Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Luther was apparently far surer of his case. He is as confident, subsequent to 1530, in drawing from Scripture the principles for the treatment of the heretics as he is in defending them against the obvious objections so often brought against them.

  Luther had it that the line of action for which he stood was not coercion to any definite religious practices. “Our Princes,” so he sought to reassure himself as early as 1525, “do not force people to the faith and to the Evangel but merely set a term to outward abominations.”

  The Elector, as was to be expected, expressed himself likewise: “Though it is not our intention to prescribe to anyone what he must hold or believe, yet, in order to guard against harmful uprisings and other disorders, we refuse to recognise or permit any sects or schisms within our Princedom.”

  Many a one amongst the new Doctors had begun, as a Protestant historian of Saxony points out, “to claim for his conscience the same right” (as Luther), while “following other paths than Luther had trodden” (in his search after God). May not, indeed, must not, such a one, so ran the objection, follow his conscience, seeing that Luther himself tells us to consult our conscience? Yes, he may, is Luther’s reply, but, if he be truthful, then he will admit my plain interpretation of the Bible as the right one, for “I have floored and overcome all my foes on the sure groundwork of Holy Scripture.”

  Moreover, might not the Princes holding Popish views seize on the coercion taught by the Lutherans as a pretext for similar measures against the Lutherans in their territories?

  No, replies Luther, they must not do so for they would be committing the same sin as the Kings of Israel when they “slew the true prophets”; but on account of the injustice of such slaughter, we are not to make nought of the law or refrain from stoning the false prophets. “Pious authorities will not punish anyone unless they see, hear, learn or know for certain that they are blasphemers.” — Even should Kaiser Charles come and tell us, that he is convinced that “the doctrine of the Papists is true, and that he must therefore, in accordance with God’s command, use all his power to extirpate our heretical doctrines in his Empire,” we must answer, that: “We know he is not certain of this, and, in fact, cannot be certain.”

  But does this not come to much the same as imposing faith by some sort of compulsion?

  No, is his answer. “The faith is not thereby forced on anyone, for he is free to believe what he pleases. He is only forbidden to indulge in that teaching and blaspheming whereby he seeks to rob God and Christians of their doctrine and Word, whilst all the while enjoying their protection and all temporal advantages. Let him go where there are no Christians and have things his way there.”

  The severity of his demands is hardly mitigated or excused by the right he gives people to leave the country. At any rate those who do not see eye to eye with him must get themselves gone, for, as he frequently remarks, whoever wishes to dwell among the burghers must not disregard the laws of the borough.

  “By all this, however,” so he says on another occasion, “no one is forced into the faith but the common man is merely set free from troublesome and obstinate spirits, and the knavery of the hole-and-corner preachers is checked.” Thus, if the man who thinks otherwise wishes to lock up his convictions in his own breast, he is quite free to do so. Within, he may enjoy the most far-reaching freedom, since no earthly power extends to his thoughts. The reply of those concerned was, however, obvious; what right, they asked, had the new religious tribunal to prevent a man from revealing his convictions and openly living up to them, and was not the order to keep silence tantamount to a stifling of conscience and to forcing people to become hypocrites?

  Hence, in the ensuing discussions, we find that Luther and his friends were ever making fresh efforts to meet the objections; in itself this was a sign of the weakness of the exclusivism adopted by the Lutherans, in spite of all they had formerly said, as soon as they had succeeded in winning the favour of the State.

  “Some argue,” we read in the memorandum of the Wittenbergers published in 1536, “that the secular authorities have no concern whatever with ghostly matters. This is going much too far.… The rulers must not only protect the life and belongings of their underlings, but their highest duty is to promote the honour of God and to prevent blasphemy and idolatry,” etc.

