Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World

The idea’s initial impact was like that of Darwinism or Marxism in their own times: it was a concept that no one had thought of in quite those terms before but that seemed to many people, once they had grasped it, to be self-evidently true. Luther’s themes were all familiar ones, either ancient or newly fashionable. St Augustine had emphasized God’s grace, the late medievals had stressed God’s absolute sovereignty, and Erasmus had called for simplicity. What Luther did was to combine those themes as never before.

However, his idea was also powerful because it was obscure. Luther suddenly became a public figure in late 1517 not because he was preaching free salvation but because his new theology made his archbishop’s financial practices seem especially offensive. He denounced them and called for a debate on the principles behind them. It was only natural that Germans, primed to expect battles between a corrupt hierarchy and brave, pious scholars, should jump to conclusions. Luther was the new Reuchlin. Even Erasmus rallied to his side. The burgeoning scandal had run on for well over a year before it became plain that Luther was calling not only for moral reform and good scholarship but for a complete reimagining of what it meant to be a Christian.

Reuchlin had chiefly been a symbolic figure. The satires that destroyed his opponents’ reputations were other people’s work. But in 1518, Luther discovered that he could write: accessibly, pungently, mixing soaring ecstasies with brutal street fighting. He had a knack for unforgettable images and analogies and a sense of paradox that made his arguments seem almost irrefutable. He could do it in Latin, like a good scholar, but he could also do it wonderfully in German, seizing his readers by the throat and pulling them into the debate.

The new technology of print had found its first master. Printing with movable type was over sixty years old by this time. The industry seemed fairly mature, mostly producing hefty legal, medical, or liturgical texts for which there were steady, predictable markets. Luther stumbled into a new literary form, the mass-market pamphlet – short, cheap, quickly produced in large numbers. A pamphlet cost roughly the same as a hen in sixteenth-century Germany and could offer more lasting and spicier nourishment. These tiny books could reach a mass audience in a completely unprecedented way. Printers who caught the wave made fortunes. Luther’s books changed the rules of religious debate, which was meant to be a game for educated elites, played in universities in the decent obscurity of Latin. Luther flung open the gates. Now anyone who could read German, or who knew someone who could read German, could join in. Already, Protestantism was breaking down walls.

Luther’s literary achievement has no parallels in the whole of human history. If that seems an extravagant claim, consider the figures. During his thirty-year public career, Luther produced 544 separate books, pamphlets, or articles, slightly more than one every three weeks. At his peak, in 1523, he managed 55. That year, 390 separate editions of his books, new and old, were published. Luther alone was responsible for over a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets by German presses during the 1520s. One scholar has totted up the totals for his rivals and supporters and concluded that the top seventeen pro-Luther pamphleteers produced 807 editions between them during the years 1518–25, whereas Luther alone produced 1,465, nearly twice as many as all the rest put together.4 No revolutionary leader in modern history has, without the aid of censorship or state backing, towered over a mass movement to the extent Martin Luther did.

Luther’s opponents were left gasping. “Every day it rains Luther books,” wrote one horrified churchman in 1521. “Nothing else sells.” During those same seven years, barely 300 editions of anti-Luther works were published in Germany. The printers of these books complained that they “cannot even be given away”. More than half were in Latin, not even trying to reach a mass audience (only a fifth of Luther’s editions were in Latin). Orthodoxy’s defenders were entirely unprepared for the storm of print that had engulfed them. Who can blame them? No one had ever seen anything like this before. In some ways, no one ever would again.5

Even so, it should have blown over. The Church had absorbed and co-opted mass movements before. If so many Christians found Luther’s ideas appealing, surely, with a little house-training, they could be welcomed into the fold?

For decades afterwards, plenty of Catholic Christians hoped and worked for reconciliation. From a modern perspective, it remains a tantalizing what-if. Was the whole thing just a ghastly misunderstanding? For myself, I suspect not. Luther’s ideas were so radical that a Catholic Church that conceded them would have turned itself inside out. And Luther himself was never amenable to being house-trained. But he could, perhaps, have been outflanked and isolated, if his opponents had been wily and farsighted enough to poach some of his ideas.

Instead, they tried to face him down. He had launched his protest in October 1517 with a short set of “theses”: bullet-point statements summarizing his views. It was a standard way of starting an academic debate, and Luther had done it many times before on different subjects. In this case, there were ninety-five theses, and the subject was the sale of indulgences: documents in which the Church promised to bestow God’s grace in recognition of a charitable gift. A great many thoughtful Christians reckoned that the indulgence trade stank, so much so that sales were dropping and the indulgence sellers were forced to redouble their efforts and coarsen their rhetoric. Luther had been preaching against indulgences since the start of the year. His October theses might or might not, as legend has it, have been nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.6 More to the point, he sent a copy to Archbishop Albrecht, the sponsor and one of the chief beneficiaries of the current indulgence campaign.

