Luther's Reformation

By the beginning of the 16th century, the political circumstances in Germany were crucial. Germany was evolving out of the Middle Ages with its dependency on feudalism into the modern age with its emphasis on a strong central government in a nation state.

POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES IN GERMANY

By the year 1517 Germany was an Empire known generally as the German Empire or more commonly the Holy Roman Empire. The Emperor however had lost much of his authority during the great Church vs State conflicts which happened during the 12th century. There were therefore some 300 small states which made up the Empire, some largish like Saxony, others small like the Palatinate. Some were merely city-states.

The rulers of these states also differed in rank. Some, like Bohemia, were ruled by a King while others, like Saxony, were ruled by a Duke. There were also the Church states and some city-states under the control of a Bishop. The larger states were fairly powerful while some of the smaller states were fairly weak.

Although the Emperor had lost much of his power during the 12th century, he was nevertheless using every opportunity to regain some of that lost power. He would therefore head a movement which ultimately would seek to re-unify Germany under his command. To do that, however, he would need to suppress the remnants of the old feudalism in much the same way in which the King of France was doing.

The rulers of the 300 German states, on the other hand, would use every opportunity available to them to maintain their own power and so prevent the unification. They were therefore suspicious of any move by the Emperor which looked likely to conflict with their tradition power.

The Emperor, however, also had other problems. In the first place, he was often Emperor of Germany but King of another territory. Emperor Charles V, under whose reign the Lutheran reformation took place, was also Charles I, King of Spain, as well as Charles the Duke of Burgundy. He had therefore the interests of his Spanish and Burgundian territories to look after, and sometimes these interests conflicted with those of the German Empire.

At the same time, he was expected to lead his Empire in defence from outside attack. Such was the case for Emperor Charles V who had to protect Germany from possible attack from the Moslem Ottoman Empire in the south-east. He therefore needed to make promises and compromises with the various German princes in order to maintain their support and to prevent them from usurping more power while he was otherwise occupied.

The Emperor had another problem in that his emperorship was at that stage electoral and not hereditary. There were seven elector states whose task it was to elect a new Emperor when the old one died: the three archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, as well as the four rulers of the Palatinate, Saxony, Brandenburg and Bohemia. To gain election the candidate was forced to make certain promises concerning the maintenance of the independence of these states.

Charles V was a young man when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. He was also only newly elected to the throne and therefore was still eager to please those Electors who had voted him into this privileged office.

It is also natural that he was striving to please them so that his own son would be elected to succeed him and so make the emperorship hereditary. It was therefore hardly likely that he would want to rock the boat by making any rash decisions which would anger the Electors.

Such was the world in which Martin Luther lived at the time of nailing his theses to the church door. How responsible was he therefore in causing the catastrophe which was to follow? Was he not therefore simply a man of his time, whose actions became caught up in the eddy of international power struggles and personal ambitions?

LUTHER STARTS THE REFORMATION

Luther was a monk until the age of 40. He was a vehement but spiritually uneasy man, with many dark and introspective recesses in his personality. He was terrified by the thought of the awful omnipotence of God. At the same time, he was distressed by his own littleness, apprehensive of the devil, and suffering from the chronic conviction that he was damned (a distinctly unbalanced personality).

His psychological make-up came, it seems, from his unhappy childhood when he was punished relentlessly for even minor offenses. As a result he came to be tortured by spiritual anxiety. He appeared to have been terrified by an ever-present fear of God, whom he conceived as the unforgiving judge who punishes every infringement of His laws.

The question of how he could please God soon became uppermost in his mind and ultimately determined the course of his life. He became a lawyer but the question of how to please God caused him so much mental anguish that he suddenly decided to become a monk.

In the monastery of Erfurt he devoted himself unremittingly to winning the favour of God by the customary discipline of fasting, praying and scourging, but he found no peace of soul.

In short, he was a spiritual neurotic until he suddenly drew inspiration from St Paul (Letter to the Roman Church) and drew up his thesis of Justification by Faith alone. This doctrine was not necessarily at odds with Catholic teaching and it was quite possible for him to give himself over to it without actually breaking with the Church. It seems that his eventual break was simply a question of circumstances which could quite easily have gone the other way.

The Catholic Church, through historic circumstances, had come to be modelled on the Roman Empire as an international or supra-national state. It had also evolved into a system of feudalism, with pope as feudal overlord ("His Holiness"), the Cardinals below him ("His Eminence"), then the Metropolitan or Archbishops ("His Grace"), the Bishops ("His Lordship"), the Monsignors ("His Excellence"), etc.

The clergy were those people ordained to carry out certain rituals which only they could do. These acts, in turn, were called Sacraments, visible signs of invisible grace (sort of hose-pipes to heaven leading grace down to earth). There were seven Sacraments, namely Baptism, the Eucharist or Holy Communion, Confirmation, Penance, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Extreme Unction or the Sacrament of the Sick.

If anyone attempted to preach anything at variance with Church teaching, he/she could be silenced by interdict or excommunication. A person dying in such a state would go straight to hell. It was in this way that the Church, by fostering superstition, was able to keep reformers in line.