  The memorandum was intended for Philip of Hesse. As Luther was aware that the Landgrave was loath to proceed to extremities with the Anabaptists, he added to the memorandum a note of his own. “Seeing that His Serene Highness the Landgrave reports that certain leaders and teachers of the Anabaptists … have not kept their promise (viz. to quit the land) Your Serene Highness may with a good conscience cause them to be punished with the sword, for this reason also, to wit, that they have not kept their oath or promise. Such is the rule. Yet Your Serene Highness, needless to say, may at all times allow justice to be tempered with mercy, according to the circumstances.”

  If meant in earnest the latter recommendation to mercy does the speaker credit and is the more noteworthy because, in his later years, we do not often hear him pleading for the heretics. As a rule he is all too intent on emphasising the wickedness of what he terms “blasphemy and idolatry,” i.e. of whatever was at variance with his own teaching.

  But what — and this is the main objection — entitles Luther’s doctrine to be regarded as the standard of belief? This point Luther usually evaded. He says: Those heretics are to be punished “whose teaching is at variance with the public articles of the faith which are plainly grounded on Scripture and believed throughout the world by the whole of Christendom.” “Such articles, common to the whole of Christendom, have already been sufficiently tested, examined, proved and determined by Scripture and by the confession of the whole of Christendom, confirmed by many miracles, sealed by the blood of the holy Martyrs, witnessed to and defended by the books of all the Doctors and are not now to become the prey of faultfinders or cavillers.” A sharp answer, one very much to the point, was given by Bullinger of Zürich, who spoke of it as “truly laughable” that his opponent should suddenly appeal to the fact “of the Church having so long held this.” “If Luther’s argument, based on longstanding usage, be admitted, then is Popery quite in the right when it harps on the Church and her age. But then the whole of Luther’s own doctrine tumbles over, for his teaching is not that which the Roman Church has held for so long.” — Nor is it easy to tell which points of doctrine Luther, in his elastic fashion, included among the articles “clearly founded on Scripture” and held unquestioningly by the whole of Christendom. His words occasionally presuppose that all divergent doctrines, not only those of the Sacramentarians and Anabaptists, but even those of the Papists, were to be punished by the authorities. If everyone is to be punished who teaches “that Christ has not died for our sins but that each one must himself make satisfaction for them,” (a doctrine unjustly foisted on the Papists by Luther), or who “condemns the public ministry and draws the people away from it,” or who “insists that our baptism and preaching are not Christian and therefore that our Church is not the Church of Christ,” etc., — then many Catholics could not but fall victims to the sword of the authorities. How often did not Luther designate every specifically Catholic doctrine as rank “blasphemy,” and stigmatise every Catholic practice as idolatry? Blasphemy and idolatry were, however, according to him, to be rooted out by violence. Truly his words gave promise of an abundant harvest of persecution.

  As a reason of his animus against heretics within his own fold Luther finally brings forward those personal considerations which are familiar to all who have followed his controversies.

  His natural foes are those who in their “peculiar wisdom” “seek to teach something besides Christ and beyond our preaching.” Hence he was fond of insisting that Christ was slaying the Papacy through him, and of rejecting all who “make a great pother” and “claim to know something new.” They come, and, like Carlstadt, want to “seize upon the prize and poach upon my preserves.”
Had not Carlstadt come along “with the fanatics, Münzer and the Anabaptists, all would have gone well with my undertaking.” These men want to “darken the sun of the Evangel” so that the world “may forget all that has hitherto been taught by us.”

  “They want to have nothing to do with me,” he complains of the fanatics, “and I want to have nothing to do with them. They boast that they have nothing from me, for which I heartily thank God; I have borrowed even less from them, for which, too, God be praised.” The rupture with the Swiss came about because they “wished to be first.”

  In all these dissensions he finds many a one saying to the Christians: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin.” And yet he alone had the right to call himself the “great Doctor” “to whom God first revealed His Word to preach.”

  But did not his very self-reliance finally broaden the ideas of the preacher of coercion? Did not Luther in a sermon preached at Eisleben on Feb. 7, 1546, as good as repudiate his former exclusivism?

