How the Reformation Began: The Quincentennial Perspective

By Pickwick Publications

The beginning of the Protestant Reformation is often dated to Luther's Ninety-five Theses in 1517, but those theses might have been forgotten if not for the events that followed. This book begins with the Ninety-five Theses and outlines the subsequent events that shaped the Reformation at least as much as the Ninety-five Theses, and quite possibly more. It provides a trove of primary documents by Luther and his opponents, along with commentary by historians who understand the theological issues at stake. Spanning the major milestones from 1517 to 1521, it concludes with the edicts that excommunicated Luther and the judgment against him with the imperial Edict of Worms. By drawing attention to these texts and events, the book gives a more complete picture of how the Reformation began.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666728811

Book preview

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The 95 Theses (1517)

Timothy J. Wengert

The year 2017 is the year to talk about the 95 Theses or, rather, talk around them, despite this author’s translation and commentary. The usual suspects for such wandering around Luther’s brief sentences are convinced that they have found either the first movement toward individual freedom by consciences bound in the twilight of the dark ages, or the clarion, religious call to reject all things Roman, or an invitation to be nice to our neighbors, whatever they may believe (the fallback position of American civil religion). Instead, lectures on the Theses should try to convince people to put them in their proper historical context rather than using them as an excuse to worship ourselves and our enlightened times.

The history of the 95 Theses and their medieval context may be found in other sources.¹ This essay concentrates instead on something of a conundrum, namely, why does Luther quote so little from the Bible? For someone, whom later generations wedded to the slogan sola Scriptura, this may seem rather odd. To be sure, these are theses, which Luther was then to prove using scripture passages, so that, indeed, there are many more references to scripture in Luther’s defense, the so-called Explanations of the 95 Theses, printed in August 1518.² But such a facile explanation does little to solve the riddle. The few important places where Luther directly deals with scripture come at the beginning and end of the document—a clue that will help us unravel how Luther is using scripture here.

Preliminary Remarks

Before going any further, however, readers need to be disabused of the centrality of sola Scriptura as a slogan describing Wittenberg’s theology then or now. Philip Melanchthon never used the term, and Luther employed it in his Latin writings only twenty times (as opposed to 1200 for sola fide and 120 for sola gratia and 500 times for solus Christus).³ Now, to be sure, he does use the phrase solo Verbo [by God’s Word alone] on occasion, but there it is often hard to know whether Luther is talking about the preached word, the written Word, or both. In any case, as Scott Hendrix proved in his book on Luther and the papacy, Luther never abandoned other authorities besides scripture, so that the church fathers, the decrees of the councils and, above all, the catholic creeds also were authoritative for him throughout his life—as they should be for later Lutherans.⁴ Peter Fraenkel, the Melanchthon scholar, writing in the 1960s, found a far better Latin phrase in Melanchthon’s writings—one that could more accurately replace sola Scriptura in stained-glass windows.⁵ For Luther and his colleagues, scripture was the primum et verum, the first and true authority, the other authorities being always derivative, resting upon their ability to witness, like John the Baptist, to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Of course, there are certain allusions to scripture scattered throughout the Theses. In Thesis 11, the bishops were sleeping when some evil person sowed such bad theology regarding papal power to grant indulgences (Matt. 13:25). Thesis 26 refers to papal authority as the power of the keys, echoing Matthew 16:19. Giving to the poor and lending to the needy, mentioned in Thesis 43, reflect Matthew 5:42. Fishing for the wealthy with the nets of the gospel and making the first last, while clearly scriptural (Matt. 13:47; 19:30), are simply employed to underscore the evil motives of indulgence preachers. Even so, outside of the very first and last theses, these are nearly all the clear allusions to scripture.

