what did martin luther's 95 theses cause

The 95 Theses: A reader’s guide

by Kevin Armbrust

October 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. Yet it is not the anniversary of any great statement Luther made as a reformer or in front of any court. There was no fiery and resounding speech given or dramatic showdown with the pope. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted the “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the church door in a small city called Wittenberg, Germany. This rather mundane academic document contained 95 theses for debate. Luther was a professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, and he was permitted to call for public theological debate to discuss ideas and interpretations as he desired.

Yet this debate was not merely academic for Luther. According to a letter he wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz explaining the posting of the 95 Theses, Luther also desired to debate the concerns in the Theses for the sake of conscience.

Luther’s short preface explains:

“Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology and regularly appointed Lecturer on these subjects at that place. He requests that those who cannot be present to debate orally with us will do so by letter.”

The original text of the 95 Theses was written in Latin, since that was the academic language of Luther’s day. Luther’s theses were quickly translated into German, published in pamphlet form and spread throughout Germany.

Though English translations are readily available , many have found the 95 Theses difficult to read and comprehend. The short primer that follows may assist to highlight some of the theses and concepts Luther wished to explore.

Repentance and forgiveness dominate the content of the Theses. Since the question for Luther was the effectiveness of indulgences, he drove the discussion to the consideration of repentance and forgiveness in Christ. The first three theses address this:

1. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [MATT. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

3. Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.

The pope and the Church cannot cause true repentance in a Christian and cannot forgive the sins of one who is guilty before Christ. The pope can only forgive that which Christ forgives. True repentance and eternal forgiveness come from Christ alone.

Luther identifies indulgences as a doctrine invented by man, since there is no scriptural promise or command for indulgences. Although Luther stops short of entirely condemning indulgences in the Theses, he nonetheless argues that the sale of indulgences and the trust in indulgences for salvation condemns both those who teach such notions and those who trust in them.

27. They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.

28. Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned, together with their teachers.

God’s grace comes not through indulgences but through Christ. All Christians receive the blessings of God apart from indulgence letters.

36. Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters.

37. Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.

If Christians are going to spend money on something other than supporting their families, they should take care of the poor instead of buying indulgences.

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.

The second half of the 95 Theses concentrates on the preaching of the true Word of the Gospel. Luther states that the teaching of indulgences should be lessened so that there might be more time for the proclamation of the true Gospel.

62. The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.

63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last [MATT. 20:16].

The Gospel of Christ is the true power for salvation (ROM. 1:16), not indulgences or even the power of the papal office.

76. We say on the contrary that papal indulgences cannot remove the very least of venial sins as far as guilt is concerned.

77. To say that even St. Peter, if he were now pope, could not grant greater graces is blasphemy against St. Peter and the pope.

78. We say on the contrary that even the present pope, or any pope whatsoever, has greater graces at his disposal, that is, the gospel, spiritual powers, gifts of healing, etc., as it is written in I Cor. 12[:28].

Preaching a false hope is really no hope at all. As a matter of fact, a false hope destroys and kills because it moves people away from Christ, where true salvation is found. The Gospel is found in Christ alone, which includes a cross and tribulations both large and small.

92. Away then with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Peace, peace,” and there is no peace! [JER. 6:14].

93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, “Cross, cross,” and there is no cross!

94. Christians should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, death, and hell;

95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace [ACTS 14:22].

Throughout the 95 Theses, Luther seeks to balance the role of the Church with the truth of the Gospel. Even as he desired to support the pope and his role in the Church, the false teaching of indulgences and the pope’s unwillingness to freely forgive the sins of all repentant Christians compelled him to speak up against these abuses.

Luther’s pastoral desire for all to trust in Christ alone for salvation drove him to post the 95 Theses. This same faith and hope sparked the Reformation that followed.

Dr. Kevin Armbrust is manager of editorial services for LCMS Communications. 

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11 thoughts on “the 95 theses: a reader’s guide”.

Thx. This article does clear up a number of difficulties in interpreting the drift & theme of the 95 thesis. The fact that he supports the pope’s office at this juncture is new to me.

Very useful as I prepare a Sunday School lesson. Thanks

As important as the 95 Theses were for the beginning of the Reformation, and since they are not specifically part of the Lutheran Confessions, are there any of the Theses that we Lutherans consider unimportant or would rather avoid, theologically speaking?

I wish Luther was here, maybe things would change in our country and bring more folks to Jesus .

“When our Lord and master Jesus Christ says, ‘Repent,’ he wills that the entire life of the Christian be one of repentance.”

This seemingly joyless statement is often quoted, less often explained, and easily misunderstood. Is Jesus calling for the main theme of Christian life to be, “I’m ashamed of my sin”?

The full sentence from Matthew 4:17 is, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” spoken when Jesus was beginning His ministry. This layman might paraphrase those words as, “Change your mindset, for divine authority is coming among you.” Indeed, when a very important person is coming to visit, we depart from business as usual, adjust our priorities, focus on careful preparation, and behave as befits the status of the visitor.

The word “repent” is recorded in Greek as “metanoeite”, which I understand to be not about remorse — not primarily about feelings at all — but about changing one’s mind or purpose.

