Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer picks apart a popular 101 video on Martin Luther’s revolt, pointing out many painfully common factual inaccuracies.
Transcription:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So we’re talking about the reformation, particularly the beginning of the Reformation with Martin Luther. I think a lot of people feel like they have a pretty good grip on the basic story, and the basic story tends to go something like this. On October the 31st of 1517, a Catholic monk and priest named Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, and he was protesting the Catholic doctrine of indulgences. He had denied indulgences, which depending on who you listen to, were about buying the forgiveness of sins or buying time out of purgatory or atonement of some form. Eventually though, Luther translates the Bible into German so that for the very first time people can read for themselves what the Bible says in their own native language. And he does this so that people can realize that these Catholic doctrines they’ve been led to believe are biblical, are actually just manmade traditions.
Okay, now what if I told you every single sentence of that was false, that there are factual errors in every sentence I just said, but that we’ve been fed basically 500 years of propaganda from both Protestants and secularists, fascinatingly telling us the kind of version of this story that historians know isn’t actually true. Now, as I’ve just alluded to, this isn’t just a Protestant thing. Plenty of people who aren’t religious have seized upon Luther as kind of the victor of free thought, the radical individual against the forces of tradition and hierarchy in the church, which is great for people who, for instance, reject Christianity outright on those same grounds. And so there’s a very popular kind of narrative around Luther, but as I hope to show today, it’s largely a mythological one that isn’t rooted in history, isn’t rooted in reality. And to show this, I want to look at a short five minute video that National Geographic of all places put out. I mean, the place we just got our kids Butterfly farm from also has weighed in on the reformation and it’s called inaccurately enough, a most precise and nuanced look into the life of the man, legend and visionary Martin Luther. And it’s kind of tongue in cheek, it’s kind of fun, but it’s intended to be a sort of 1 0 1 primer telling the basic story of Martin Luther. And in this five minute video, there are at least six major factual errors,
A most precise and nuanced look into the life of the band legend and visionary Martin Ruth. Sir, one day when Luther is 21 years old, the most and nuanced look into the life of the band legend and visionary Martin Luther, sir.
Now you might be wondering why pick on this video? Well, hopefully I’m not picking on it because it’s true. You can find more bias, more radical, more extreme, more inaccurate versions of the story of Luther. But usually when people are watching those, they know what they’re getting. They want to hear someone tell you Catholicism is bad and evil, and as long as you’re saying that they don’t really care if what you’re saying is true or historically accurate, but this is National Geographic and a lot of the people watching this believe they’re getting something like a neutral, objective, accurate sort of history. And it’s not a few people, right? National Geographic has 23.1 million subscribers on YouTube. This video alone had 1.4 million. And when you read the comments, it’s people saying things like, who else is here? Because their teacher assigned this for class. That comment has 1800 likes and 289 replies. So lots of people are learning about Martin Luther in the Reformation from videos like this one. So what does it get wrong? Now, I’m going to skip the very first part of the video, which is about how Luther becomes a monk because that’s not really important for this conversation. And turn to the very next thing they look at, which is the posting of the 95 these and what kind of causes Luther to begin the reformation in the first place.
Luther cannot understand it if God’s intention is really for poor people to spend all their money buying their way out of punishment so they can go to heaven. And why should it be easier for the rich to avoid a long time in purgatory than it is for the poor?
So let’s just analyze those two claims that the poor spent all of their money on indulgences or were the church was trying to get them to spend all their money on indulgences. And second, that indulgences were easy to get if you were rich and not if you were poor. Both of those are clearly demonstrably untrue, both generally and in the particular circumstances of Luther’s life. And we know this from several historical sources. I’m going to look first the historian, RN Swanson’s book, religion and Devotion in Europe. He’s looking at the period of 1215 to 1515. He’s purposely stopping right at the eve of the reformation two years later, but in there, Swanson, now as we go, it’s going to be confusing using medieval money and I’ll do my best to kind of explain it. This, by the way, was a part of the video that took the most time to make sense of in the research, which is unpacking pounds and shillings and pence in the middle ages and what those basically correspond to because all of that to a modern American seemed like meaningless currency.