Luther’s reticence at this point cannot be chalked up to his lack of experience with the scripture. Instead, his limited use of scripture in this setting demonstrates his respect for reading the biblical text in context. Moreover, as he will later plead against Karlstadt and other ravers as he nicknamed them, when one reads something in scripture, one cannot simply ask, Is it the Word of God? but rather, Is it the Word of God for us?⁶

Luther’s example also clears the way for Lutheran Christians to use their heads. His fierce logic and remarkable rhetoric in the 95 Theses remind us of that saying in Proverbs 25:11: A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver. In short, the 95 Theses is death to all manner of specious proof texting. Indeed, when Luther or Melanchthon refer to a single verse of scripture, one must first search out and understand their interpretation of the text in its exegetical context before dismissing their arguments.⁷

The Rhetoric of the 95 Theses

So, Luther puts his most important scriptural arguments at the beginning and end of the Theses. Why? Here a recent insight in the study of the 95 Theses may help.⁸ Luther’s work has a rhetorical shape. This is not to say that Luther did not also use logic or dialectics, as he called it. But the overall shape of the Theses is imbued with important aspects of Renaissance rhetoric—much as in Freedom of Christian, as Birgit Stolt demonstrated in the 1960s, or as in the Invocavit Sermons of 1522, as Neil Leroux has proved more recently.⁹ This means that we can identify the typical parts of a Renaissance speech here, an argument strengthened by the fact that in his Explanations Luther labels two sections with technical names and writes his defense as if his arguments were meant to be read in this rhetorical light. These parts are traditionally, in this order, the exordium (introduction), the narration (basic, commonly accepted facts), the main thesis (summarized in Thesis 5), the proof or confirmation of this thesis and its corollaries, the refutation of anticipated objections, and the peroration.¹⁰ In the exordium, on which Luther puts great weight in his prefatory letter for the Explanations addressed to Pope Leo X, Luther writes that he is presenting these theses out of love and zeal for the truth.¹¹ The proof of his work stretches from theses 1–80, and a rejection or confutation of other opinions—placed in the mouth of a sharp layperson—comes in theses 81–91. Crucial for Luther’s interpretation of scripture, however, comes in the narration and the peroration: theses 1–4 and 91–95. Precisely where Luther sets forth the incontrovertible facts at the beginning and a summary of his argument at the end, he calls upon scripture.

The Narration: Matthew 4:17

In traditional rhetoric, the narration is an exposition of the facts of the case, on which both the main thesis and its confirmation rest. The narration, as Cicero or Quintilian explain it, involves presenting facts that are presumably not in dispute, but rather accepted by all. Sure enough, in his Explanations Luther declares that these first four theses are not up for debate. Moreover, his educated readers would most likely have agreed with him, because Luther’s entire case rests upon a single verse of scripture and the newest accepted facts about it. His fellow humanists surely knew it—especially once Luther unpacked it in the Explanations published in August 1518. The first thesis is thus the bedrock upon which Luther’s entire argument rests. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in saying ‘Do penance . . . ,’ wanted the entire life of the faithful to be one of penitence.¹²

Luther is quoting the standard Vulgate rendering of Matthew 4:17 (Poenitentiam agite). The older English version of the Theses, strongly influenced by the very arguments under investigation here, translates it Repent.¹³ In Latin and German, however, the same phrase may be rendered Do penance, Be penitent, or Repent. Luther’s contemporaries would thus have heard in Jesus’ words a command to avail themselves of the sacrament of penance. But Luther knew better, not because he had discovered a new approach to this text (a singular addiction of the modern age to novelty but worrisome to Luther) but rather because the year before, in 1516, the famous Greek scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, had published for the first time the Greek New Testament, printed in parallel columns with the Latin Vulgate. We know from Luther’s lectures on Romans that he immediately got hold of a copy and was teaching himself Greek while, at the same time, using the companion volume of Erasmus’ annotations that explained where the Vulgate needed correction on the basis of the Greek text.

Sure enough, in comments on Matthew 4:17 Erasmus referred his readers back to comments on Matthew 3:2, where John the Baptist uses the same phrase. At that place, Erasmus pointed out that the Greek, metanoiete, is better translated as change your hearts or change your minds. But he did more. He pointed out that with Jerome’s Latin translation the church fathers, Augustine in particular, connected this text to the public punishment of flagrant sinners. Only in the Middle Ages did some theologians commit the not small error, as Erasmus puts it, of then applying Augustine’s statements on this text to the medieval sacrament of penance.