The Christian life has a variety of themes, of which repentance is one. But repentance is not an end in itself. It is pivoting and changing course to pursue a direction that better fulfills God’s purposes as He gives the grace. For Jesus also willed “that you bear much fruit” (John 15:8) and “that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).

Could you explain number 93? I need this one explained. Jackie

Agreed. 93 is confusing.

In contrast to the false security of indulgences referenced in 92, number 93 references the preaching of true repentance. With true contrition and repentance over our sins, we Christians humble ourselves to the truth that we have earned our place on the cross as punishment and condemnation. But then we find the eternal surprise and wellspring of joy that our cross has been taken away from us and made Christ’s own. In exchange He gives us forgiveness, life and salvation!

Thank you, James Athey.

I myself did not fully understand this thesis yesterday, when I searched the Internet for an explanation of it. I found that I was not the only person who was confused by it. I also found that Luther explained it in a letter that he wrote to an Augustinian prior in 1516. Here is his explanation:

You are seeking and craving for peace, but in the wrong order. For you are seeking it as the world giveth, not as Christ giveth. Know you not that God is “wonderful among His saints,” for this reason, that He establishes His peace in the midst of no peace, that is, of all temptations and afflictions. It is said “Thou shalt dwell in the midst of thine enemies.” The man who possesses peace is not the man whom no one disturbs—that is the peace of the world; he is the man whom all men and all things disturb, but who bears all patiently, and with joy. You are saying with Israel, “Peace, peace,” and there is no peace. Learn to say rather with Christ: “The Cross, the Cross,” and there is no Cross. For the Cross at once ceases to be the Cross as soon as you have joyfully exclaimed, in the language of the hymn,

Blessed Cross, above all other, One and only noble tree.

It is posted here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/first_prin.iii.i.html

Magnificent!

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The Protestant Reformation, explained

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther changed Christianity — and the world.

by Tara Isabella Burton

This week, people across the world are celebrating Halloween. But Tuesday, many people of faith marked another, far less spooky, celebration. October 31 was the 500-year anniversary of the day Martin Luther allegedly nailed his 95 theses — objections to various practices of the Catholic Church — to the door of a German church. This event is widely considered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

The event was celebrated across Germany , including in Luther’s native Wittenberg (T-shirts for sale there proudly proclaim, “Protestant since 1517!”), as well as by Protestants of all denominations worldwide. As the inciting incident for the entire Reformation, Luther’s actions came to define the subsequent five centuries of Christian history in Western Europe and, later, America: a story of constant intra-Christian challenge, debate, and conflict that has transformed Christianity into the diffuse, fragmented, and diverse entity it is today.

This week, Twitter has been full of users discussing Reformation Day. Some have used the opportunity to post jokes or funny memes about their chosen Christian denomination. Others are debating Luther’s legacy, including discussing the degree to which he either created modern Christianity as we know it or heralded centuries of division within Christian communities.

While Reformation Day is celebrated annually among some Protestants, especially in Germany, the nature of this anniversary has brought debate over Luther and the Protestant Reformation more generally into the public sphere.

So what exactly happened in 1517, and why does it matter?

What started as an objection to particular corruptions morphed into a global revolution

While the Catholic Church was not the only church on the European religious landscape (the Eastern Orthodox Churches still dominated in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia), by the 16th century, it was certainly the most dominant. The church had a great deal of political as well as spiritual power; it had close alliances, for example, with many royal houses, as well as the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which at that time encompassed much of Central Europe, including present-day Germany. 

The church’s great power brought with it a fair degree of corruption. Among the most notable and controversial practices of that time was the selling of “indulgences.” For Catholics of that time, sin could be divided into two broad categories. “Mortal sin” was enough to send you to hell after death, while “venal sin” got you some years of purifying punishment in purgatory, an interim state between life on earth and the heavenly hereafter.

By the 16th century, the idea that you could purchase an indulgence to reduce your purgatorial debt had become increasingly widespread. Religious leaders who wanted to fund projects would send out “professional pardoners,” or quaestores, to collect funds from the general public. Often, the sale of indulgences exceeded the official parameters of church doctrine; unscrupulous quaestores might promise eternal salvation (rather than just a remission of time in purgatory) in exchange for funds, or threaten damnation to those who refused. Indulgences could be sold on behalf of departed friends or loved ones, and many indulgence salesmen used that pressure to great effect.

Enter Martin Luther. A Catholic monk in Wittenberg, Luther found himself disillusioned by the practices of the church he loved. For Luther, indulgences — and the church’s approach to sin and penance more generally — seemed to go against what he saw as the most important part of his Christian faith. If God really did send his only son, Jesus, to die on the cross for the sins of mankind, then why were indulgences even necessary? If the salvation of mankind had come through Jesus’s sacrifice, then surely faith in Jesus alone should be enough for salvation.

In autumn 1517 (whether the actual date of October 31 is accurate is debatable), Luther nailed his 95 theses — most of the 95 points in the document, which was framed in the then-common style of academic debate, objections to the practice of indulgences — to a Wittenberg church door.

His intent was to spark a debate within his church over a reformation of Catholicism. Instead, Luther and those who followed him found themselves at the forefront of a new religious movement known as Lutheranism. By 1520, Luther had been excommunicated by the Catholic Church. Soon after, he found himself at the Diet (council) of the city of Worms, on trial for heresy under the authority of the (very Catholic) Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. At that council, the emperor declared Luther to be an outlaw and demanded his arrest.