So Swanson explains that the general level of four pence, so when you see the four D, D is for denari, which is what they’re calling pence, it’s confusing, but four pence per pardon in early 16th century England. He says, Swanson says it was still substantial for a craftsman. So perhaps the purchasers were mainly from the wealthier layers of society with artisans and people below them, content with the indulgences, which required effort but not money, like repetition of prayers or visits to churches. Okay, so the very first thing you should see here is the point of indulgences, and we’re going to get into a closer look at this in the next inaccuracy. The point of indulgences isn’t to take people’s money and many indulgences don’t involve money at all and never did. So particular prayerful devotions the church was trying to cultivate, stepping back. The idea of an indulgence is to help you grow in your Christian life and incentivizing you to become more Christian, to be more charitable, to be more loving to God and to your neighbor.
And there’s a bunch of ways that can look including charitable giving, but also including things like praying and going to church more. And those are important parts even of the indulgences that Luther’s protesting. So there’s two things you should notice from what Swanson has said. First, you didn’t have to pay anything for some of these indulgences and second, for the ones that did have money attached to them, it was often something like for Pence. Now he says this is somewhat still cost, but what does that actually look like? Well, let’s turn here to a concrete measure of money bunnies. Steve Rappaport is looking at this same time period in his book, worlds Within Worlds Structures of Life in 16th century London, and he explains that when Henry VIII becomes king in 1509, a bushel of flour costs three shillings that is 60 pence because there’s 20 pence to his shilling back then because the British hate base 10 and a rabbit cost roughly two PEs.
So if you want to put it in those terms, an indulgence is two rabbits. That’s not all of your life savings, even if you’re someone who is not wealthy. And so the idea that we’re taking all the money of the poor is factually inaccurate, and that’s just at the asset. That’s just a particular indulgence they’re looking at in early 16th century London. Now let’s go back to Swanson’s book because he says not all indulgences were so cheap, and then he gives the example of the plenary indulgence and the jubilee of 1500, but he says that the collector in England, Jasper Ponts set a sliding scale of charges varying with landed income or the value of movable goods. I’m going to warn you, it’s going to get mathy here for a second into make it a little easier. I’ve translated everything into pence, so I’m going to give it to you in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, and then the equivalent value in pence.
So you get a sense of the portion, what percentage of your assets is the church asking you to part ways with for this indulgence to make this more confusing, as you’ve already heard, there’s two different scales. One, if you have landed income, you’re a wealthy landowner and the other, if you have movable goods, maybe you’re a merchant or something, but you don’t own ’em like a fief dim or something. There’s two different sliding scales in use for the landowners. The top tier you’re making over 2000 pounds, that’s 480,000 pence. That’s what you’re worth, at least the cost for indulgence there is three pounds, six shillings, eight pence, or 792 out of your 480,000 pence. The lowest bracket is for those people who are landed and their worth is between 20 and 40 pounds. So 4,800 to 9,600 pence and they’re has to give 16 pence as you can see, in neither case at the top or the bottom, is this anything like the lion’s share or a crippling amount of what we’re not even close to something like a 10% tithes like they had in the Old Testament.
Now what about those with goods like movable goods? If you had a thousand pounds worth of movable goods, so 24,000 pence, you were asked to give two pounds, 480 pence, so two out of your thousand pounds, if you had less than that, let’s say you had 22, 200 pounds worth of movable goods, you’re asked to give a shilling, which is 12 pence out of your 4,800 to 48,000 pence worth of stuff. Again, this is not a lot. Now you might notice the bottom bracket in both of those cases is still someone who’s landed or still has a pretty sizable amount of money. Now we’ll get into what happens if you’re below that, but I want to just point something out here. One shilling the lowest tier. If you’re in that 20 to 200 pound range, that’s six rabbits. You’re someone who’s a merchant who’s making something in the pounds, not in the pence, not in the shilling category, in the pounds category, you has to part ways with six rabbits for a plenary indulgence.
The idea this is taking all of your money is just factually incorrect. But here’s the kicker, Swanson acknowledges people falling below 20 pounds paid whatever they felt able to contribute out of devotion. Now you might say, okay, Joe, that’s early 16th century England, which you used because you kind of understand pounds and shillings and pence. What about medieval Germany, which has an even more confusing system of currency, but it’s more relevant to Martin Luther because after all, he’s not living in early 16th century England. He’s living in early 16th century. So how do we know people like Johan Tetzel, the infamous preacher of indulgences wasn’t bilking people of all their worth? Well, because we have the instructions that the archbishop gave to Tsel in 1515 and in the instructions Archbishop Albert of Mons says, because the conditions of men are many and diverse, it is not possible to establish a general fee.