It was a challenge that could not be ignored, and because Luther refused to back down, the argument steadily escalated. A series of set-piece debates between Luther and increasingly formidable theological opponents took place during 1518 and 1519. They settled nothing. Luther, in fact, found them intensely frustrating. He wanted to talk about God’s grace, true repentance, and how nitpicking legalism was rendered meaningless by Christ’s astonishing gift of salvation. But his opponents would not let him. From the beginning, they accused him of questioning superiors to whom he ought instead to submit. There were crude financial considerations at work; by attacking indulgences, Luther was threatening a major income stream. There were also institutional rivalries: the Dominican friars, watchdogs of orthodoxy, distrusted Luther’s modish Augustinian order. After the first debate, in 1518, Luther was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy. He did not go. After the second, the pope required Luther, as a matter of obedience, to accept the official line on indulgences. Again Luther refused, insisting that the pope needed to produce arguments, not commands. The establishment had decided that this was a matter for lawyers, not theologians. But if there was one thing Luther’s theology opposed, it was law.7

Most of us, in Luther’s place, would have crumbled. Perhaps from prudence: a charge of heresy is not a game. Or from conscience: when the Church, Christ’s representative on earth, commands us to be silent, who are we to disagree? But Luther rejoiced in rejecting prudence, and his conscience was marching to a different beat. During 1518 and 1519, he discovered in himself an epochal, adamantine stubbornness. The more he was assaulted, the more firmly he took root.

At the third debate, a full-scale scholarly disputation at Leipzig in 1519, he faced the ablest theological opponent of his life, Johann Eck of Ingolstadt. Eck, who had no real hope that Luther would concede, aimed to unmask him as a heretic. He pursued the apparent points of agreement between Luther and the Czech theologian Jan Hus, who had been executed for heresy in 1415. Eventually, he forced Luther to concede and indeed to trumpet that he, too, held the beliefs for which Hus had been condemned.

Still Luther did not budge. If what he believed was incompatible with what the Church had decreed, then, he insisted, the Church must be wrong. To his opponents, this was almost comically grotesque. Luther was choosing his own frail opinion over the collective weight of the whole Church, guided through the ages by the Holy Spirit. It was a textbook example of heresy: wilful disobedience. But to Luther, it was a liberation. If the Church’s most authoritative decrees could be wrong, there was no longer anything that could separate him from the love of God. Only now did he realize how far he must go. Eck had succeeded in pushing Luther out of the Church, but the result was not quite what he had intended. If 1517 was the beginning of the Luther scandal, 1519 was the real birth of Protestantism.

Luther, now outed as a plain heretic, should have been arrested and dealt with. He was saved by politics. Rome had more pressing concerns than this squabble between German friars. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, had been dying for years and doing so unconscionably slowly. Since 1514, he had taken a coffin with him everywhere he travelled. Long before he finally died in January 1519, plans were being laid for the contest to follow. For the imperial title was not hereditary; it was elected, chosen by seven senior German princes and bishops. Since 1440, the electors had chosen members of Austria’s Habsburg dynasty, but there was nothing to stop them from choosing someone else, and this time there was a good reason to do so: the Habsburg candidate, the eighteen-year-old Charles, was also king of Spain and of the Netherlands. The prospect of one man’s controlling such a vast set of territories was alarming, not least to the pope. The king of France was a realistic rival. Even Henry VIII of England was considered. The looming election overshadowed everything.

It just so happened that one of the seven electors was Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s local prince and the founder of the University of Wittenberg. Frederick’s relationship with Luther was an odd one. The two men never met in person, and Frederick, who was an avid collector of holy relics, never quite saw the point of Luther’s theological preoccupations. Yet he was determined to defend the celebrity professor from his prized university. The celebrity was certainly part of it. Luther had put Wittenberg on the map in a very pleasing way, was beginning to attract star academics and distinguished students, and had vaulted the town’s printing industry into the first rank. In this sense, Frederick’s protection was a side effect of Luther’s mass-market appeal. But Frederick also wanted to defy outside interference as a matter of principle. And in 1518–19, Frederick’s wishes mattered. In the impending imperial election, he was seen as a crucial swing vote. He was even considered an imperial candidate himself. If, at this moment, he wanted to shelter a suspected heretic, no one was going to force the issue.

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.