The church encouraged the people to believe that adherence to the law provided a sovereign remedy for sin. Should conformity to the law prove too difficult, individual sinners could perform acts of penance or lessen time in purgatory through the purchase of indulgences. In effect, Christians were bound therefore either to remain a spiritual slave to the law or to seek freedom in an easily-forgiven fleshly licence.
It almost seems as if the pre-Reformation church anticipated the fundamental postulate of twentieth century cultural Marxism: “The individual cannot be simultaneously free and unfree, autonomous and heteronomous, unless the being of the person is conceived as divisible and belonging to different spheres”.768
Luther sought to persuade his fellow Germans that the truly virtuous Christian man is both “a perfectly free lord of all” and “a perfectly dutiful servant of all”.769 Only by embracing the faith in Christ shared within the priesthood of all believers could the German people truly work to save themselves, individually and collectively.
7: Why Was Martin Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian Man (1520) Controversial?
The God who made the world and everything in it…gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the place where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him — though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being…For we too are his offspring’.
Acts 17:24–28
Introduction
Martin Luther’s treatise on Christian liberty was the final instalment in a trilogy of pamphlets calling for a religious revolution in Germany. Written in the midst of the personal and social crisis following his attack on the supposed papal authority to sanction the sale of indulgences, the three treatises were addressed in turn to each of the three traditional estates which together constituted the late medieval German nation: those who fight, those who pray, and those who work.770 Singly and together each of these works advanced the cause of national particularism against the established authority of a transnational Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy asserting universal jurisdiction over the bodies and souls of all Christians.
Luther does not appear to have commented on Acts 17:24–28 but he clearly followed in the footsteps of the apostle Paul by groping after God everywhere in the life of his nation. He attacked the openly political theology of a Church setting itself up as the sole mediator between God and man. Luther’s polemical essay in defence of Christian freedom was controversial, first of all, because it was “directed against an ecclesiastical institution that, to the sixteenth century mind, had come to epitomize organized power”. With an implacable boldness, he called upon his fellow Germans to restore “our noble Christian liberty” by resisting the tyranny and corruption of an absolutist papal monarchy.771 In doing so, he was implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — articulating the elements of a German Christian ethno-theology. In the twenty-first century as in the sixteenth, sympathetic explorations of the ethno-national foundations of Christian faith provoke intense controversy. Now as then, organized religion joins with the cosmopolitan powers-that-be in their resolute refusal to see the work of the Holy Spirit in the long history of each of the European nations which once upon a time helped to create and sustain a Christian civilization.
The Christian Freedom of Those Who Work
In the centuries since the appearance of Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen, Christians have been active on all sides of the national question. Among Lutherans, such disunity is due not least of all to the fact that Luther’s treatise on Christian liberty is bereft of a coherent ethno-theology. In that essay, the relationship between religious renewal and national identity remains largely implicit and wholly undeveloped. By writing and publishing this pamphlet in German, Luther clearly hoped to lead his nation in a religious revival.772 With its focus on the theological relationship between faith and good works, the treatise on Christian liberty was also speaking in a vernacular familiar to the traditional third estate of “those who work”. But he spoke to them as individuals not as Germans. His goal was to infuse an evangelical faith in the Word of God into the hearts of the faithless hypocrites who seek to justify themselves by their good works alone. Nowhere does Luther urge his readers to find God in the carnal experience of membership in the German nation.
By contrast, the treatise aimed at “those who fight” was explicitly addressed to the Christian nobility of the German Nation. The “national and patriotic inspiration” of that pamphlet was obvious. It made an explicit contribution to the emergence of a German Christian ethno-theology with a message that was “both exclusive and inclusive”. Luther “was exclusive in denying involvement in German affairs to the alien ‘Romanists’…but it was inclusive of Luther’s fellow Germans who made up the nation’s lay estates”.773 But the nation fades into the background when Luther considers the freedom of the Christian man. There his focus is on the solitary individual believer whose inner, spiritual nature must remain separate from his outer carnal nature so long as he refuses the gift of faith. Luther does not consider whether the extended family of the nation is the essential medium through which individuals come to God. Had Luther addressed the treatise explicitly to the Christian man of the German Nation, he would have confronted two issues central to Christian ethno-theology.