We have therefore fixed the following rates, and then he gives a confusing list of rates using medieval gilders, which is even more complicated. I don’t know how many bunnies you can get for a gilder, but the point there is the richer expected to give more than the poor. And there it’s very explicit that those who do not have any money should supply their contribution with prayer for the kingdom of heaven should be open to the poor, no less than to the rich. In other words, that’s not Luther’s like protest. That’s something that the Archbishop had said at the outset. So reading this as Luther’s a class warrior who’s upset that the poor are being expected to give all their money and it’s easier for the rich doesn’t understand the medieval system of indulgences and doesn’t understand particularly the fact that the poor were not expected to give in many cases at all, they were expected to pray instead straightforward, right? So let’s go back to the video and see the next mistake it makes.
He thinks it’s way too much about money and too little about God when priests sell letters of indulgence with slogans such as when the coin in the coff clings the soul from purgatory springs,
Okay, so did the indulgences of Luther’s day make it all about money rather than prayer? Well, we’ve already seen that’s not true because we know the poor we’re asked to pay in the form of prayer rather than money. But from that same instruction, everyone whether you’re giving a financial donation or not, is first required to do several other things. The instructions read as follows, everyone who is contrite in heart and has confessed with his mouth or at least has the intention of confessing, shall visit the designated seven churches in which the papal coast of arms is displayed. Pause for a second. Think about all the times you’ve heard about Martin Luther, the protests of indulgences and the like. How many times in your experience have you heard anyone mention that this wasn’t just give a bunch of money that you were supposed to go in a little mini pilgrimage in your own diocese in your own city to seven different churches?
That seems like a pretty important part of the story, that this isn’t just write a check and you’re going to get out of purgatory. You’re being asked to go on a mini spiritual pilgrimage and then when you get to those churches, you’re asked to pray in each church, five devout lord’s prayers, the our Father and five of Marias in the Hail Mary in honor of the five wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby our redemption took place or one misre, that’s Psalm 95, which psalm seems particularly appropriate to obtain forgiveness of sins. So several things are being asked of you. Number one, you have to be contrite for your sentence. Number two, you need to have gone to confession or at least be planning on going. Number three, you’ve got to go on this kind of mini pilgrimage to the seven churches. Now that one, if you are too sick to be able to go, the church will accommodate your confessor, can give you a substitute penance, a substitute kind of journey of some kind.
They can literally just bring you religious images if you’re home bound and then you’re supposed to pray there. That’s the fourth. And then really the fifth is that you then contribute to the building of St. Peter’s. Now I understand many people are going to say, well, whether it’s a lot or a little, that’s a problem, right? Why is money involved here at all? And there’s a good answer to that question. To understand this, you have to understand the biblical evidence, which you have to hold two things at the same time. On the one hand, you cannot buy spiritual rewards. You can’t just cut a check and get out of purgatory free card. You can’t just automatically go to heaven because you bought your way there. It doesn’t work like that. And we know this partly from the Bible in Acts chapter eight, there’s a guy named Simon who tries to buy the spiritual power of the laying on of hands and he’s told by St.
Peter, your silver per with you because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money. This is where the sin of Simon he comes from. On the other hand though, so you can’t buy spiritual rewards, you can’t buy the gift of God. On the other hand though, God does reward generosity and that’s also very clearly taught in the Bible. So for instance, in second Corinthians chapter nine, St. Paul says that he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You’ll be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God for the rendering of this service. Not only supplies the wants of the saints but also overflows in many Thanksgivings to God. So here’s the tension. It was the tension faced in Luther’s day.
It’s the tension faced by anyone who takes the biblical evidence seriously. You don’t want to say you can buy your way to heaven. You do want to say if you’re serious about going to heaven, you need to be generous with your money. You see the tension? It’s not a perfect analogy, but think about something like politics. It is okay to spend money supporting your candidate that’s considered good democratic action. It is bad to bribe a candidate and sometimes that line can seem a little fuzzy where you say, I’m going to give a lot of money to this candidate because I know they’re pro-life. That’s okay, that’s good. But if you say, I’m going to give a lot of money to this candidate to make sure that they vote pro-life, that starts to look more like bribery. And so in Luther’s day, the indulgences thing is more on the line than I think many Protestants understand.
