The Endurance of Luther's 1517 Reformation

Political and Secular Considerations Enabled Successful Reform

© Michael Streich

Nov 23, 2008

By 1517 German princes were ready to embrace a local movement that, while begun as a debate on Church practices and beliefs, encompassed elements of political reform.

The start of the Protestant Reformation is usually dated to October 1517 when the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, published his Ninety-Five Theses, a series of statements meant for debate and prompted by the sale of indulgences. Luther, a professor of Scripture at Wittenberg University, had become increasingly uneasy with the wholesaling of indulgences, notably by the Dominican Johaan Tetzel. Unlike past attempts at church reform under Jan Huss and John Wycliffe, Luther’s Reformation established a permanent movement, splitting Christendom in half, and was supported by secular authority.

Of Politics and Piety

North German nobility in the early Sixteen Century were beginning to explore greater means of territorial autonomy both from Church and Emperor. Luther’s hearing at the 1521 Diet of Worms coincided with a more general meeting attended by various ambassadors addressing taxation issues. Luther’s own patron, Saxony’s Frederick the Wise, protected him as public opinion swelled in support of Luther’s refusal to recant. Excommunicated in early 1521, Luther had already written several documents further identifying crucial issues of Reform, including The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Christian Liberty, and An Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of Christendom.

Although Luther’s message of reform was theological (his first Theses point had stated, “when Christ our Lord says ‘repent’, He means that the entire life of believers should be one of repentance.”), many saw the growing movement in secular terms and sought to incorporate everyday grievances. The 1524 Peasant Revolt was caused, at least in part, by a misunderstanding of Luther’s message. Luther rejected the goals of the revolt and supported the nobility. In his Commentary on Romans, Luther writes that, “The Apostle therefore commands that Christians should honor the power of governments and not use their liberty of grace as a cloak for their maliciousness.” (Chapter 13) Luther rendered unto Caesar those things that were Caesar’s and rendered unto God those things that were His, although he viewed God’s omnipotence as a totality that included human government.

An Enduring Movement

By the time Luther died in 1546, the Council of Trent had begun the task of reclaiming lapsed Catholicism but the Reformation was solidly entrenched. Leaders after Luther such as John Calvin would further the movement and in England an unhappily married Tudor king would divorce Catholicism from his realm purely for personal, political reasons. Far from promoting authentic Christianity, the Reformation would spawn bloody wars of religion, notably in France, and culminate in the hellish Thirty Years’ War. From those turmoils new Christian groups would emerge, espousing many of the reforms Luther had advocated, chief among which may have been access to a vernacular Bible. Reformation beliefs may have enabled the evolution of secular considerations of governmental reform such as Resistance Theory that ultimately contributed to early notions of constitutionalism.

One long term legacy of 1517 was the freedom to think and to discourse, whether on religious or secular themes. Carlo Ginzburg’s unfortunate miller never had this opportunity (The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller). In this, Luther freed people from rigidly strident Christianity and began a process that would eventually separate church and state. The Reformation as an enduring movement proved beneficial to both.

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