The basis for that claim is itself a work of scholarly substance despite coming to my attention as the product of an internet search for material on Martin Luther and German ethno-nationalism. The search engine’s first offering was a sixty-six-page senior thesis written by Stephen M Borthwick, a graduate student at the Catholic University of America. The paper is entitled “Brother of Germany: Martin Luther and German Nationalism, 1516–1546” and a copy is attached herewith. It is well worth reading. Borthwick sets out to investigate whether “Luther’s views on Germany so significantly influenced his religion and his desire for reform that the Lutheran reformation was primarily a national, or at the very least German, event”. He concludes that Luther was not merely the “deeply pious and otherworldly” monk who defied the Pope under the spiritual banner of sola fide. Luther was also “deeply nationalist and grounded in the reality of his time”. The “fiery passion” animating Luther’s faith “drove him to support the German nation against what he saw as inherently evil: the Papacy and its supporters”.792
For my purposes here, Borthwick provides ample support for the basic premise of my paper; namely, that the German nation was at the heart of Luther’s theology. In the words of Acts 17:26–27, Luther hoped to find the Lord by groping towards the light shining in and through the spirit of the German Volk. I submit that Borthwick demonstrates that Luther was “a warrior for unity of Volk, purity of spirit, and preservation of authority”. There is abundant evidence that Luther sought something more or other than a transcendent, heavenly kingdom of God. “He strove for a German Christianity and opposed rule of Germans not by corrupt tyrants but Italian tyrants, he juxtaposed the pure and simple Germans with the worldly and arrogant foreigners [not least of all the Jews], and he reprimanded the peasants for disrupting a political order ordained by God”.793
In Borthwick’s view, “Luther was a nationalist entirely of his own age”. He therefore supports my view that Luther’s Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen should be interpreted within the context provided by his life-long efforts to create a German Christian ethno-theology. Certainly, “he saw the German Volk and preached God to them as a means to cleanse them of Roman corruption”. Had Luther not been thwarted by the Spanish Catholic emperor, he “would likely have been instrumental in the founding of a unified German church in an age when legitimate rule still depended on God, not the people”. In other words, Martin Luther was a “primordial” nationalist who “gave rise to a nationalism of an ethnicity and a nation before there was a state to legalize this reality”.
Certainly, a reading of Borthwick’s article should suggest that your interpretation of Luther’s writings (as the expression of a purely religious theologia crusis) is not the only legitimate scholarly approach. Borthwick provides at least one respectable academic source for the view that Luther sought to re-form the Church not as a transcendent Eternal City but rather into “a mighty fortress: a German Berg free of foreign influence and steeped in the simplicity of Luther’s lieben Deudschen”.794 The fact that an ethno-theological interpretation of Luther is not widely shared should not be grounds for penalizing my essay. It is just possible that such a hermeneutic strategy may shed new light on why Luther’s tract on Christian freedom has been so controversial.
The question ought to be: Is there evidence that Luther’s writings laid the foundations, however imperfectly, for a German Christian ethno-theology? It should not matter that such an interpretation does not conform to the conventional wisdom current among academics committed to a deracinated theologia crusis. That is the essence of controversy.
A little over three hours later I received the following e-mail message from Dr Gladwin:
Dear Drew
Thanks for your email. I’m sorry to hear of your disappointment,
I think a key issue here is one of due emphasis and weight in weighing up why Freedom of a Christian was controversial. As I note in my comments, I agree that growing nationalist sentiment plays a part, not least in relation to the claims of the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor. It’s important to note, however, that Luther’s three major reforming treatises of 1520 were a direct appeal to the German people to exercise initiative in reforming the Church and its teaching and practices. There is also an overwhelming scholarly consensus (among many of the world’s leading Reformation scholars who have spent decades studying Luther’s life and writings) that Luther’s soteriological innovation and its implications for the authority of the papacy and its economy of salvation and piety were crucial reasons for the tract’s controversial nature. The later statements of the RCC on justification at Trent, after all, were a direct response to Luther’s controversial soteriology and attest to the controverted nature of his ideas. And it was Freedom of a Christian, more than any treatise before that time, that set out the solafidian doctrine at the heart of Luther’s reform agenda. The essay question is concerned with determining why that work specifically was so controversial.
Am happy to discuss further, but I’m going to need more than one graduate student’s non-peer-reviewed, internet-published thesis to be persuaded.
Best
Michael
Apparently, where there is “an overwhelming scholarly consensus (among many of the world’s leading Reformation scholars who have spent decades studying Luther’s life and writings)” there must also be a right answer and a wrong answer to the question: Why was the Freedom of a Christian Man controversial? The wrong answer is obviously the one which dares to suggest that Luther simply took it for granted that Christian liberty belonged to Germans as Germans. His faith in Christ was grounded in his membership in a German Volk or ethno-nation which did not yet look to the State as the incarnation of its collective identity. It may be that such a stateless vision of German Christian ethno-nationalism is even more dangerous to the powers-that-be today than it was in the sixteenth century.