Luther's attack was not against the Catholic Church's central core of theology, but against the peripheries. His belief in justification by faith alone could easily have been reconciled with Church teaching because, after all, the Catholic teaching of grace through good works was merely an attempt to get people to live a more saintly life. Luther was indeed forced to acknowledge that, although justification is by faith alone, nevertheless good works is an indication of that faith.

He also attacked the sale of indulgences, then a core subject of Church activity. Although indulgences may seem strange to modern society, it was a very real way in which the Catholic Church attempted to get its members to be more religious. By offering an indulgence, the Church was succeeding in getting the majority of its members to perform certain acts and prayers.

Martin Luther was not initially against the idea of indulgences. He was also not so angered even by the sale of indulgences. He objected to the fact that the Church failed to demand that the person earning the indulgence had first to be in a state of grace.

Luther also questioned the existence of seven sacraments. This was also not necessarily a major problem because the Catholic Church itself readily agreed that the first two, namely Baptism and Holy Communion, were primary sacraments while the rest were secondary. Furthermore, the Church's teaching on the sacraments was constantly in a state of flux.

Where then did the problem lie? Most people admitted that there were glaring abuses within the Catholic Church, especially in such things as simony and pluralism. They objected to the fact that people of influence could be dispensed from certain laws (e.g. the annulment of marriages). They also pointed to the moral decline of the clergy and the monasteries.

The Church had faced such problems before and they had been overcome through reform. Perhaps the Papacy of the early 16th century was extremely corrupt at that moment, yet the Renaissance popes were not the most corrupt in the history of the Church. Had Luther attacked such blatant abuses, he might have been more successful.

The chief problem, however, seemed to lie in the desire of the German princes to break free of what they believed was bondage under the papacy and its ally, the German Empire (Holy Roman Empire). Luther's fight with the Church presented an ideal opportunity to do that very thing. The princes therefore rallied behind him and gave him enough support to make him rebellious. Had he not been given such confidence, would he have stepped so far?

The Catholic Church was also a major problem because of the unbending face it presented. It was quick to enter into clever rhetoric against Luther. Although as a university man, he enjoyed such rhetoric, Luther also had a stubborn streak.

The Church was therefore able to goad him into making declarations which had been clearly rejected by earlier Church Councils. Indeed, Luther eventually confessed beliefs for which John Huss of Bohemia had earlier been burned at the stake.

Luther himself, finding that he had been cleverly manoeuvred into a corner, became obstinate and refused to retract, especially when he perceived that there was so much political and academic support from the German princes and students.

The Church then presented him with a Papal Bull which excommunicated him, but which he in turn burnt publicly. At that point the die was cast and the Reformation would continue, if not for religious reasons, then for political ones.

THE REFORMATION SUCCEEDS

It is probable that, if the Holy Roman Emperor had stepped in immediately, the revolt could have been suppressed but two factors militated against such action. First was the fact that Emperor Charles V was still a young man (he was 19) and proved indecisive.

Furthermore, he had only recently been elected Emperor and, to gain the support of the electors, had been forced to make certain promises to them. The chief among these was an acceptance to call a German Diet (general assembly of the princes) before making any major decisions.

Charles found himself helpless to impose on the German states the Roman Catholic edict by which Luther was declared a heretic and outlaw of the Empire. Instead he left it up to the individual princes to enforce or not enforce it as they saw fit. He therefore promised not to enter into any German territory to arrest Luther without the permission of the prince.

Charles was also in other political difficulties. Not only did he have the Turks snapping at his heels, but he found himself in a war with France (started in 1521 and which would only end in 1529) for which he desperately needed the aid of the German states. He therefore could not afford to alienate the Germans by reneging on his agreement with them.

By 1530, when the war was over, the rift was already too deep. Some of the electors were themselves Lutherans who protested against any action against Luther and had formed themselves into a defensive union (Schmalkaldic League) in case the Emperor attacked.

Before Charles could go to war against the Schmalkaldic League, however, advancing Turks took his attention and so it was not until 1546, after Charles's death, that the Empire could go to war and so started the Wars of Religion.

But that's another story. Lutheranism was now a generation old and was fully cemented into the life of customs of the German peoples. The Reformation had happened and would be very difficult to reverse. Furthermore, the Reformation was already taking new turns in Switzerland as Calvinism was gaining ground.

CONCLUSION

It would seem that the Reformation started in Germany due to unique circumstances. Luther himself was a spiritual neurotic who was seeking to appease his own feelings of guilt. As an academic he was also exploring some of the major abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Germany.

When the Catholic Church, partly using the Emperor as its instrument of justice, tried to suppress Luther, it found certain powerful princes leaping to his aid. These princes had very little interest in religion but were concerned to use the Lutheran revolt to push for their own greater autonomy within the German political arena. The Emperor in turn had major political problems of his own and could not afford to take military action against these princes so as to suppress Lutheranism.

Lutheranism therefore had nearly three decades in which to take root. By that stage there was a second generation of people who had been born Lutherans and were now more than 20 years of age. Such people were prepared to fight and die for their religious beliefs.

At the same time, because of the state of feudalism which still existed in Germany in 1519, it was believed that a prince was quite entitled to instruct all the peoples to believe in his particular form of worship. Once a prince decided to support Lutheranism, therefore, his subject people had no option but to do likewise.

In many states the peasants believe otherwise but the princes suppressed such a revolt with great savagery. Lutheranism therefore became the state religion in many of the German states.