Political, economic, and technological factors contributed to the spread of Luther’s ideas

So why wasn’t Luther arrested and executed, as plenty of other would-be reformers and “heretics” had been? The answer has as much to do with politics as with religion. In the region now known as Germany, the holy Roman emperor had authority over many regional princes, not all of whom were too happy about submitting to their emperor’s authority.

One such prince, Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, “kidnapped” Luther after his trial to keep him safe from his would-be arrestors. In the years following the trial, and the spread of Luther’s dissent as the basis for a Lutheranism, Protestantism often became a means by which individual princes would signal their opposition to imperial power. And when a prince converted, his entire principality was seen to have converted too. This led, for example, to the catastrophic Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648, in which conflict between pro-Catholic and pro-Lutheran German princes morphed into a pan-European war that killed up to 20 percent of Europe’s population.

As it happens, the term “Protestant” began as a political rather than theological category. It originally referred to a number of German princes who formally protested an imperial ban on Martin Luther, before becoming a more general term for reformers who founded movements outside the Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, Luther was able to spread his ideas more quickly than ever before due to one vital new piece of technology: the printing press. For the first time in human history, vast amounts of information could be transmitted and shared easily with a great number of people. Luther’s anti-clerical pamphlets and essays — which were written in German, the language of the people, rather than the more obscure and “formal” academic language of Latin — could be swiftly and easily disseminated to convince others of his cause. (The relationship between Luther and the printing press was actually a symbiotic one : The more popular Luther became, the more print shops spread up across Europe to meet demand.)

Luther’s newfound popularity and “celebrity” status, in turn, made him a much more difficult force for his Catholic opponents to contend with. While earlier would-be reformers, such as John Hus, had been burned at the stake for heresy, getting rid of someone as widely known as Luther was far more politically risky.

Luther’s success, and the success of those who followed him, is a vital reminder of the ways politics, propaganda, and religion intersect. Something that began as a relatively narrow and academic debate over the church selling indulgences significantly changed Western culture. Luther opened the floodgates for other reformers.

Although Luther can be said to have started the Reformation, he was one of many reformers whose legacy lives on in different Protestant traditions. Switzerland saw the rise of John Calvin (whose own Protestant denomination, Calvinism, bears his name). John Knox founded the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Each denomination of Protestantism had its own specific theology and approach. But not all Protestant reformations were entirely idealistic in nature: King Henry VIII famously established the Church of England, still the state church in that country today, in order to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

Nearly all Protestant groups, however, shared Luther’s original objections to the Catholic Church — theological ideals that still define the Protestant umbrella today.

The most important of these is the idea that salvation happens through faith alone. In other words, nothing — not indulgences, not confession or penance, not even good works — can alter the course of a person’s salvation. For Protestants, salvation happens through divine grace received through faith in Jesus Christ. The second of these is the idea that biblical Scripture, and a person’s individual relationship with the Bible, is the most important source of information about God and Christian life. (This is in stark contrast with the Catholic Church, in which a wider body of church teaching and church authority play a major role.)

While it would be too simplistic to say that Protestants as a whole favor individualism and autonomy over established tradition, it’s fair to say that most Protestant traditions place a greater premium on individuals’ personal religious experiences, on the act of “being saved” through prayer, and on individual readings of Scripture, than do Catholics or members of orthodox churches. 

Other differences between Catholic and Protestant theology and practice involve the clergy and church. Protestants by and large see the “sacraments,” such as communion, as less important than their Catholic counterparts (the intensity of this varies by tradition, although only Catholics see the communion wafer as the literal body of Christ). Protestant priests, likewise, are not bound by priestly celibacy, and can marry.

That said, for many Christians today, differences are cultural, not theological. Earlier this fall, a study carried out by the Pew Research Center found that average Protestants more often than not   assert traditionally Catholic teachings  about, among other things, the nature of salvation or the role of church teaching.

Protestantism today still bears the stamp of Luther

Today, about 900 million people — 40 percent of Christians — identify as Protestant around the world. Of these, 72 million people — just 8 percent — are Lutherans. But Lutheranism has still come to define much of the Protestant ethos.

Over the centuries, more forms of Protestantism have taken shape. Several of them have had cataclysmic effects on world history. Puritanism, another reform movement within the Church of England, inspired its members to seek a new life in the New World and helped shape America as we know it today. Many of these movements classified themselves as “revivalist” movements, each one in turn trying to reawaken a church that critics saw as having become staid and complacent (just as Luther saw the Catholic Church).

Of these reform and revivalist movements, perhaps none is so visible today in America as the loose umbrella known as evangelical Christianity. Many of the historic Protestant churches — Lutheranism, Calvinism, Presbyterianism, the Church of England — are now classified as mainline Protestant churches, which tend to be more socially and politically liberal. Evangelical Christianity, though, arose out of similar revivalist tendencies within those churches, in various waves dating back to the 18th century.