Now the church realizes there are times it would cross the line, and so in response to it, the Council of Trent condemns the sale of indulgences. Don’t even get near the line, but it would be a mistake to take from that. That generosity was this was all just transactional. No, the whole point of this is if you are helping to build a church or a bridge or any of these things for the good of the church, the good of community, those are real areas of growth and generosity. Some people may be stone masons and amazing at physically building the church, wonderful, but if you’re not a stone mason but you’re someone who has a lot of money to hire a stone mason, you can contribute too. That’s not buying your way to heaven any more than it’s buying your way to heaven for the stone mason to work on building the church to glorify God. I hope that’s clear. So that’s actually going on. This isn’t just about, let’s just cut a check and we’ll go straight to heaven. The documents themselves, including the ones that the archbishop writes to tetzel, the one that the whole indulgences controversy that Luther is specifically arguing about, we can see quite clearly it is not as later descriptions would have it just rich people get out of purgatory free card or let’s just make this all about money. Alright, let’s turn now to the third major mistake.
Luther wants to discuss this with other monks and priests. So he writes 95 these and nails them to the church door in Denberg where he lives. The church door you see acts as a form of bulletin board and is a completely normal way to put things up for debate.
For some reason the video goes into a good deal of time explaining in a five minute video it spends like 15 seconds explaining why it was okay that he nailed the 95 these to the church door in Wittenberg when the crazy part is historians don’t believe he actually did that. So Joan Ella in an article for the New Yorker points out that modern scholars differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on that the hammering episode, so satisfyingly, symbolic, loud, metallic, violent, never occurred. Now why do they think it didn’t occur? There were no eyewitnesses. Luther himself ordinarily an enthusiastic self dramatize, as she says, was vague on what had happened. He remember drawing up a list of 95 theses around the date in question, but that’s what he did with it. All he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop.
That is I think, key to really pointing out how dramatically mythologized this whole thing is because the most kind of characteristic thing, that famous image of Luther nailing the 95 theses to the door is seemingly a work of legend, not a fact of history. Now we do know what the 95 theses were about. So while we’re talking about this, let’s just do a little bonus round here. Did Luther reject indulgences? Now in the video’s defense, it doesn’t claim that, but many people do claim that or believe that Luther was posting these 95 theses because he thought indulgences were wrong. The video certainly would give you that impression, but it stopped short of explicitly saying it. Luther actually does not deny indulgences. He has questions about the administration of indulgences and critiques and some of those critiques are perfectly valid as we’ve already heard. The Council of Trent basically sides with Luther against Tetzel in the way money is being treated in all of this.
But Luther is quite clear, beginning in the 69th thesis, he says, bishops and curates are bound to administer the commissaries of papal indulgences with all reverence. Did you catch that? He doesn’t say don’t comply with papal indulgences. He says the exact opposite, but then he says in the 70th, but they’re much more bound to strain their eyes and ears Les. These men preach their own dreams instead of what the pope has commissioned. Notice that he’s not saying the pope is wrong, he’s saying some of these preachers and he means hear people like tetzel are going beyond what they were ordered to do, that they were given a particular commission which is good and that they should be doing and they’re abusing it. That’s an important distinction because in one you’re complaining that the Catholic doctrine is bad and in the other you’re complaining that the local preacher isn’t preaching Catholicism correctly.
Catholics are constantly saying the local priest isn’t preaching the Catholic doctrine correctly on various issues sometimes correctly, right? So then thesis number 71, Luther says, let him who speaks against the truth concerning papal indulgences be anathema and a cursed. That is the only anathema clause in the 95 thesis and it’s against those who deny indulgences. So all that’s to say the history of the 95 thesis has three major errors in this and a fourth major error that isn’t in the video but is common enough that it felt appropriate to mention it. Now the video is going to jump from the 95 these to what’s called the Diet of verbs, where Luther is on trial defending his views and it’s a famous scene and a scene that is once again largely fictional.