The first relates to the social construction of nationhood as in itself a good work, indeed, as the necessary precondition for all other good works. Luther insists that it is the faith of the inner man alone that can justify him before God. He “cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all”.774 At the same time, Luther was determined “to counter the Catholic slander that [his] teaching meant that Christians could believe the propositions of the gospel and live like the devil and still be certain of salvation”.775 Luther’s ethno-theology rests upon an implicit understanding of God’s gracious gift of faith as something akin to what many patristic writers described as a process of deification or theosis, the end product of which is the ethno-genesis of a holy nation, people, or race.776
Like Origen in late antiquity, Luther compared the effect of the Word on the soul to “the heated iron [which] glows like fire because of the union of fire with it”. The soul which clings to “the promises of God…with a firm faith will be so closely united with them and altogether absorbed by them that it will not only share in all their power but will be saturated and intoxicated by them”. Such good faithful souls will inhabit the bodies of men who do good works simply because it is in their nature “to serve, help, and in every way deal with his neighbour as he sees that God through Christ has dealt and still deals with him”.777 Luther overlooks the fact that the very presence of neighbours presupposes the prior existence of a neighbourhood. The nation is a neighbourhood writ large. Every Christian nation must be sustained by good works done freely, from no motive other than the desire to please God. Throughout the time which God has allotted for its existence, every holy nation infused with a saving faith in Christ must be possessed as well of secure boundaries to separate and distinguish it from other peoples.
Boundaries in Luther’s Christian Faith Community
Unfortunately, Luther’s exclusive focus on the inner man as the invisible avatar of Christian freedom helped to dissolve the boundaries between the various estates and classes constituting the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. In accordance with the law of unintended consequence, Luther’s priesthood of all believers co-existed with — when it did not actively encourage — the steady erosion of traditional, legally enforced, and highly visible differences between neighbours and strangers, Christians and non-Christians, Germans and Jews.
Indeed, Gesche Linde suggests that Luther’s Freiheitstraktat amounts to a theoretical justification and practical preparation for the process of secularizat
ion that eventually culminated in the collapse of Christendom. After all, the Christian believer is no longer bound to follow a rigid moral code. Every specifically religious practice is external to the inner life of faith.778 Luther was emphatic “that no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom, or in producing unrighteousness or servitude”. Nor was there anything especially holy about the priestly caste or even the monastic orders. “It does not help the soul if the body is adorned with the sacred robes of priests or dwells in sacred places”. Nor does it help to occupy oneself with sacred duties or to pray, fast, and abstain “from certain types of food, or [do] any work that can be done by the body or in the body…Such works produce nothing but hypocrites”. Luther explicitly declared that every Christian, however humble his estate and station, is “by faith so exalted above all things that, by virtue of a spiritual power, he is lord of all things without exception”. Having announced that “all of us who believe in Christ are priests and kings in Christ,”779 Luther suffered a profound shock when peasants and Anabaptists rose up in rebellion against those who still asserted an exclusive title to priestly and princely status.
Luther’s vision of Christian liberty led to the far-reaching profanation of religious life. Marriage, for example, had been treated by the Church as a sacrament endowing a central moment in the life cycle of individuals and families with sacred significance. When marriage ceased to have sacramental significance, the legality of divorce was the logical consequence. Similarly, the reduction of every religious practice to the lowest common denominator of faith enhanced the status of every worldly calling. As Linde observes, even the faithful Christian housemaid who sweeps the floor or picks up the straw hats lying about a farmhouse out of love for her master and mistress performs good works.780 She need not enter a convent to bring her body into subjection that she “may the more sincerely and freely serve others”.781 If appearances count for nothing, if a nun is not necessarily more godly (indeed quite possibly less) than a maidservant, Luther’s faith community is confounded by an even more controversial conundrum: If outward confessions of Christian faith cannot be taken at face value, how can one distinguish between Christians and non-Christians?
Luther’s treatise on Christian liberty effectively abolished every visible marker of Christian identity. The visible church was no longer congruent with the invisible community of faith. “The true church was the community of those justified by faith and spread throughout the world, known with certainty only to God”.782 As the logic of that idea unfolded, religious affiliation lost its public significance. A confession of Christian faith no longer carried with it legally enforceable rights or legally enforceable duties.783 In early modern Germany, with its sizeable Jewish population and a still-powerful Roman Catholic Church in the hands of the Antichrist, ethno-religious competition remained an inescapable fact of life. However reluctantly, Luther was forced to come to grips not just with the social construction of church, state, and nation but with the need to establish visible boundaries both within Christendom and between Christians and non-Christians.
Conclusion
In response to Luther’s early attacks on the depravity of the papal church, the papal envoy Cajetan observed, “That would mean we must build a new church”. Late in life, “Luther was forced to acknowledge the fatal truth of that observation, for he recognized that he must busy himself with the construction of a visible institution” to house a Christian community of faith.784 Luther finally came to understand that, without such structures, German Christians would suffer in competition with both papists and Jews.
Earlier, in the “Freedom of a Christian Man,” Luther tried to rise above the carnal passions associated with ethno-religious rivalry; he attacked preachers who descended to “childish and effeminate nonsense” when they seek to turn “sympathy with Christ” into “anger against the Jews”.785 Mullett cites this passage as evidence of “a relatively enlightened phase in Luther’s attitude to the Jewish people”.786 It appears that Luther himself later came to regard his earlier position of the Jewish question not so much enlightened as naïve. Eventually he understood that the survival of Christian faith among the German people required more than the construction of a visible church; there was also a need for fences and boundaries to keep the faithful from straying into alien pastures.