Even more decentralized than their mainline counterparts, evangelical Christian groups tend to stress scriptural authority (including scriptural inerrancy) and the centrality of being “saved” to an even greater extent than, say, modern Lutheranism. Because of the fragmented and decentralized way many of these churches operate, anybody can conceivably set up a church or church community in any building. This, in turn, gives rise to the trend of “storefront churches,” something particularly popular in Pentecostal communities, and “house churches,” in which members meet for Bible study at one another’s homes.

The history of Christianity worldwide has, largely, followed the Luther cycle. As each church or church community becomes set in its ways, a group of idealistic reformers seeks to revitalize its spiritual life. They found new movements, only for reformers to splinter off from them in turn.

In America, where mainline Protestantism has been in decline for decades, various forms of evangelical Protestantism seemed to flourish for many years. Now evangelicals — particularly white evangelicals — are finding themselves in decline  for a variety of reasons, including demographic change and increasingly socially liberal attitudes on the part of younger Christians. Meanwhile, social media — the printing press of our own age — is changing the way some Christians worship: Some Christians are more likely to worship and study the Bible online or attend virtual discussion groups, while in other churches, attendees are encouraged to “live-tweet” sermons to heighten engagement.

What happens next is anyone’s guess.

But if the history of Lutheranism is anything to go by, we may be due for another wave of reformation before too long.

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This Day In History : October 31

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Martin Luther posts 95 theses

On October 31, 1517, legend has it that the priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation .

In his theses, Luther condemned the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the papal practice of asking payment—called “indulgences”—for the forgiveness of sins. At the time, a Dominican priest named Johann Tetzel, commissioned by the Archbishop of Mainz and Pope Leo X, was in the midst of a major fundraising campaign in Germany to finance the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Though Prince Frederick III the Wise had banned the sale of indulgences in Wittenberg, many church members traveled to purchase them. When they returned, they showed the pardons they had bought to Luther, claiming they no longer had to repent for their sins.

Luther’s frustration with this practice led him to write the 95 Theses, which were quickly snapped up, translated from Latin into German and distributed widely. A copy made its way to Rome, and efforts began to convince Luther to change his tune. He refused to keep silent, however, and in 1521 Pope Leo X formally excommunicated Luther from the Catholic Church. That same year, Luther again refused to recant his writings before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany, who issued the famous Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw and a heretic and giving permission for anyone to kill him without consequence. Protected by Prince Frederick, Luther began working on a German translation of the Bible, a task that took 10 years to complete.

The term “Protestant” first appeared in 1529, when Charles V revoked a provision that allowed the ruler of each German state to choose whether they would enforce the Edict of Worms. A number of princes and other supporters of Luther issued a protest, declaring that their allegiance to God trumped their allegiance to the emperor. They became known to their opponents as Protestants; gradually this name came to apply to all who believed the Church should be reformed, even those outside Germany. By the time Luther died, of natural causes, in 1546, his revolutionary beliefs had formed the basis for the Protestant Reformation, which would over the next three centuries revolutionize Western civilization.

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Luther’s Ninety-five Theses: What You May Not Know and Why They Matter Today

More By Justin Holcomb

For more accessible overviews of key moments in church history, purchase Justin Holcomb’s new book, Know the Creeds and Councils (Zondervan, 2014) [ interview ]. Additionally, Holcomb has made available to TGC readers an exclusive bonus chapter, which can be accessed here . This article is a shortened version of the chapter.

If people know only one thing about the Protestant Reformation, it is the famous event on October 31, 1517, when the Ninety-five Theses of Martin Luther (1483–1586) were nailed on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg in protest against the Roman Catholic Church. Within a few years of this event, the church had splintered into not just the “church’s camp” or “Luther’s camp” but also the camps of churches led by theologians of all different stripes.

Luther is known mostly for his teachings about Scripture and justification. Regarding Scripture, he argued the Bible alone ( sola scriptura ) is our ultimate authority for faith and practice. Regarding justification, he taught we are saved solely through faith in Jesus Christ because of God’s grace and Christ’s merit. We are neither saved by our merits nor declared righteous by our good works. Additionally, we need to fully trust in God to save us from our sins, rather than relying partly on our own self-improvement.

Forgiveness with a Price Tag

These teachings were radical departures from the Catholic orthodoxy of Luther’s day. But you might be surprised to learn that the Ninety-five Theses, even though this document that sparked the Reformation, was not about these issues. Instead, Luther objected to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church was offering to sell certificates of forgiveness, and that by doing so it was substituting a false hope (that forgiveness can be earned or purchased) for the true hope of the gospel (that we receive forgiveness solely via the riches of God’s grace).

The Roman Catholic Church claimed it had been placed in charge of a “treasury of merits” of all of the good deeds that saints had done (not to mention the deeds of Christ, who made the treasury infinitely deep). For those trapped by their own sinfulness, the church could write a certificate transferring to the sinner some of the merits of the saints. The catch? These “indulgences” had a price tag.

This much needs to be understood to make sense of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses: the selling of indulgences for full remission of sins intersected perfectly with the long, intense struggle Luther himself had experienced over the issues of salvation and assurance. At this point of collision between one man’s gospel hope and the church’s denial of that hope the Ninety-five Theses can be properly understood.