Luther is allowed to defend himself at a trial in the city of Vs. The church hopes that Luther will withdraw what he said and wrote so that everything can return to normal, but Luther will not. He maintains that if no one can prove him wrong through arguments or quotes from the Bible, he must be right. I cannot and I will not regret what I have said. I cannot act against my conscience. Luther says, not many in the audience have heard the word conscience before, but they are in no doubt as to whether Luther stands firm on his beliefs or not. I
Was struck by how bizarre that depiction of the diet of Rems is. So let’s just ask the question, is it really true that most people had never heard of conscience at this time? The answer obviously it’s completely fictional and I would point you to several sources including Timothy PO’s book conscience and medieval philosophy. He makes the points that the medievals were more concerned about the idea of conscience and we’ll get into why. So he says conscience has been much neglected by philosophers. It is not directly treated in ancient philosophy. So go back to the ancient Greeks and then apart from Bishop Butler who is primarily interested in the aspect of self-deception, there’s scarcely a philosopher from Descartes to the present day who has touched upon it more than tangentially. So the ancients don’t really focus on it, the moderns don’t really focus on it, but in between there, that middle age, which is where we get the word medieval from, he says in the 13th and 14th centuries, however, a treatise upon conscience became a standard component of commentaries upon Peter Lombard’s judgments.
So quick word there, before you could do your own philosophy, you had to first show that you understood the philosophy that came before you. And so you were expected to do a commentary on a very influential work of St. Peter Lombard and in his writings he talks about conscience. And so you were expected to write about conscience before you were ready to do any of your own philosophy. From there, pot says it found its way into university, seminary written up as debated questions and in textbooks what are called summas or sume, so conscience, in other words, it’s all over the place. Now conscience is treated actually in a more nuanced way by medievals than it is by most of us. Today we have kind of a vague idea of what we mean by conscience. They were more precise. Then there said two aspects of conscience.
You have what’s called sinis, that’s the un erasable knowledge of the basic principles of morality. And according to medieval theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas, that’s infallible. You always know for instance that justice is better than injustice. But then second you have cia, which is where the English word conscience comes from, which is the application of arias and the application of moral principles to particular cases. Now there you can air there, you can go wrong. That’s going to be an important subtle distinction. I’ll get into why, because you might say, well, okay sure, back in Aquinas’s day, but there’s still a couple centuries until you get to Luther. So maybe by Luther’s time ordinary people had forgotten about what conscience was. So the Renaissance studies journal has an entire issue on the Renaissance conscience and in there Brian Cummings makes a point that conscience is not some early modern neologism like in other words, not a word created by the early moderns arising out of pre of reformation controversy.
That’s the fashionable cliche. He says. Instead it was a stapled topic in scholastic theologies. We already saw it was discussed in Peter Lombard’s sentences from there went into standard commentary as the university syllabi and there are elaborate treatments on conscience both in Bonaventure and Aquinas. But then he says that Alvaro de Silva has observed that St. Thomas Moore. So Moore is a contemporary of Martin Luther and he dies in 1535 that more uses the word conscience over a hundred times in the letters of the last year of his life. That’s pretty striking. If allegedly, no one has ever heard of this or most people don’t even know what this word is, conscience is all the rage because it raising a really important question and a regularly asked question for centuries, are you bound to follow an airing conscience? In other words, if your moral principles lead you to believe you should do an evil thing, a thing that you know the church forbids you to do, what should you do?
Should you listen to your conscience or should you listen to the church? That is a hotly debated issue for centuries. This is not some new thing that Martin Luther is coming up with. However, it is true that there are new movements about conscience, not a refocus on it, but maybe a redefinition of it. And so Cummings says that new instincts about conscience were stirring within theology and among the Protestant reformers in Germany, things were moving very quickly. And then he distinguishes here, he says, Peter Lombard discussed two different views on the issue of conscience, one that he accepts, which says that the spark of conscience is like a preparation for grace so that when grace comes, it is something to work on. The other view views that there is only one will, which defected by sin turns out only to want what is evil until grace comes by 1517, Luther has rejected the idea of a spark or scintilla of goodness left in man.
Okay, so why do I point out these subtle debates on conscience to say not only were the Catholics prior to Luther focused on conscience, they had a higher view of conscience that Luther takes a view that a man who is unredeemed doesn’t have anything good in him. And so if he has nothing good in him and he only wants evil, you don’t owe a great deal of respect to his conscience. This may sound like an academic debate. It is absolutely not. Why do I say that? Because in Luther’s life we see that he is no great herald of conscience except his own conscience. When other people try to use the same principles and follow them, he turns on them viciously. Matthew Baker in wild boar in the vineyard, Martin Luther at the birth of the modern world, he explains that the peasants war of 15, 24 to 1525, a series of violent uprising throughout Germany was the largest popular revolt in Europe for the French Revolution.