  It is true that this has been confidently asserted by Protestants, but the text of this sermon, known only through Aurifaber’s Notes, does not justify such an inference. In it the preacher is not treating of the attitude of the Christian authorities towards heresy, but is only showing how the faithful and the preachers must behave, surrounded as they are by wicked folk, by Anabaptists and sectarians. The occasion for speaking of this was supplied by the Sunday Gospel of the Tares, Matt. xiii. 24-30, which grow up together with the wheat in God’s field, and which the Lord wishes to be left undisturbed until the Day of Judgment. Hence he explains how this must be understood, the local conditions probably supplying him with a particular reason for doing so, seeing that, in the County of Mansfeld, there must still have been some Catholics and that the Jews stood in favour. The greater part of the Sermon on the Tares is devoted to describing the passions and lusts which Christians must fight against in their own hearts with patience and perseverance. It is only towards the end that he speaks of the wickedness rampant in the world. He refutes the opinion of those, who “would have a Church in which there is no evil but where all are prudent and pious, and pure and holy”; thus “the Anabaptists, Münzer and such like, wish to root out and put to death everything that is not holy.” Hence “how are we to suffer the heretics and yet not to suffer them? How am I to act? If I tear up or root out the tares in one place then I spoil the wheat [according to the Parable], and the weeds will still grow up again elsewhere. Thus if I root out one heretic, yet the same devil-sown seed springs up again in ten other places.” Hence we must look to it that we do not make matters worse by violence and suppression. “Papists and Jews will ever be with us.” “You will not succeed in this world in entirely separating the heretics and false Christians from the just.” “Look to it that you remain master in your own household; see to it, you preachers, parsons and hearers [it is only to these that he is addressing himself, not to the State authorities], that heretics and seditious men, such as Münzer was, do not rule or dominate; grumble in a corner, that indeed they may do, but that they should mount the rostrum, get into the pulpit or go up to the altar, that, so far as in you lies, you must not allow.” Care must be taken that the “pulpit and the Sacrament are kept undefiled.” “By human might and power we cannot root them out, or make them different. For, in this point, they are often far superior to us, can get themselves a following, draw the masses to them, and, on the top of it all, they have on their side the prince of this world, viz. the devil.”

  The main thing therefore is that the heretics “should not rule in our Churches.”

  But what are we to do against the tares, against the Papists and Sophists, against Cologne, Louvain and the devil’s other thistles? Of boils it holds good: “Let them swell until they burst. So too it is in secular and domestic government: Where [whether in the Town Council or among the servants] we cannot get rid of the wicked without harm or detriment, there we must put up with them until the time is ripe.”

  In this much-discussed Sermon on the Tares Luther is very far from wishing to give the authorities directions as to how to treat the sectarians. On the contrary he makes it plain that some other line of action than that described by him must be followed even by the faithful and the preachers, and much more so by the Christian authorities, whenever the heretics come out of their “corner” and try to climb into the pulpit or mount the altar. What was to be done that the pulpit and the Sacrament might remain undefiled, he had already sufficiently explained elsewhere. Naturally, a sermon on the Gospel which tells us to leave the Tares until the harvest was scarcely the place for Luther to expound his severer theories on the treatment to be meted out to unbelievers and misbelievers, so that his silence here cannot be taken as a repudiation of the measures for which he so long had stood. At the close of the next sermon, the last he was ever to preach, addressing himself to the nobility, he speaks very harshly of the Jews. “If they refuse to be converted, then, as blasphemers, they deserve that we should not suffer or endure them among us.” “You Lords ought not to tolerate but rather expel them.” This duty he bases on his usual principle: “Were I to tolerate the man who dishonours, blasphemes and curses Christ my Master, I should be making myself a partaker in the sins of others.”

  His system of coercing and punishing heretics he certainly never repudiated.

  Compulsory Attendance at Church

  “Facts have shown,” Luther wrote to Spalatin in 1527 of the conditions in his new churches, “that men despise the Evangel and insist on being compelled by the law and the sword.” He was very anxious to make attendance at the Lutheran preaching a matter of obligation.