Theses Themselves

Luther’s Ninety-five Theses focuses on three main issues: selling forgiveness (via indulgences) to build a cathedral, the pope’s claimed power to distribute forgiveness, and the damage indulgences caused to grieving sinners. That his concern was pastoral (rather than trying to push a private agenda) is apparent from the document. He didn’t believe (at this point) that indulgences were altogether a bad idea; he just believed they were misleading Christians regarding their spiritual state:

41. Papal indulgences must be preached with caution, lest people erroneously think that they are preferable to other good works of love.

As well as their duty to others:

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.

44. Because love grows by works of love, man thereby becomes better. Man does not, however, become better by means of indulgences but is merely freed from penalties. [Notice that Luther is not yet wholly against the theology of indulgences.]

And even financial well-being:

46. Christians are to be taught that, unless they have more than they need, they must reserve enough for their family needs and by no means squander it on indulgences.

Luther’s attitude toward the pope is also surprisingly ambivalent. In later years he called the pope “the Antichrist” and burned his writings, but here his tone is merely cautionary, hoping the pope will come to his senses. For instance, in this passage he appears to be defending the pope against detractors, albeit in a backhanded way:

51. Christians are to be taught that the pope would and should wish to give of his own money, even though he had to sell the basilica of St. Peter, to many of those from whom certain hawkers of indulgences cajole money.

Obviously, since Leo X had begun the indulgences campaign in order to build the basilica, he did not “wish to give of his own money” to victims. However, Luther phrased his criticism to suggest that the pope might be ignorant of the abuses and at any rate should be given the benefit of the doubt. It provided Leo a graceful exit from the indulgences campaign if he wished to take it.

So what made this document so controversial? Luther’s Ninety-five Theses hit a nerve in the depths of the authority structure of the medieval church. Luther was calling the pope and those in power to repent—on no authority but the convictions he’d gained from Scripture—and urged the leaders of the indulgences movement to direct their gaze to Christ, the only one able to pay the penalty due for sin.

Of all the portions of the document, Luther’s closing is perhaps the most memorable for its exhortation to look to Christ rather than to the church’s power:

92. Away, then, with those prophets who say to Christ’s people, “Peace, peace,” where in there is no peace.

93. Hail, hail to all those prophets who say to Christ’s people, “The cross, the cross,” where there is no cross.

94. Christians should be exhorted to be zealous to follow Christ, their Head, through penalties, deaths, and hells.

95. And let them thus be more confident of entering heaven through many tribulations rather than through a false assurance of peace.

In the years following his initial posting of the theses, Luther became emboldened in his resolve and strengthened his arguments with Scripture. At the same time, the church became more and more uncomfortable with the radical Luther and, in the following decades, the spark that he made grew into a flame of reformation that spread across Europe. Luther was ordered by the church to recant in 1520 and was eventually exiled in 1521.

Ongoing Relevance

Although the Ninety-five Theses doesn’t explicitly lay out a Protestant theology or agenda, it contains the seeds of the most important beliefs of the movement, especially the priority of grasping and applying the gospel. Luther developed his critique of the Roman Catholic Church out of his struggle with doubt and guilt as well as his pastoral concern for his parishioners. He longed for the hope and security that only the good news can bring, and he was frustrated with the structures that were using Christ to take advantage of people and prevent them from saving union with God. Further, Luther’s focus on the teaching of Scripture is significant, since it provided the foundation on which the great doctrines of the Reformation found their origin.

Indeed, Luther developed a robust notion of justification by faith and rejected the notion of purgatory as unbiblical; he argued that indulgences and even hierarchical penance cannot lead to salvation; and, perhaps most notably, he rebelled against the authority of the pope. All of these critiques were driven by Luther’s commitment, above all else, to Christ and the Scriptures that testify about him. The outspoken courage Luther demonstrated in writing and publishing the Ninety-five Theses also spread to other influential leaders of the young Protestant Reformation.

Today, the Ninety-five Theses may stand as the most well-known document from the Reformation era. Luther’s courage and his willingness to confront what he deemed to be clear error is just as important today as it was then. One of the greatest ways in which Luther’s theses affect us today—in addition to the wonderful inheritance of the five Reformation solas (Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, glory to God alone)—is that it calls us to thoroughly examine the inherited practices of the church against the standard set forth in the Scriptures. Luther saw an abuse, was not afraid to address it, and was exiled as a result of his faithfulness to the Bible in the midst of harsh opposition.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

Justin Holcomb is an Episcopal priest and a theology professor at Reformed Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is author with his wife, Lindsey, of God Made All of Me , Is It My Fault? , and Rid of My Disgrace: Hope and Healing for Victims of Sexual Assault . Justin also has written or edited numerous other books on historical theology and biblical studies. You can find him on Facebook , Twitter , and at JustinHolcomb.com .

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The lasting impact of Martin Luther and the Reformation

Published: October 26, 2017

Author: Brandi Klingerman

In October 1517, Martin Luther famously published his 95 Theses, unleashing criticisms that resulted in a rejection of the pope’s authority and fractured Christianity as he knew it. Exactly 500 years later, Brad S. Gregory , the Dorothy G. Griffin Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame, explains how this eventually, but unintentionally, led to a world of modern capitalism, polarizing politics and more.