What does that have to do with Luther? What we’re going to see initially met with negotiation mediation. These revolts were eventually put down ruthlessly by the armies of the German nobility. And as many as a hundred thousand peasants were killed, some of the peasants demands drew heavily on Luther’s ideas and language such as Christian freedom and conscience and the supreme authority of the biblical word over temporal authorities. That makes sense. If Luther can say, I’m going to follow my own conscience rather than the church, why can’t the peasant say, I’m going to follow my own conscience rather than the secular Lord? It seems like the secular Lord has less authority over my conscience than does the church. Well what does Luther have to say about it? He writes in 1525, a treatise called against the robbing and murdering hoards of peasants. There’s other English translations equally delightfully provocative.
And in there he is absolutely ruthless. He encourages killing the peasants on moss. He says, therefore, let everyone who can smite slay and stab secretly or openly remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog. If you do not strike him, he will strike you in a whole land with you. So even if you’re not in the army, go murder your peasant neighbor. That’s what he’s actually telling you to do. And he explains, he says to the rulers they should go on unconcerned with a good conscience, lay about them as long as their hearts still beat. And he says that it’s to their advantage that the peasants have a bad conscience and an unjust cause and that any peasant who is killed is lost in body and soul and is eternally the devils very clear, right?
Luther’s views on conscience permit him to take the view that the people who disagree with him who rebelled not against the church but against the German lords and secular leaders deserve to all just be killed on moss and sent to hell because there’s nothing good in their conscience. So to turn him into this kind of a hero of conscience is strikingly bizarre. He’s not. He degrades conscience. He’s great defending his own right of conscience. He’s terrible defending the rights of conscience of those who disagree with him. Which leads me to another point that the video doesn’t get wrong, but which a lot of people do because there’s a very famous line at the diet of vers. If you’ve ever seen a movie about Luther or read a book about him, Luther gives a very impassioned speech, which is generally known as the, here I stand speech, here’s a little taste of it.
Unless I am convinced by scripture and by plain reason and not by popes and councils who have so often contradicted themselves, my conscience is captive to the word of God. To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. I cannot and I will not recant. Here I stand. I can do no other God help me.
So did Luther really say here I stand? Well, the answer seems to be no. And fascinatingly in Lutheran quarterly, there’s a great article on this from the historian Samuel L. Young called How Luther Became the Mythical. Here I stand hero and it’s all about this creation of the mythical Luther that doesn’t really match what we have from the historical evidence, how the earliest sources don’t have him saying, here I stand, I can do no other. And
Young looks at the history of why this became popular. If this isn’t the true story, why is this fictional version of Luther so popular? Well, he says, this became the translation that dominated writings on Luther in the British and American press after 1840. So you’ll notice well after the time of Luther, and it became a compelling aspect of the Reformer’s biography precisely because its implications could be adapted for various kinds of universal meanings, meaning you didn’t have to be a Lutheran to be really moved by the here I stand speech as it’s been kind of invented modified universalized, disregarding the actual historical circumstances of the diet of firms. Luther could simultaneously be touted as the champion of democracy, evangelical religion, human rights, individualism of free thought, of progress, and of modernity, whatever your cause, you can draw on this language and be like Hurrah, we’re overthrowing the forces that are against us of tradition and the old fashioned people. And we are following conscience because we’re the good guys who believe in fill in the blank, democracy, progress, modernity, free thought.
And so young says, as the archetypical warrior against religious, political, and intellectual tyranny of any kind, Luther’s appearance at vers proved a malleable rhetorical weapon. Although here I stand, historical narratives could be employed toward different ends. All of these readings serve to reinforce a larger historiography to which both Protestants and free thinkers could subscribe. This by the way, is why I think National Geographic is wading into the waters of Martin Luther, not because they’re devoted Protestants, but because Luther has become a sort of hero for secularists. And young makes the same point because in all these narratives, Luther was interpreted as a figure of deep discontinuity with the medieval past all of these stories. Rather than having Luther be a person from the 16th century who was deeply formed by his medieval Catholic upbringing, who even while he is questioning one aspect is still very much swimming in those waters, the actual historical real life.
