ABSTRACT
The 95 Theses of 1517 were to springboard Martin Luther into a world of controversy and extreme peril over the next three years, leading to his excommunication by the papacy in 1520 and his criminalisation in the Holy Roman Empire by the Diet of Worms in 1521. These were also the critical years in which Luther’s role altered irretrievably from that of a would-be reformer of the Catholic Church to a declared foe of that institution, as it refused to heed his call to bring its beliefs and practice into line with the doctrines he had been uncovering in his lectures on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans. In 1517, however, Luther was not yet the fully-fledged reformer
of later years, and the 95 Theses did not arise out of the doctrine of passive justification by faith alone as it was subsequently to be consolidated. Luther was now fully aware that forgiveness came via ‘the grace of God and the piety of the cross’. At the same time, however, there was emphasis in the Theses on the responsibility of the individual to take charge of his or her being forgiven as well as stress on the sinner’s struggle to be contrite. As we saw in the previous chapter, although by as early as 1516 Luther had assembled the basic intellectual presuppositions for the doctrine of justification by faith, within the 95 Theses themselves, as a ‘pastoral’ document, there remained a focus on the sinner’s repentance as an ingredient in his or her being pardoned, an echo of the later medieval concept of quod in se est, the formula according to which God responded to the individual’s efforts to be contrite
that we considered in Chapter 2 (‘Luther the monk’). Thus the intellectual atmosphere of the 95 Theses was still suffused with insistence on the penitent’s indispensable repentance, albeit not as a programme of appeasing good works, but as an abased and contrite state of heart and mind, to which God would react in delivering His forgiveness: ‘the whole life of the faithful should be repentance’, as the first of the Theses proclaimed. In a subsequent period, and crucially in the course of a disputation in which he was engaged in Heidelberg in 1518, Luther was to make passive justification by faith, rather than active exertion to gain contrition, the inspiration of his mounting critique of Catholicism and its ways. For the time being, though, Luther was still emphatically a
Catholic reformer, operating through the proper channels to suppress an abuse of doctrine and practice. In the period following the drawing up of the 95 Theses, we see him in the role of a kind of appellant with a grievance, bringing it to the attention of everwidening circles of tribunals which might hear his case. He first launched his ‘appeal’ with his episcopal superiors, then began to take it before the bar of public opinion via the press; the papacy and its representatives soon became involved, along with his Augustinian religious order, as well as academia. He also presented his case to be judged by the verdicts of the councils of the Church. He turned to his ruler, Elector Frederick (via Frederick’s secretary-cum-chaplain, Georg Spalatin (1484-1545)), and then appealed to the whole ruling class of Germany, both in his pamphlet of 1520, the ‘Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate’, and in his personal appearance before the Diet and the Emperor at Worms in 1521. Finally, he was forced back on the jury of his own conscience, instructed by the word of God in the Bible. In the very first phase of that sequence, Luther was appealing
his case to his religious superiors in the German episcopate. On 31 October 1517 he sent the 95 Theses, possibly with an early version of what became a published ‘Sermon on Indulgences and Grace’ and with a deferential cover letter, to Archbishop Albrecht. In the letter he called on the prelate to withdraw from the indulgences his endorsement, which Luther professed to believe was claimed ‘certainly without your full awareness and consent, Most
Reverend Father’. What we may term Luther’s appeal to the episcopate continued to 5 November, when he sent another copy of the Theses to the diocesan responsible for his immediate area, Hieronymus Schulze, bishop of Brandenburg, who was initially sympathetic to their contents. Luther followed this up in February of the following year with a letter to Bishop Schulze which portrayed its sender as a hesitant scholar reluctantly prevailed upon by others to invite learned men to take part in a quiet discussion on an issue of the ‘new and unprecedented doctrines’ of indulgences. This was a matter, though, that would in the end have to remain in the care of ‘holy church to determine’. Yet even while these apparently modest addresses were being made, Luther’s appeal was being broadened out in a wider dimension altogether, that of public opinion, as the Theses were run off presses and made available in German and Latin versions, projecting Luther into a nation-wide literary controversy of which he was to show himself a master. He also consolidated his published output with the best-selling ‘Sermon on Indulgences and Grace’ of February 1518.1
Whether or not, as he professed in letters of March and April 1518, Luther was coerced into and genuinely distressed at the process – ‘causing me regrets … not pleased with [the Theses’] wide dissemination … forced to prepare proofs’ – he was being inexorably caught up in a media campaign. Tetzel, awarded an honorary doctorate in January, marked the occasion by publishing a defence of indulgences in a set of theses ghostwritten for him. These offered a critical commentary on and rebuttal of the clauses of Luther’s original; they restated the need for contrition within the sacrament of penance, but they also confidently reaffirmed the function of indulgences in discharging penalties imposed on sins after they had been forgiven. In the new year following the posting of the 95 Theses in
Wittenberg, as excitement over his case mounted, Luther began preparing his ‘Resolutions Concerning the Ninety-Five Theses’. His ‘appeal’ was now inescapably becoming involved with the press and public opinion. In March 1518 he reported that the redoubtable disputant Johannes Maier von Eck, whom he described as a ‘man of signal and talented learning and learned talent’, had, in a set of observations on the 95 Theses entitled Obelisci (‘Obelisks’), denounced him as a heretic, a disciple, in fact, of the
early-fifteenth-century Czech dissident John Hus, who was executed by the Church in 1415. In his reply, Asterisci (‘Asterisks’), Luther vilified Eck as a sterile Scholastic, bereft of Scripture. While Luther was thus extending the range and deepening the
intensity of the debate over indulgences, the Church’s authorities went on the offensive against him. In an initial response to the 95 Theses, Archbishop von Hohenzollern opened what was known as an ‘inhibitory’, or silencing, process against the ‘presumptuous’ Luther. However, the Theses had raised the issue of principle of the ultimate authority that the pope in Rome claimed from Christ to issue indulgences, and so the papacy had to be involved in the matter. Thus in December 1517, the archbishop sent the incriminating Luther file, consisting of the 95 Theses, the earlier 97 Theses against Scholastic theology and other materials to Rome, where Pope Leo X (r. 1513-21) read the 95 Theses. It was next decided in Rome that the appropriate vehicle for controlling the protester was his Augustinian Order, whose superior, Gabriele della Volta (1468-1537), sent instructions to Staupitz to bring the errant friar to book.
