Outside the intelligentsia, however, Luther was far from interred. Among traditional groups like the nobility, the peasantry, and the lower middle class in the towns, the enthronement of reason and the overthrow of the Bible caused a backlash. The French Revolution, with its efforts to engineer an ideal society, seemed an exercise in hubris, while the ensuing violence and chaos seemed a form of divine punishment. In 1792, France declared war on Prussia and Austria, initiating a period of French domination of Central Europe. In early October 1806, Napoleon smashed the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstädt, and later that month he marched triumphantly into Berlin, consolidating French control from the Rhine to the Elbe. Spurred by its defeat, Prussia rebuilt its armed forces, and after the rout of Napoleon’s army in Russia in 1812, it mobilized. In October 1813, in a series of battles known as the wars of liberation, the Prussians drove the French from German territory.
During the French occupation, German nationalism had surged. At the same time, the political and social reforms introduced by France had stirred interest in representative government. University students formed patriotic unions committed to personal renovation and political liberalization. With the approach of the three-hundredth anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, there was new interest in Luther’s efforts on behalf of German emancipation. On October 18, 1817—the fourth anniversary of the wars of liberation—several hundred students met at the Wartburg, chosen for its association with Luther. Luther was hailed as the “internal liberator” of Germany paralleling the external liberation by the generals. A victory fire was lit, and, in a reenactment of Luther’s burning of the papal bull, printed paper bearing the names of despised reactionary authors was cast into it.
But the old regime, led by Count Metternich, was unbowed. After a deranged student stabbed a conservative playwright to death, Metternich ordered the unions disbanded and enacted a series of repressive measures aimed at crushing all dissent. The Protestant church remained a pillar of that regime. In these years, there arose a neo-Lutheran movement that took “back to Luther” as its slogan and held throne and altar to be inseparable.
From this milieu of renewed piety emerged Otto von Bismarck. While living as a country squire in Prussia, he met the daughter of a conservative aristocratic family known for its Pietism. While courting her, he had a religious conversion that gave him both a sense of inner strength and a renewed commitment to the old order. Bismarck came to see the state as a Christian entity that got its ultimate sanction from God, and he felt only contempt for the elite liberals who held up England as a model for Prussia. His successful campaign to consolidate the German states into the Second Reich (Empire)—proclaimed on January 18, 1871—seemed to many Protestants to complete what Luther had begun. The Lutheran church became a strong backer of the new Kaiser, Wilhelm I, and of monarchism in general.
But new social forces were gathering. Spurred by the great capitalist boom of the late nineteenth century, Germany became a land of giant companies, big agriculture, powerful banks, swelling cities, and an expanding proletariat whose radicalism grew as its misery deepened. The Protestants, attached to the ruling class, were incapable of developing a program to attract the working class. In the cities, workers turned dramatically away from religion. Berlin, which in the first decade of the twentieth century had a population of more than 2 million, had only about a hundred places of worship, earning it a reputation as a “spiritual cemetery.”
Instead, those workers turned to a new faith—socialism. The Social Democratic Party grew so fast that by 1890 it was outpolling all other parties. Marxist historians showed new interest in the Peasants’ War. In 1897, Karl Kautsky, a leading party theorist, came out with Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation. Echoing Friedrich Engels, he hailed Thomas Müntzer as a hero of the working class and reviled Luther for having backed the princes. Among liberal Protestant theologians, meanwhile, Luther was scorned as a medieval figure whose attachment to faith and rejection of human agency held little relevance for the modern age. In 1906, Ernst Troeltsch, a prominent theologian at the University of Berlin, gave a lecture on the significance of Protestantism for the beginning of the modern world. He dismissed the “old Protestantism” of Luther’s time as backward-looking and uninspired and censured it for its withdrawal from the world and glorification of the state. The true start of the modern age, Troeltsch asserted, was not the German Reformation but the Enlightenments in England and France, and he urged Germany to follow the democratic and pluralistic course being pursued in England and America.
Among those in the audience for Troeltsch’s lecture was a church historian named Karl Holl. Though a liberal Protestant, Holl was troubled by Troeltsch’s attempt to consign Luther to history’s dustbin. No less unsettling were the new attacks from the Catholics. In 1904, Heinrich Denifle, a Dominican historian working as an archivist at the Vatican, published a scathing indictment of Luther’s scholarship, conduct, and character. Denifle had seen a copy of Luther’s recently discovered lecture notes on the Epistle to the Romans, and, drawing on it, he dismissed his doctrine of justification by faith as unsupported by both Scripture and the Fathers. He also called attention to Luther’s frank admissions about his carnal desires. He was, Denifle wrote, “a fallen-away monk with unbridled lust, a theological ignoramus, an evil man” who “used immorality to begin the Reformation.” Luther was charged with apostasy, buffoonery, hypocrisy, mendacity, and drunkenness. Praised in Rome, the book caused an outcry in Germany, and even liberal Protestants rushed to the reformer’s defense.