Martin Luther, they have a Luther who’s almost like a 19th, 20th, 21st century American Protestant or American liberal who’s just kind of plopped into the scene and says, oh, you battled medieval Catholic church. And that is just wildly anachronistic. That deep discontinuity to medieval past is the thing young is rightly critiquing. He says his piety, meaning here, Luthers piety, character, eloquence, ingenious, are in stark contrast to his Catholic context, making his stand that much more dramatic and poignant. Pinpointing the died of vers as the beginning of modernity or a renewed biblical piety assumes an anti-Catholic notion of progress and historical development. And then he concludes this thought by saying that there have been recent studies by a couple other scholars that have underscored the symbiotic relationship between Protestantism and secularism in the 19th and 20th centuries and a similar dynamic marks the development of here I stand historiography.
Let me put that in simpler language. At the time of Luther, the German peasant said, aha, this stuff Luther is saying can be used to justify our social revolution. And Luther’s horrified and says, the people doing this should be killed, murdered. Well, later Protestants and later secularists and free thinkers and liberals of all kinds do the exact same thing the German peasants do. They say, aha, we can draw on Luther as this kind of figure. I mean Adolf Hitler famously does this where he draws on Luther, one of the first writers in German to try to build an anti-Jewish German ethos and has things he can draw on. That’s the issue for another episode. But the point is people are using Luther in this way that in many cases is not actually accurately representing who Luther is. So the diet of worms isn’t this major turning point that many accounts treat it as including this National Geographic video.
And he doesn’t really have this here I stand speech almost certainly it’s not until much later they get these kind of ha geographies. There are eyewitnesses at the diet of vers who don’t record him saying this. So that’s a rough sketch of why we’ve got all of these historical rewritings that it fits the agenda of a lot of different people to make Luther into a person he wasn’t in real life. Alright, there’s two more errors I want to get into the first one’s about the Bible and the second is about the church. Let’s look at the Bible next.
Up until then, the Bible has only existed in Greek and Latin while hiding at Ford Book Luther Translates the entire New Testament into German. Luther wants people to have the opportunity to read the Bible in their own language. So they do not depend on the priests and the church’s interpretation because Luther sees the Bible as God speaking to all people.
So that’s a pretty straightforward question. Did Luther really create the first German language Bible as so many Protestants and secularists tell us, no, that’s not remotely true. And there are plenty of writings on this, including from non-Catholics like the Adventist scholar, Kenneth Strand, who has a work called German Bibles before Luther, the story of 14 high German editions. In the beginning of that book, he gives an overview of what the situation was at the time of Luther. He says, long before Luther’s day, Germans had taken an interest in having scripture in their own tongue. That’s the opposite of what National Geographic tells you. And vernacular translations had been laboriously copied out by hand. Remember the printing press didn’t exist and so you don’t have a ton of mass produced, well, any kind of Bible or any kind of document because you can’t mass produce things, but you do have people hand copying the Bible into German because that was the only thing available at the time with the advent of printing.
Additions of scripture in German as well as in Latin, began to multiply from various presses in the German lands by the time of Luther’s birth in 1483, no fewer than nine, such editions of the complete Bible in high German and two in low German had appeared. And then by the time of Luther’s own publication of the Bible, there were already 14 high German and four low German editions of the entire Bible to say nothing of additions, of portions of scripture and manuscript coffees. So Luther is maybe the 17th, or excuse me, maybe the 19th, to show up here, not the first. And that matters because the whole narrative is the Catholic church didn’t want ordinary German people to have the Bible in their language. And the evidence shows exactly the opposite of that. So that’s a pretty glaring sign that you’re being fed propaganda that is not consistent with the historical evidence. Alright, one final point I want to address from the video.
When people get access to reading the Bible themselves, they also begin to use the words of the Bible as an argument for all sorts of things. Luther has started something he cannot control. His news thoughts are used as arguments in the power struggles of princess in revolts and in the struggle between kings princess and the Pope about who actually decides what soon everyone is poring and fighting. Some even go to war. Luther had dreamt about changing the church. He knew, but his thoughts ended up splitting the church in two, the Catholic church and the Protestant church. And that soon becomes important for many other things than the church.
