Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
out and deal with the core of our Christian doctrine, wherever it may be found throughout the Bible. And the core is this: that without any merit, as a gift of God’s pure grace in Christ, we attain righteousness, life, and salvation.16
That was the message: the Gospel, the good news of Christ crucified and risen. The reason he called the Epistle of James straw was that for all its earnest moralizing “it contains not a syllable about Christ.”
This is why, at Worms, Luther said his conscience was captive to the Word of God, rather than to the Bible. The two were not quite the same. John’s Gospel teaches that Jesus Christ himself is the Word of God made human. The Bible, Luther argued, was the same Word of God “enlettered”, clothed in a body of ink and pulped rag.17 Therefore much of its content was incidental and unimportant. If that included some factual errors or contradictions, they did not matter any more than the fit of Jesus’ clothing. The message was what counted.
Luther used his Bible to fight his battles, and did so with relish, but before he was a brawler, he was a lover. The Bible had taught him about his beloved, and so he treasured it as a love letter. He understood it through the prism of that love. Everything that could not be read through this prism was unimportant. The Bible was not to be analysed like a scholarly text but to be gazed at like a great work of art.18 This was the only way that the Word of God could speak to your soul, and this was why every outside authority had to be rejected. Like that of a great work of art, the Bible’s power was to Luther self-evident. Unless, impossibly, you could persuade him that he had not seen what he had seen, there was nothing more to be said. The difficulty, inescapable after Worms, is that not everyone who gazes on a great work of art sees the same message.
Although Luther was allowed to leave Worms in safety, he was merely given a head start. For the rest of his life, he was a wanted man, and to the end of his days he was conscious of the Diet’s still-active condemnation hanging over him. The immediate effect was that halfway home he was kidnapped on the road by what seemed to be a band of brigands. His companions were aghast, but Luther had been warned to expect it. The “kidnappers” worked for his protector, Elector Frederick. They spirited him away to the Wartburg castle, near Eisenach, where he remained in hiding for nearly a year. His captors took elaborate steps to conceal his whereabouts, even spreading rumours that he had fled to Bohemia.19 He changed his monk’s habit for the clothes of a country knight and grew his hair and beard: a disguise, but also an assertion of the Christian liberty he preached. Yet, as he joked, in his confinement he was now more truly a monk than ever. He did not waste his time in captivity; he translated the New Testament into German, among other projects. But he chafed. In the first few weeks he was “drunk with leisure”.20 Soon he was brooding over what was happening in his unexpected absence.
Luther was already displaying what would become an enduring feature of Protestantism: a queasy mixture of humility and arrogance. The humility was real. Luther knew that he was the worst of sinners. He begged his followers to call themselves Christians, not “Lutherans”:
What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone. . . . How then should I, poor stinking maggot-fodder that I am, come to have men call the children of Christ by my wretched name?
He denied that his movement’s success was his own doing. In 1522, he gave this account of how it happened:
I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends . . . the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses on it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.21
Vintage Luther, including the beer. But for all the humility, there are some bold claims here. His teaching is Christ’s teaching, and he writes God’s Word. Increasingly, Luther saw himself not merely as a theologian but as a prophet, called by God to overturn the papacy. For one obscure professor to mobilize an unprecedented mass movement, to defy all the forces of Church and empire, and to feel them crumbling at his touch – this was heady stuff. And yet his confinement had sidelined him. His books still churned out, but there was a dangerous vacuum – especially back in Wittenberg, the eye of the storm.
Wittenberg was by now dominated by Luther’s allies. The most important of them was Philip Melanchthon, acknowledged on all sides to be one of the most brilliant minds of his age. The unpronounceable name is a sign of the times. He was born with the solid German surname of Schwartzerd, but Johannes Reuchlin, who happened to be his great-uncle, suggested he adopt the Renaissance fashion of translating his name into Greek. In 1518, Reuchlin also secured the job of professor of Greek at Wittenberg for his nephew. Luther was immediately in awe of Melanchthon, who, at only twenty-one, was thirteen years his junior. He claimed that he had never written a book as good as Melanchthon’s Commonplaces, published in 1521. It was Melanchthon who fashioned Luther’s vivid, chaotic theological insights into a coherent system. But while the two men were always close, Luther’s faith in his younger colleague was shaken during his confinement in 1521–22. Melanchthon had not kept a grip on Wittenberg. Where Luther was immovably stubborn, Melanchthon was calm and reasonable – to the point, his enemies muttered, of timidity. Luther compared their respective styles by saying that Melanchthon pricked their enemies with pins, while he himself stabbed them with pikes.22
If Melanchthon was timid, others in Wittenberg had the opposite problem. After Luther’s condemnation at Worms, some of his fellow-travellers began to take matters into their own hands. In September 1521, Luther’s fellow Augustinian monks changed the way they were celebrating the Catholic Mass, the most prominent daily symbol of the theology they now questioned, eventually rewriting the service in German rather than Latin. Some began to abandon their cloisters. In January 1522, the university’s chancellor, Andreas Karlstadt, even got married, in defiance of the long-standing Catholic requirement that clergy remain celibate.
A nervous Elector Frederick called for restraint, but these new radicals were only just beginning. In December 1521, three men from the mining town of Zwickau arrived in Wittenberg: a former student and two weavers. They claimed that God had called them to be prophets, predicted the imminent end of the world, and demanded further dramatic reforms. In particular, they criticized the practice of baptizing infants, which, as they rightly said, has no direct biblical basis. Meanwhile, Karlstadt and his allies were demanding the destruction of Catholic images, altars, and relics in the town’s churches, so as to “cleanse” the buildings of idolatry and fit them for reformed worship. This was controversial in itself, but when the elector forbade it and some of the more excitable townsfolk started smashing images on their own initiative, it looked less like holiness and more like rioting.23
Luther was horrified. Partly this was because, for all his spiritual radicalism, he was deeply socially conservative. His instinct was to obey rightful authorities, to respect social hierarchies, and to preserve good order. For him, Christian freedom meant inner liberation, not political upheaval. He had defied established authorities, but he was a professor and had in any case been called by God. Self-appointed prophets like the Zwickauers and the iconoclasts had no excuse.
More significantly, Luther hated these impatient reformers’ ideas. He wanted to set Christians free from rules and laws, but Karlstadt and the Zwickauers were burdening Christian consciences with new rules about baptism and images. They had missed the point. Luther wanted not to replace bad laws with good ones but to lift believers above the realm of law altogether, into the light of the Gospel of love. For him, these law-mongers were Schwärmer, “fanatics”. It was a capacious category, which expanded over the coming decades to include almost everyone Luther disagreed with.
So in March 1522, Luther decided to risk returning to Wittenberg to take charge. Symbolically, he arrived in his monk’s habit, shaved and tonsured. For a time, it worked. Karlstadt was reined in and then exiled to an obscure country parish. Luther’s success in whipping his recalcitrant colleagues into line only confirmed his sense of his unique calling.
Yet while Luther could impose order on one town, the wider movement he had sparked was now beyond anyone’s control. The early 1520s in Germany were revolutionary years. Priests, printers, peddlers, even (shockingly) women could all make themselves