Now, although Luther could have judged Erasmus’ insight as new, he did not, because both he and Erasmus, as humanists, were committed to the cry, ad fontes, back to the sources, where the oldest sources were always deemed the purest and best. Thus, before correcting the original Latin translation of Jerome, Erasmus carefully disentangles Jesus’ words from questionable medieval usage, based upon a misunderstanding of a church father. In the Explanations Luther, without naming Erasmus, makes his dependence on the Dutch humanist clear by citing the Greek text and explaining to the reader what it means.

Already this indicates a crucial aspect of proper biblical interpretation in the church for Luther. It never occurs in a vacuum but is part of the continuing conversation on the sacred text’s meaning stretching from within the Bible itself to the present. The notion of the lone reader of scripture, sitting in a motel room armed only with his or her King James Version of the Bible and coming to faith, destroys the church and is built upon a myth of individualism that continues to distort modern and postmodern interpretation of scripture in America.¹⁴ On the contrary, Luther and other Wittenberg reformers did not read the Bible alone but always in conversation with contemporaries and, even more importantly, with their predecessors.¹⁵

But on this particular text, Luther does Erasmus one better, bringing insights gleaned from his recent lectures on Romans into his understanding of the Matthean text. Indeed, a single word turns the world this text addresses upside down: "the entire life. This is such a profound insight into the biblical text, but one that few people appreciate. With a single sentence, based upon a particular reading of Matthew, Luther has destroyed the single most pernicious view of the Christian life lurking among Christians today: that there is a before and after in the Christian life. Once I was a sinner; now I am a believer. Once I was in a state of sin; now I am in a state of grace."

This division of the Christian life into a before and after means that certain biblical texts, such as Matthew 4:17, only apply at certain times in a Christian’s life—whether applied to penance and penitence from the Vulgate or even to a change of mind and repentance implied by metanoiete. But Luther realized that such a view sells the biblical text and its speaker, Jesus Christ, short. As long as human beings think that they have graduated from repentance to living a Christian life or doing really good, meritorious works, the Bible seems to become remarkably silent—precisely at the point where it most applies to us. Repent! Jesus says, and we look around the room and think, Too bad so-and-so isn’t here, because he or she really needs to hear this! Or, "It’s those people who need to repent! Or, worse yet, we think, But I’ve tried to no avail! The good that I would that I do not; the evil that I would not, that I do! Then, instead of invoking the savior—Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"—we simply despair, assuming there must be something we have failed to do or left undone.

Luther had already expressed this notion the year before in his lectures on Romans 7—helped by Augustine, where neither exegete possessed the West’s introspective conscience.¹⁶ So, in the first, unassailable thesis of the 95 Theses Luther insists that Christian believers are, to use the phrase that already occurs in comments on Romans 7, simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously a righteous person and a sinner). This is meant not in the gross antinomian way that some today use it (Ha! We all make mistakes!), but rather precisely as a description of one’s entire life: captive to sin, unable to free oneself. By breaking the connection to penance, Erasmus had undercut this text’s ritual use; by referring to the Christian’s entire life, Luther restated the truly good news about God’s remedy for human sin, removing all limitations to the application of Jesus’ words for the hearer.

In this way the Theses constitute a debate over the law’s function in the life of the Christian. This gets to the very heart of Luther’s questioning of late-medieval practices of indulgences. Already in a sermon delivered at the Castle Church on 16 January 1517, as part of the celebration of the anniversary of that church’s dedication in 1503, to which an indulgence of 200 days was attached, Luther expressed his deep concerns regarding indulgences.¹⁷ How could indulgences, he asked, correspond to the Christian life of faith that welcomed God’s discipline and chastisement of the flesh. This sermon disconcerted poor elector Frederick, who rather loved his religious foundations and saw himself as the head of religious life in Saxony. In response to the prince’s objections and to rumors about the exaggerated preaching of Johann Tetzel that had just started in January in Luther’s birthplace, Eisleben, Luther began to do his theological homework, discovering in the process that indulgences had a completely different, wholly pastoral and ecclesial function in the early church and, more importantly, discovering that Jesus’ command to Do penance had nothing to do with the medieval sacrament. From his study of Paul, Luther already knew that God was constantly in hot pursuit of humanity, working death to the old creature and life to the new. He summarized this central insight with the simple phrase, the entire life.