One wonders, therefore, what grade Mr Borthwick received on his senior thesis from the Department of History at the Catholic University of America or whether his supervisor, unlike Dr Gladwin, bothered to read or even glance at it. Here in Australia at least, intellectual curiosity does not appear to be the strong suit among the disingenuous white liberals who inhabit the theological academy. But, of course, the roots of such intellectual repression extend far beyond Australia. Ethno-nationalism among white Christian groups or communities anywhere in the Western world is always subject to suspicion in the eyes of those who control the media and the universities. But the spectre of German ethno-nationalism, in particular is one which calls for extra vigilance wherever and whenever signs of its revival appear on the horizon. Hence any interpretation of Luther’s writings which appears to bestow academic legitimacy much less theological authority upon a German Christian doctrine of the ethno-nation is strictly verboten and banished to the darkest corners of the internet.
A week or so after receiving Dr Gladwin’s polite but peremptory brush-off, I came across an indisputably authoritative work on the symbiotic relationship between German nationalism and the Lutheran reformation. In fact, AG Dickens, the author of The German Nation and Martin Luther also happens to have written one of the textbooks set in THL 132. That being so, I found it more than passing strange that Dr Gladwin made no reference to Dickens’ work on the German Reformation in class, in the course notes, or in his critical comments on my essay. Much struck by this omission, I sent the following e-mail to Dr Gladwin:
In your critique of my short essay on Luther you fault me for straying off the track marked out by “an overwhelming scholarly consensus (among…leading Reformation scholars…) that Luther’s soteriological innovation and its implications for the authority of the papacy…were crucial reasons for the tract’s controversial nature”. You cite the presumptive authority of such an academic consensus to validate your claim that “[a]t the heart of Luther’s theology is not the German nation but a transcendent kingdom of God — a theologia crucia”. But, if there is no such monolithic consensu
s, it may not be unreasonable to look for the deepest roots of the controversy surrounding Luther’s treatise on Christian liberty in a broad popular movement which had long sought “to stir up a German nationalism which was predominantly anti-Italian and anti-papal”.795 I submit that unimpeachable scholarly support for that proposition does in fact exist.
You have rejected the challenge to the conventional wisdom implicit in Stephen M Borthwick’s senior thesis on Martin Luther and German nationalism, observing that it lacks the academic prestige and scholarly legitimacy attached to peer review together with publication in a recognized journal. Now, while I was impressed by the cogency of Borthwick’s portrayal of Luther as a “primordial” German nationalist, I have my own bone to pick with the execution of his project. He (and his thesis supervisor) let his readers down by not including in his bibliography the single most authoritative study in English of the nationalist humanists who “acted as midwives to the Lutheran Reformation” and the popular patriotism driving Luther’s reform agenda.
AG Dickens, the author of the work in question, happens to have written one of the textbooks set in THL132; namely, The English Reformation. I suggest that Dickens’ book entitled The German Nation and Martin Luther provides powerful support for the premise of my essay on Luther; namely, that the controversy surrounding the Freedom of a Christian Man may be discussed, legitimately and fruitfully, in the context of Luther’s life-long effort to develop a German ethno-theology.
Moreover, Dickens provides ample grounds for questioning the centrality of the theology of justification to the history of the reform movement led by Luther. Dickens contends that while the “perilous libertarianism of 1520” played its part “in the slow emancipation of European society from its long phase of clerical domination,” one “may still ask whether this precise theological basis, even this original and fruitful theology of Justification, had any historically indispensable character”. Indeed, Dickens doubts “whether the mass of [Luther’s] lay followers during the early years had grasped more than a bunch of religious slogans”.796 In fact, even later when the papal “nuncio Van der Vorst went around Germany asking people what they believed to be the main controversial issues, he came back with nine points, amongst which Justification by Faith did not appear at all!” Dickens concludes that “Luther the theologian never looked like becoming a one-man Council of Trent for the Protestant half of Europe”. The influence he wielded and the controversies he provoked through his pamphleteering depended instead upon “the surge of forces within the [German] nation…which elevated him to one the rare titanic roles in western history”.797
In Dickens’ view, it was not “Luther’s own thinking…which set the stage for a new era” but “an obscurer turmoil of prejudices, emotions, aspirations, compounded of spiritual and material elements” among “the millions who then formed the German nation. The nation is both hero and anti-hero of this story, and it is even more complicated than the conventional hero, Martin Luther”. Dickens shows “that Luther, for all his obstinacy, was a respondent to forces, as well as a promoter and creator of forces”.798
Even Luther’s “theology of the Cross” was rooted deeply in the religious history of the German nation. “For him one of its main sources lay in the familiar writings of the German mystics,” including the late fourteenth century Theologia Germanica written by a priest of the Teutonic Order. In 1516 Luther edited and published this work along with an appreciative introduction. Luther’s reception of this long-established theological school emphasised its German rather than its mystical character. As you note, Luther made “a direct appeal to exercise initiative in reforming the Church and its teachings and practices”. But Luther was not a mystic longing to enter into “a transcendent kingdom of God” divorced from worldly affairs. Luther was “involved, not withdrawn; mentally as well as physically, he has left the monastery and rejoined the human race”.799 He strove to create a national church understood as a community of believers united in and through the organic ties of language, blood, and faith (i.e. Volkskirche). Naturally enough, therefore, Luther’s German Bible translated ecclesia using völkisch terms such as Gemeinde (community), Gemeine (congregation) and Versammlung (assembly).800