I find that last line really telling that this becomes important for other things than the church, which tells you their interest in the story isn’t really about the church, but fine. That’s okay. You can be interested in a religious topic for non-religious reasons, but it might be giving away the agenda behind why they’re making a video telling a fake history of Martin Luther. So the last question I have is, did Martin Luther really split the church in two? And the answer is not really. There isn’t a Protestant church. There are a bunch of different Protestant denominations, and this is true in the lifetime of Martin Luther. And the video actually points out he can’t control how other people are going to interpret the scriptures. If the whole point is Luther says, read the Bible for yourself and follow your own conscience. Other people aren’t going to agree with Luther’s interpretation.
We already saw it with the German peasants. This is true across the board. The historian Walter Osh probably butchering that, I apologize. In his studies in medieval and modern German history says that through Luther, the 16th century became a theologically determined age, witnessing the birth of other evangelical denominations. Without Luther’s breakthrough, the founding of churches by Swingley and Calvin would’ve been inconceivable. So by the time Luther dies, there are at least four major denominational families. The boundary of what a denomination is, it is notoriously kind of difficult to hammer out, but you’ve got the Lutheran, you’ve got the Calvinists or Reformed, you’ve got the Anabaptists, and you’ve got the Anglicans. And to say these are one church doesn’t really make any sense because on many of the issues that they’re debating about, they are just as likely to agree with the Catholic side as they’re to agree with one another.
So Luther famously said that he was closer to the Catholic position than he was to his wing’s position kind of reform. Well kind of the Anabaptist kind of the reform position on the Eucharist. So there’s any number of issues. So it really doesn’t make any sense to call these four disagreeing groups. One Protestant church, it’s not an existing body. There is no organizational continuity, there’s no doctrinal unity, nothing that would make it one body. These are at the bare minimum four denominations at the death of Luther. And the history of this isn’t that this creates two churches, a Protestant one and a Catholic one, but untold denominations splintering off after the death of each of these four major founders. Rudolph Hines, I’ve mentioned this book before, but in his book reform and in conflict looks the legacy both during their life and after. And he says that the failure of efforts to heal the schism between Protestants and Catholics is probably more understandable than the continuing breach among Protestants since the latters were agreed on the essentials of the faith, right?
They can have something like a belief in sola fide, but then it turns out they can’t agree on other stuff. All of the magisterial reformers, you’ll notice he’s excluding here the radical reformers because it’s too hard to even speak of all Protestants together. During the lifetime of Luther, all of the magisterial reformers were committed to a belief in still the script Torah as well as the rejection of Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. They were also largely agreed on the doctrines of justification and priesthood of all believers. So you’ll notice even in that description, he’s taking some Protestants who are largely agreed, this is not a unified church. And really that’s kind of the point he’s making. He says that the Protestants quickly discovered, this is again the subgroup of the subgroup of Protestants who kind of agree. They quickly discovered the commitment to the sole authority of scripture and belief in the ity. That’s the clarity of scripture, did not necessarily make it easy to agree on what scripture actually teaches. So they can all agree, scripture is really clear, we don’t need the church. But when you say, what does scripture say? What does it teach? They don’t know. They don’t agree with each other, which is the Catholic point by the way.
And then he gives the example that the Marlborough Colloquy was an attempt to create something like an ecumenical council for Protestants. And it was only the first of a number of unsuccessful attempts to heal the breach among Protestants. So there is no such thing as a Protestant church and there never has been. In all the attempts to create something like a unified statement of belief or creed or catechism that all Protestants could sign off to has utterly failed for 500 years. In no sense are Protestants a denomination. They just aren’t. It’s a loose category of a bunch of different denominations and we can’t even say how many. So that’s Luther’s actual legacy. He advances principles that he’s horrified when the German peasants use in ways he doesn’t like and that then give rise to untold denominations creating a future that he certainly didn’t intend. That’s the actual history.
The idea of Luther being this great defender of conscience, first modern in all of that, that’s a fictional version. He’s not nailing the thesis to the door. He’s not giving the hero I stand defense. He’s not doing any of the things popularly assumed, nor is the Catholic church doing the things popularly accused of doing, selling salvation or giving a special deal to the rich over the poor. Any of those things, those things are just propaganda. They were sometimes national propaganda, England versus Spain. They were sometimes religious propaganda, Protestant versus Catholic. And there’s sometimes religious propaganda of atheists and secularists against Christianity. But the point is a lot of what you know or think you know about Martin Luther or hopefully knew or thought you knew prior to watching the studio is false. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.