By 1543, he was so tormented by with unrelenting competition from “these miserable and accursed” Jews who “do not cease to lure to themselves even us” that he published his now infamous pamphlet “On the Jews and their Lies”. In essence, this work makes a passionate call for the construction of clear ethno-religious borders between “our people” and the Jews, against whom he warned Christians to be on their guard.787 Needless to say, given the philo-semitic atmosphere which pervades the theological academy today, this pamphlet is treated by scholars with unmitigated distaste and disdain. In introducing a short extract of the book, Timothy Lull assures his readers that it is a marginal work which serves only to tarnish Luther’s reputation and richly deserves to have been “officially disavowed by Lutherans worldwide”.788 A more judicious scholar might see this treatise on the Jews as a teachable moment for both Luther and his readers. Here Luther confesses that the freedom of Christian men has been put at risk by the confrontation between the practitioners of an age-old and highly refined Jewish ethno-theology and their woefully undeveloped, unprepared, and guilt-ridden Christian counterparts. That one-sided competition between an unapologetically particularistic Jewish ethno-theology and a vision of Christian liberty driven to deny its ethno-religious roots continues even now at the close of the long Jewish century.789
8: Postscript on Luther
I studied THL 132 The European Reformations by distance from St Mark’s Theological College in Canberra, an Anglican institution affiliated with CSU. My first assignment, a primary source study of Luther’s Von der Freiheit eines Christenmensch, was supposed to be around 750 words in length. In fact, not counting notes, my answers to the four set questions totalled 1389 words. The lecturer, Dr Michael Gladwin, awarded it a grade of DI 78.
The second assignment was set as a short essay of 1250 words. My submission was actually 2369 words. But the lecturer made no objection to the excess word count in either of my two assignments on Luther. On the contrary, he criticized both papers for not dealing with certain issues with “more depth and breadth” and not providing sufficient “evidence…in places”. Dr Gladwin made even sharper criticisms of the second essay, charging that the “focus digressed from key issues in answering the essay question”. He suggested that my “scholarly interests [in ethno-theology] risk under-emphasising some key reasons for [the] controversy” surrounding Luther’s pamphlet. Accordingly, he gave the paper a lowly CR 65 grade.
On receiving this grade, I wearily prepared myself to descend, yet again, into the academic trenches, this time to defend my interpretation of the controversy still swirling around Luther’s understanding of Christian freedom. I composed and sent off the following response to Dr Gladwin’s assessment of the second Luther essay:
As you might imagine I was somewhat surprised and definitely disappointed to receive no more than a CR 65 grade for the “[s]hort essay” on Luther. I was particularly disturbed by your suggestion that I “seem to have digressed into a discussion of ethno-theology that does not allow [me] to give adequate attention to several key reasons for why Luther’s treatise was controversial (i.e. the focus of the essay question)”. Accordingly, you criticize my failure to say more about “sola fide as the fulcrum of Luther’s thought and action”. Similarly, you believe I should have highlighted “Luther’s controversial departure from an Augustinian framework in interpreting ‘justification’ as God ‘declaring a person to be righteous’…as distinguished from sanctification”. In response, may I observe that you do not allow for the possibility that the stated premise for such criticisms is itself highly controversial?
Outside the establishment circle
of the “more specialist Reformation scholars [who] could have kept [me] more on track in answering the essay question,” not everyone reading Martin Luther’s 1520 trilogy in the original German doubts that those works were inspired by a fiercely passionate German ethno-patriotism. You, on the other hand, maintain that “[a]lthough the ethnic and national dimensions of Luther’s writings were important, there appears to be an over-emphasis on them in [my] discussion”. You assert that “[a]t the heart of Luther’s theology is not the German nation but a transcendent kingdom of God — a theologia crucia”. Your remarks reflect an apparent scholarly consensus “that Luther’s was primarily a religious movement”. This view takes as settled an issue that turns out to be very much up for grabs. It has been said that this received orthodoxy is grounded less in solid scholarly evidence than “in a desire to ‘rehabilitate’ Luther in light of his use and abuse by the National Socialist regime for propaganda purposes”.790
Indeed, the idea that such politically correct motivations may be at work is confirmed by your own observation that “Reformation scholars such as Alister McGrath and Hans Hillerbrand note the difficulty of drawing any continuous line between Luther and the Holocaust”. This remark follows your suggestion that Luther’s pamphlet On the Jews and their Lies was written as a Christian not as a German ethno-nationalist. Now while it is true that when Luther “attacks the Jews he still largely attacks them as a Christian” but this assessment must be balanced “with his understanding that the Jews seemed to consider themselves a separate people” characterized by an overweening cultural arrogance towards Luther’s own Volk. The references to “wir deutschen” [we Germans] found so frequently in “Luther’s writings and conversations” typically exist “in contrast with other groups and communities,” most controversially in his discussions of the Jewish question.791
Dissident Dispatches Page 42