In Gregory’s latest book, “Rebel in the Ranks” (HarperOne) , he explains that in the early 1500s religion was more than just one component of a person’s lifestyle in Western Europe and that Christianity, as the dominant religion, influenced all areas of Christians’ lives. However, after Luther’s initial concerns inadvertently created a movement — the Reformation — the result was a division between Catholicism and the varied Protestant traditions, conflicts among those traditions and, eventually, changes in how religion influenced people’s lives.

“The Reformation gave rise to constructive forms of several different Christian traditions, such as Lutheranism and Calvinism,” said Gregory. “But this also meant that people of differing faiths had to work out how they could coexist when religion had always been the key influence on politics, family and education. Although in the 17th and 18th centuries some political leaders continued to use the idea of religious uniformity to manage their territories, beginning with the 17th-century Dutch they realized that religious toleration was good for business.”

This effort to coexist and the desire for economic prosperity, Gregory argues, resulted in a “centuries-long process of secularization.” Religion was redefined and its scope restricted to a modern sense of religion as individual internal beliefs, forms of worship and devotional preferences. This made religion separable from politics, economics and other areas of life. With this, Western society has increasingly struggled to come to a consensus on politics, education and other social issues without the direction of an overarching faith or any shared substantive set of values to replace it.

“One result of the Reformation has been the political protection of individuals to believe or worship how they want,” said Gregory. “However, this freedom has also delivered — contrary to what Luther would have wanted — the right for people to practice no religion at all, and more, in recent decades, the seeming inability of citizens to agree on even the most basic norms important for shared political and social life.”

The Reformation’s unintended consequence of modern individual freedom has positives and negatives, he explained. Although people benefit from individual freedoms that were not available 500 years ago, these freedoms have also led, for instance, to the right for someone to purchase whatever they want without regard for the needs of anyone else.

“To match demand and thrive financially, factories produce the goods people want. In doing so, factories pollute the environment in ways that contribute to global warming. When religion was a pervasive and shared reality, individual freedom restrained the consumerist behaviors we see today,” said Gregory. “This is just one of many ways in which the long-term, unintended consequences of the Reformation are still influencing our lives today.”

Gregory is the director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and author of “The Unintended Reformation . ” To learn more about him as well as his latest book, “Rebel in the Ranks,” visit https://ndias.nd.edu/books/rebel-in-the-ranks/ .

Contact : Brittany Kaufman, assistant director, Office of Media Relations, 574-631-6335, [email protected]

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What was the significance of the 95 theses.

What were the 95 Theses?

According to historic legend, Martin Luther posted a document on the door of the Wittenberg Church on the 31 st October 1517; a document later referred to as the 95 Theses. This document was questioning rather than accusatory, seeking to inform the Archbishop of Mainz that the selling of indulgences had become corrupt, with the sellers seeking solely to line their own pockets. It questioned the idea that the indulgences trade perpetuated – that buying a trinket could shave time off the stay of one’s loved ones in purgatory, sending them to a glorious Heaven.

It is important, however, to recognise that this was not the action of a man wanting to break away from the Catholic Church. When writing the 95 Theses, Luther simply intended to bring reform to the centre of the agenda for the Church Council once again; it cannot be stressed enough that he wanted to reform, rather than abandon, the Church.

Nonetheless, the 95 Theses were undoubtedly provocative, leading to debates across the German Lands about what it meant to be a true Christian, with some historians considering the document to be the start of the lengthy process of the Reformation. But why did Luther write them?

Why did Luther write the 95 Theses?

In particular, Luther was horrified by the fact that a large portion of the profits from this trade were being used to renovate St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. His outrage at this is evident from the 86 th thesis: ‘Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St Peter with the money of the poor rather than with his own money?’ Perhaps this is indicative of Luther’s opinion as opposing the financial extortion indulgences pressed upon the poor, rather than the theology which lay behind the process of freeing one’s loved ones from purgatory.

It is interesting to note that Luther also sent a copy of his 95 Theses directly to Archbishop Albrecht von Brandenburg. It appears that he legitimately believed that the Archbishop was not aware of the corruption inherent in the indulgence trade led by Tetzel. This is something which can be considered important later on, for it indicates that Luther did not consider the Church hierarchy redundant at this point.

Why were the 95 Theses significant?

Though the document itself has a debateable significance, the events which occurred because of its publication were paramount in Luther’s ideological and religious development. Almost immediately there was outrage at the ‘heresy’ which the Church viewed as implicit within the document. Despite the pressure upon Luther to immediately recant his position, he did not. This in part led to the Leipzig debate in summer 1519 with Johann Eck.

This debate forced Luther to clarify some of his theories and doctrinal stances against the representative of the Catholic Church. The debate focused largely on doctrine; in fact, the debate regarding indulgences was only briefly mentioned in the discussions between the two men. This seems surprising; Luther’s primary purpose in writing the 95 Theses was to protest the selling of indulgences. Why was this therefore not the primary purpose of the debate?

Ultimately the debate served to further Luther’s development of doctrine which opposed the traditional view of the Catholic Church. In the debate he was forced to conclude that Church Councils had the potential to be erroneous in their judgements. This therefore threw into dispute the papal hierarchy’s authority, and set him on his path towards evangelicalism and the formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Yet it is important to bear in mind that, had the pope offered a reconciliation, Luther would have returned to the doctrine of the established Church.