Prodded by Denifle, Holl got hold of a copy of Luther’s lecture notes. Far from being disappointed, he was dazzled. In commenting on Paul’s passages about justification, Luther seemed to arrive at a completely original understanding of the relationship between man and God. His insights seemed all the more significant as the First World War approached. Like many Protestants, Holl was caught up by in the patriotic surge in Germany. Luther seemed to embody the vigor and creativity of the German people, in contrast to the pallid pluralism and sterile rationalism of the West. When the far-right German Fatherland Party was formed in September 1917, Holl—showing how far he was moving from his liberal roots—joined it.
On October 31, 1917—the four-hundredth anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses—Holl gave a memorial lecture at the University of Berlin. In it, he described Luther’s religion as a religion of conscience that represented a decisive breakthrough for the modern era. Holl’s recovery of the theology of the young Luther from the mire of confessions and commentaries that had swallowed it caused great excitement, and he spent the next several years expanding his lecture. He worked against the backdrop of the many upheavals shaking Germany: its defeat in the war, the fall of the monarchy, the socialist revolution of the winter of 1918–1919, the humiliation of Versailles. The new Weimar Republic brought democracy, night clubs, Expressionism, jazz, Josephine Baker, the disestablishment of the church, and other developments that seemed a betrayal of traditional German values.
In 1921, Holl came out with a collection of essays, including his expanded lecture. “What Did Luther Understand by Religion?”, the essay was titled. Luther, Holl declared, was “the great awakener of the conscience in his day.” In emphasizing that religion addresses itself to “personal freedom” and “personal decision,” Luther provided the foundation for an autonomy that was “more than merely an imperfect preliminary form of the autonomy espoused by the Enlightenment.” In a jab at Troeltsch, Holl claimed that Luther stood out “so sharply from the Middle Ages” and appeared “so much as the transformer of the whole life of the mind that it is impossible to associate him with the Middle Ages.” But, he hastened to add, Luther was not a proponent of unbridled individualism. On the contrary, he was “the principal advocate of the community concept in religion.” Only when a community’s members are united with God, he taught, does it deserve to be called a church of Christ. During the Peasants’ War, Luther had
courageously protected the gospel by making sure it was not recruited for use in the social struggle. (Holl made no mention of Luther’s statements about stabbing and slaying the peasants or of his close ties to the princes.)
While many aspects of Luther’s religion were distinctively German, Holl concluded, it would be arrogant of the German people to lay claim to him for themselves alone, for Luther showed how the “profound genius” of the German people had within it a “universally human element.” Luther “belongs not only to us Germans, he belongs to humanity. This is why we are confident that his attainments will continue to be cherished.”
Holl’s resurrection of the young Luther and his veneration of him as a symbol of German greatness caused a sensation, and the accompanying flood of essays and studies would become known as the Luther Renaissance. Conservatives in particular rallied to Holl’s portrayal of Luther as an outstanding German with much to teach the rest of the world. Holl’s vision of the church as a national community, meanwhile, became the basis for the idea of a Volkskirche (people’s church) that embodied the unique values of German Christians—an idea that resonated with the many young Protestants flocking to the standard of militant Christian nationalism.
In the 1920s, Protestants voted overwhelmingly for the right-wing German National People’s Party and then for its successor, the National Socialists. In the election of July 1932, the Nazis won 37 percent of the overall vote but 56 percent in Protestant-dominated regions (compared to 23 percent in Catholic ones). Hitler skillfully appealed to the Protestants’ resentment of Weimar, and many Protestant theologians and ministers saw his rise as offering a last chance to establish a true people’s church. The German Christians, as his Protestant supporters became known, sought to take over church bodies from within and turn them into the spiritual home for the “true Christians” of the Third Reich. “Stormtroopers for Christ,” they called themselves.
Many Protestants objected, however, and in May 1934 a group of them met in Barmen to form a competing body, the Confessing Church. Rejecting the totalitarian claims of the state over society and religion, they sought to protect the independence of the Protestant church. More ministers affiliated with this body than with the German Christians. Even they, however, were motivated more by a desire to maintain clerical autonomy against Nazi encroachments than to resist Hitler’s war aims and his murderous attacks on the Jews and other groups.
This lack of opposition reflected, in part, the menacing repression that all dissidents faced; many who did resist, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, paid with their lives. But it also reflected the longstanding Lutheran tradition of deference to the state. One of the few open dissenters, the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, wrote in 1939 that Luther’s idea of “two kingdoms,” with its insistence on keeping the secular and spiritual apart, “lies like a cloud over the ecclesiastical thinking and action of more or less every course taken by the German Church.” During the war, as word began arriving of the atrocities committed on the eastern front and against the Jews, all but a handful of Confessing church members remained silent.
