut, a survivor of the battle of Frankenhausen who became a compelling Anabaptist missionary before his death in prison in 1527, argued that the Bible, if taken literally, bristled with contradictions. It could therefore only be properly understood by the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this way, theologically uneducated radicals could defy learned professors like Luther. One self-taught Anabaptist preacher called scholars “Scripture wizards”, arguing that their hairsplitting subtleties blinded them to the simple truth.²⁶

Пред.1 234 След.