An interesting point to consider about the aftermath of the 95 Theses is the attitude of the Catholic Church. It immediately sought to identify Luther as someone who had strayed from the true way and was therefore a heretic; it refused to recognise that Luther had valid complaints which were shared by many across Western Christendom. The 95 Theses could have been taken at face value and used as an avenue to reform, as Luther intended. Instead, the papal hierarchy sought to discredit Luther, and keep to the status quo.

What made the 95 Theses significant?

A document written in Latin and posted on a door like most other academic debates, it does not seem obvious when considering the 95 Theses alone to see just how they became as significant as they did.

The translation of the Latin text into German also helped make the document significant. Translated in early 1518 by reformist friends of Luther, this widened the debate’s appeal simply because it made the subject matter accessible to a greater number of people. ‘Common’ folk who could read would have been able to read in German, rather than Latin. This therefore meant that they would be able to read the article for themselves and realise just how many of the arguments they identified with (or did not identify with, for that matter). The translation also meant that these literate folk could read the Theses aloud to a large audience; Bob Scribner argued that we should not forget the oral nature of the Reformation, beginning with one of the most divisive documents in history.

Finally, the 95 Theses can be considered significant because they were expressing sentiments that many ordinary folk felt themselves at the time. There had been a disillusionment with the Church and corruption within it for a great deal of time; the Reformatio Sigismundi  of 1439 is a prime early example of a series of lists detailing the concerns of the people about the state of the Church. By the time of the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1521, there were 102 grievances with the Church, something overshadowed due to Martin Luther’s presence at this Diet. Many of the issues Luther highlighted were shared among the populace; it was due to the contextual factors of the printing press and the use of the German language that made this expression so significant.

It would not be surprising if, when posting his 95 Theses on the door of the chapel on the 31 st October 1517, Luther did not expect a great deal to change. At the time, he did not know what such an act would lead to. The events which occurred due to the Theses led to Luther clarifying his doctrinal position in a manner which led to his eventual repudiation of the decadence and corruption within the Catholic Church and his excommunication.

Yet we must remember that whilst the 95 Theses can be considered to constitute an extraordinary shift in the mentality of a disillusioned Christian, they are very unlikely to have achieved the same significance without the printing press. If the 95 Theses had been posted on the 31 st October 1417 , would the result have been the same?

Written by Victoria Bettney

Bibliography

Dixon, Scott C. The Reformation in Germany . Oxford  : Blackwell, 2002.

Dixon, Scott C ed. The German Reformation: The Essential Readings . Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

Lau, Franz and Bizer, Ernst. A History of the Reformation in Germany To 1555 . Translated by Brian Hardy. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1969.

Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations . Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

McGrath, Alister. Christian Theology: An Introduction . Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

McGrath, Alister. Reformation Thought: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998.

Scribner, Robert. ‘Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas,’ History of European Ideas 5, no. 3 (1984): 237-256.

“The 95 Theses,” http://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html , accessed 29.10.15

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Post navigation, 3 thoughts on “ what was the significance of the 95 theses ”.

Interesting article! You rightly argue that the Theses were not the finished product but just a step in Luther’s theological development. That makes you think; should we really be celebrating 31 October 2017 as the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, or should we be remembering a different date?

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hit the griddy

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Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the Origins of the Reformation Narrative

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C Scott Dixon, Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the Origins of the Reformation Narrative, The English Historical Review , Volume 132, Issue 556, June 2017, Pages 533–569, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cex224

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With the quincentenary of the German Reformation now upon us, it is worth revisiting how, and why, the posting of the 95 theses emerged as such a defining moment in the Reformation story. It is easy to understand why it has assumed pride of place in modern histories. What is less easy to understand, however, is why the theses-posting emerged as the critical moment in the early modern accounts, for there were many other moments with even more drama and proximate significance for the Reformation. Moreover, the posting of theses had little shock-value at the time. Many professors posted academic theses, many reform-minded Christians had questioned indulgences, and many high-profile German intellectuals had written at least one critical piece against Rome. The following article begins with a survey of the origins of Reformation history and traces the incorporation of the theses-posting into the narrative stream. The second section examines the reasons why this act remained so prominent in the Lutheran memory during the two centuries after the Reformation by relating it to a broader analytical framework and sense of self-perception. The final section examines the process of reinterpretation that occurred during the period of late Lutheran Orthodoxy and the early Enlightenment, when scholars started to revisit the episode and sketch out the features of the modern view. The broader aim is to demonstrate how historical conditions can shape historical facts, even when those facts were bound to something as seemingly idealistic as the origins of a new Church.