  According to his earlier statements, attendance at the preaching had been voluntary, for the matter of the sermons was to be judged by the hearers, in order that they might avoid what was harmful; his subsequent practice of driving all to the preaching made an end of this freedom, or rather duty. Through the authorities, so far as his influence went, he insisted on this principle: “Even though they do not believe they must nevertheless, for the sake of the Ten Commandments, be driven to the preaching, so that they may at least learn the outward work of obedience.” He wrote this at a time when he had already justified such coercion at Wittenberg, viz. on Aug. 26, 1529, in a letter to the “strict and steadfast” Joseph Levin Metzsch of Mila, who was shortly after appointed by the Elector to take part in the Visitation. Instructions sent by Luther on the same day to Thomas Löscher, pastor of the same locality, are to the same effect (“cogendi sunt ad conciones … audiant etiam inviti”). The orders of the authorities concerning public worship were represented in the Visitation Rules for the pastors (1528) as universally binding: “All secular authority is to be obeyed because the secular powers are not ordering a new worship but enforcing peace and charity.” The Preface of the Smaller Catechism (1531) was on the same lines. “Although we neither can nor should force anyone into the faith, yet the masses must be held and driven to it in order that they may know what is right or wrong in those among whom they live.”

  In the same year Luther advised Margrave George of Brandenburg to compel the people to attend the Catechism “at the behest of the secular authority,” for, since they “are Christians and wish to be so called,” it was only fitting “they should be obliged to learn what a Christian ought to know.” The Ansbach preachers embodied this requirement in the same year in the alterations they proposed in the church-regulations.

  Wittenberg served as the pattern. It was to Wittenberg that Leonard Beyer addressed himself when he succeeded Luther’s friend, Nicholas Hausmann, as pastor of Zwickau. Luther answered his letter by describing the system of coercion practised in Wittenberg and the neighbourhood when people persistently neglected to attend the sermons: “With the authority and in the name of our Most Noble Prince it is our custom to affright those who disregard all piety and fail to attend the preaching, and to threaten them with banishment and the law. This is the first step. Then, if they do not amend, the pastors ar
e enjoined by us to ply them for a month or more with instructions and representations, and, finally, in the event of their still proving contumacious, to excommunicate them, and to break off all intercourse with them as though they were heathen.” He concludes: “The words of the Bible [Matt. xviii. 17; 2 Thes. iii. 6] concerning the avoidance of heretics are quite clear.” — He, however, forgets to add that neither he nor the pastors had ever been quite successful in their attempts at excommunication.

  The above regulations of the authorities were to remain in force. In 1533 the Prince once more insisted that: No one is to be permitted to absent himself from the “common church-going,” everyone must be “earnestly reminded of this.” In the General Articles of 1557 it was determined by the Elector August, that, whoever absented himself without permission from the sermon on Sundays and festivals, whether in the morning or afternoon, “more particularly in the villages” was to be fined, or, if he was poor, “to be punished with the pillory, either at the church or at some prison.” The parsons, however, were to notify the authorities of any who contemned the preaching and the sacraments, or who obstinately persisted in their false opinion. Even the practice of auricular confession was, at a later date, made a strict law; whoever evaded confession and the Supper was liable to banishment. The Saxon lawyer, Benedict Carpzov (1595-1666) in his “Iurisprudentia ecclesiastica” defended as self-evident the legal principle based on the practice of Luther’s own country: “Those, who, after repeated admonitions, maliciously absent themselves from the Supper, are to be expelled from the land; they are to be compelled to sell their goods and emigrate.” The same scholarly lawyer elsewhere alludes to the Saxon custom of condemning seditious and blasphemous heretics to die at the stake.

  At Wittenberg strong ramparts were set up for the protection of the Lutheran doctrine and to prevent divergent opinions finding their way in.