Earlier generations of historians recognized Luther as “the German prophet par excellence, his mission covering Germany, his function that of a prophet to the Germans,” a view which “remains far from inappropriate” according to Dickens. Indeed, Dickens ranks Luther as Germany’s “major prophet”.801 It is not unreasonable, therefore, to characterize Luther’s theological writings as the consummation of a German ethno-patriotic movement which developed gradually over the two centuries prior to the Reformation. But, prophet or not, Luther could not foresee the future in which his “brave words on spiritual liberty uttered in 1520” would be belied in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg which “finally sanctioned the wholesale forcing of consciences by the threat of exile”. Similarly, as I argued in my essay, Luther in 1520 did not grasp the profoundly de-stabilizing potential of a Christian liberty which failed to establish secure boundaries, internally between social estates, and externally between nations. Early on in the Peasants War and then progressively later in life Luther himself came to recognize the dangers inherent in his early vision of Christian freedom. The limitations of his anti-institutional libertarianism became particularly controversial — even in his own mind — when he could no longer ignore the intense inter-ethnic rivalry between Christians and Jews.
Your critique of my essay downplays the national and ethnic character of the powerfully anti-Jewish rhetoric on display in Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies. You suggest that the conflict there was a purely religious dispute arising out of rabbinic exegesis of Scripture and the Jewish rejection of Jesus. Unfortunately, Dickens has little to say on that issue. But my reading of Von den Juden und ihren Lügen reveals ample evidence that Luther saw the Jews as a highly ethnocentric, “beschnittende Volk” (circumcised people) who claimed that by virtue of their “edle Blut” (noble blood) they were entitled to flout the law of God by lying, robbing, and injuring the “verfluchten Gojim” (damned Gentiles) whenever and however they pleased. Not the least of the injuries inflicted upon German Christians by the Jews was the wealth expropriated by the latter through usurious and exploitative business practices.802 This was no merely doctrinal dispute over scriptural exegesis; it reflected a deep-seated ethnic rivalry. Luther was forced to think deeply about how German communities of Christian believers could protect and preserve themselves, both spiritually and materially, in a no-holds-barred competition for resources with Jews.
I hope that this submission will persuade you to reconsider the foundation premise of your critique of my Luther essay.
The next day I received an email from Dr Gladwin in which he assured me that he was “certainly happy to consider the issue further” by looking at my submission “when time permits (i.e. dust settles from marking and wrapping up two subjects)”. He also expressed interest in knowing what I made of Colin Kidd’s book on The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). This query took me by surprise since I had never mentioned or cited the book in anything written for THL132. I wondered how he knew that I had read the book. But I responded by mentioning that I had been very much struck by Kidd’s tripartite distinction between race-as-biology, race-as-ethnicity, and race-as-theology, so much so that it inspired me to write a two-part article “Three-Dimensional Man: Race and the Trinitarian Theology of Christian Nationhood” [see above] for The Occidental Quarterly. I attached a copy of the first part of that article to my reply to Dr Gladwin which he said he looked forward to reading “when time permits’. I received no further communication directly from Dr Gladwin until three weeks later when he emailed the result of my final essay on the English Reformation, a paper meant to be about 1500 words in length (since THL132 is a first-year undergraduate course) but which weighe
d in at around 3700 words.
9: Why Did the English Church Break with the Papacy?
Introduction
The proximate cause of the break between the Roman Catholic papal monarchy and the English Church was the decision by Henry VIII to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon. In order to secure that divorce, the English king had to assert his own Supreme Headship over the Church in England. In doing so, Henry set in motion a course of events causing bishops, priests, and laity of the English Church to follow his lead not just by abjuring the formal legal jurisdiction of the papacy but also — much more dangerously — by attacking the theological foundations and moral legitimacy of papal authority.
As a consequence, sixteenth century English Christians were swept up in the wider European movement known as the Protestant Reformation. Their descendants still struggle to explain the causes and consequences of the reformation of the English church. Not surprisingly, there are sharp differences between Protestant and Catholic interpretations of the English Reformation. A third, Orthodox Christian, perspective looks back to the Great Schism of the eleventh century to explain why the English Church itself broke with the papacy almost four centuries later. Clearly, history and theology are tightly interwoven in the historiography of the English Reformation; so much so that even accounts of the period offered by professionally agnostic academic historians align themselves naturally with one or other of the Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox interpretive strategies.
Protestant and (Neo-Protestant) Interpretations
Dissident Dispatches Page 43