In October 1945, some surviving leaders of that church issued a “Declaration of Guilt,” expressing “great anguish” over the “inestimable suffering” inflicted “on many peoples and lands.” “We accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.” Though the declaration was tepid—it made no mention of the Jews, for instance—it marked the start of a painful (and ongoing) effort by German Protestants to atone for their performance during the war. In an effort to serve society, the Protestant church mounted an ambitious social-welfare program, establishing a network of schools, hospitals, homes for the elderly, and youth programs. While helping offset the perception of Protestant indifference, however, these efforts gave rise to a vast bureaucracy that sapped spiritual spontaneity and stymied innovation.
In 1967, Karl Kupisch, a German church historian, offered an assessment of the Luther Renaissance fifty years after it had begun, and it was harsh. Led by theologians, he wrote, the movement had “created a theologically mummified Luther who was a stranger to the mass of evangelical churchgoers.” Luther had as a result remained “one of the great unknown figures in German history. Like Snow White, he lies asleep in his (theological) glass coffin, and the time of his awakening cannot be foreseen.” Reexamining his life and work, Kupisch went on, remained “a vital task” for the German people, for “he is as much a part of their confused history as Goethe and Bismarck. He cannot be swept under a theological carpet: for that he was too great a man.”
Yet Luther largely remains in his coffin. With the steady advance of Erasmian-style humanism in Germany, the country’s churches have experienced a precipitous fall-off in attendance. Between 1990 and 2010, the Protestant federation closed 340 churches; 46 were demolished and others were turned into restaurants or converted into mosques. The retreat from faith has been especially marked in eastern Germany. A 2012 global survey found that 52 percent of the population in that region said that they do not believe in God—a higher proportion than in any other part of the world, earning the region the label “the most godless place on earth.” “Where have all the Protestants gone?” the pastor of St. Mary’s, the Wittenberg town church, has lamented. On an ordinary Sunday, no more than fifty to a hundred of the town’s residents show up for services.
They are greatly outnumbered by tourists. In addition to St. Mary’s, tourists visit the Luther House, a modernized version of the old Black Cloister that now houses the world’s largest museum about the Reformation; the (rebuilt) Castle Church, whose north portal features bronze doors bearing the text of the Ninety-Five Theses; the homes of Melanchthon and Cranach; and shops selling Reformation beer, wine, and socks embroidered with the statement, “Here I Stand.” Cruise ships regularly put in on the Elbe, and for overnight visitors there’s a Best Western steps from the cloister. Lutherstadt-Wittenberg (as it is now officially known) has become a Reformation theme park.
The flow of visitors greatly increased in the period leading up to October 31, 2017—the five-hundredth anniversary of the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses. For a full decade beforehand, the Lutheran church sponsored a series of commemorative conferences, exhibitions, concerts, and tours, thus hoping to spark another back-to-Luther movement. It is an uphill battle, given the ongoing de-Christianization of Germany (as of Europe as a whole). Luther’s own writings pose an additional obstacle. Today, no conference on the reformer is complete without a discussion of his anti-Jewish writings and of how much responsibility he bears for the Holocaust. On the Jews and Their Lies remains an indelible stain on Luther’s reputation and a major stumbling block to any new Luther Renaissance.
To find the modern-day impact of Luther’s ideas, one must look beyond Germany. Thanks in part to the missionary work begun by the Pietists, Protestantism today commands a worldwide empire stretching from Nigeria (60 million adherents) and South Africa (37 million) to China (58 million) and Brazil (40 million). In sub-Saharan Africa alone there are 295 million Protestants, dwarfing the 100 million in Europe. The single largest Protestant congregation is the Yoido Full Gospel Church, in Seoul, South Korea; its average weekly attendance is 200,000.
The largest concentration of Protestants, however, is in the United States, where just under half of the population identifies as such. For more than two centuries, America has been the capital of world Protestantism, and it is there that one must look for Luther’s current influence.
The natural place to begin is with America’s Lutherans. There are about seven million of them, concentrated in the Upper Midwest. Most are descendants of German and Scandinavian immigrants who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their most well-known community is Lake Wobegon, which, though fictitious, embodies the traits for which American Lutherans are best known: modesty, reticence, stoicism, insularity. As Lutherans themselves like to joke, their prototy
pical figure is a shy Norwegian bachelor farmer. Proportionately many fewer Lutherans have served in Congress or the Cabinet than have Episcopalians, Presbyterians, or Methodists; the highest office attained has been that of chief justice of the Supreme Court (William Rehnquist). This record reflects Luther’s own rejection of political engagement. All in all, the Lutherans are an inconspicuous presence in America.
To find Luther’s influence, one must look beyond the denominations that bear his name. Consider, for instance, the Southern Baptists. With more than fifteen million members and 46,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest denomination in America; through its seminaries, publications, office in Washington, and network of missionaries, it has profoundly affected American political, social, and cultural life. The Baptists’ various statements of belief bear Luther’s stamp throughout, beginning with the prime place assigned to Scripture. The Bible, they maintain, is the “supreme standard” by which all human conduct and religious opinion should be measured. It is “a perfect treasure of divine instruction,” having “God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.” This is essentially a restatement of Luther’s principle of Scripture alone (except on the matter of biblical inerrancy, which he never endorsed).
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