On 13 October 1760, as a consequence of the ongoing hostilities between Prussian and Imperial troops in the Seven Years War, a relentless hail of bombs, grenades, and ‘fire balls’ rained down on the Saxon town of Wittenberg. According to the theology professor Christian Siegmund Georgi (1702–71), who was in Wittenberg at the time, most of the buildings in and near the centre of the town suffered direct hits and subsequently burned for a number of days. Away from the centre, however, and closer to the walls, some areas of the town had been spared and some buildings had survived the onslaught, including the Augusteum, the former monastery that had once served as a home to Martin Luther and still housed the famous Lutherstube ( Figure 1 ). But even the Augusteum was severely damaged and was only preserved because the intervals between strikes were long enough to allow for suppression of the fires. One building that did not survive the attack was the Castle Church, termed by Georgi the ‘mother church of all evangelical Lutheranism’, which had been reduced to a smouldering pile of stone and ash. 1 Numerous treasures went up in flames, including paintings by Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer, late medieval imperial tombs, marble statues of the electors, epitaphs of renowned theologians, the church organ and Luther’s stone pulpit. But perhaps the most revered of all these casualties was the church door, the very door on which Luther had first posted the Ninety-Five Theses . No doubt there had been some repairs in the intervening centuries, but it was still thought to be authentic at the time of the bicentenary of the Reformation in 1717, and indeed some people held that Luther’s nails were still in the wood. 2 In October 1760, however, the Imperial ordnance set the church alight and the ‘beautiful temple’, to use Georgi’s words, ‘whence the teaching of the Gospel had first rung out and spread to the rest of the world’, was destroyed. 3

The bombardment. Georgi, Wittenbergische Klage-Geschichte (1760). Image by permission of SLUB Dresden, http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id334313465/10 ( CC-BY-SA 4.0 ).

By the time the Imperial battery had reduced the Castle Church (also known as All Saints Church) to pulverised stone and ash, the church door had already secured its place in Reformation history. Although the famous scene of Luther nailing the Ninety-Five Theses against indulgences on 31 October 1517 was based on very modest historical foundations, with a single recollection by Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) being the first and only public testimony to the event, Melanchthon’s reference proved authoritative enough for later generations of Lutherans to look back on this act as the starting point of the Reformation. At the time, however, the posting of the theses was just one scene among others, and in truth it does not appear to have had an immediate visual appeal. It was not until the gothic revival of the nineteenth century that artists such as Gustav König, Ferdinand Pauwels and Hugo Vogel began to pose Luther in front of the church door with hammer in hand. The elevation of the theses-posting to its current place in the public imagination as the Reformation’s dramatic scene nonpareil is a legacy of the nineteenth century. 4 Nevertheless, the theses-posting became a staple of the Reformation narrative soon after Melanchthon first published his recollection. No one doubted that it occurred on All Saints’ Day 1517; and, more to the point, all were in agreement that this act marked the origins of the Reformation and thus that 31 October 1517 was the moment when the Reformation began. In Georgi’s interior view of the Castle Church ( Figure 2 ), for instance, the door is clearly marked out (no. 59) and described as ‘the great door on which Doctor Luther of hallowed memory posted his 95 theses against Tetzel and thus brought about the blessed Reformation’. 5

The interior. Georgi, Wittenbergische Klage-Geschichte (1760). Image by permission of SLUB Dresden, http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id334313465/67 ( CC-BY-SA 4.0 ).

With the quincentenary of the German Reformation now upon us, it is worth revisiting how, and why, the theses-posting emerged as such a defining moment in the Reformation story. From the modern perspective it seems straightforward enough: this was the moment when Luther openly challenged the practice of indulgence-peddling, and with it the teaching and authority of the late medieval Catholic church. As a result of this act of defiance, Catholicism ultimately lost its monopoly of Christian salvation in the West. Furthermore, according to a long tradition of scholarship, this was the moment when the individual believer took his stand against the dead hand of tradition and the modern religious conscience was born. In the words of the church historian Ernst Wilhelm Benz, this act marks the instant when ‘western Christianity had reached a new stage of the religious conscience, one in which, for the individual, personal experience and personal witness becomes decisive in his relationship to God and to the community’. 6 The theologian Ulrich Barth has recently confirmed this view, claiming that the range and depth of social, moral and theological criticisms (both implicit and explicit) in the Ninety-Five Theses , compounded with Luther’s clearly stated doubts about the practice of indulgences and the power of the papacy, warrant the claim that this episode marked ‘the birth of religious autonomy’. 7

Freighted with this much importance, it is easy to understand why the posting of the theses has assumed pride of place in modern histories. What is less easy to understand, however, is why it emerged as the critical moment in early modern accounts, before the modern cult of individualism and its celebration of religious conscience; for not only were reports of the episode based on very shaky foundations but there were many other moments with even more drama and similar significance for the Reformation, from the debate with Johannes Eck in Leipzig and the burning of the papal Bull of excommunication to Luther’s appearance before Charles V in Worms (by which time the critical concern had shifted from the issue of indulgences to papal plenitude). Moreover, as a historical gesture with the symbolic weight identified by Benz, the posting of theses had little shock value at the time. Many professors posted academic theses, many reform-minded Christians had questioned indulgences, and many high-profile German intellectuals had written at least one critical piece against Rome.

The following article addresses this problem in three parts. It begins with a survey of the origins of Reformation history and traces the incorporation of the theses-posting into the narrative stream. The second section examines the reasons why this act remained so prominent in Lutheran memory during the two centuries after the Reformation by relating it to a broader theological framework, a providential interpretation of history and an evolving sense of self-perception. The final section examines the process of reinterpretation that occurred during the period of late Lutheran Orthodoxy and the early Enlightenment, when scholars started to revisit the episode and sketch the outlines of the modern view. A survey of the theses-posting is nothing new, of course, and indeed German historians have regularly re-examined the episode since the debate first became a national issue in the 1960s. Where this study departs from its predecessors is in its focus on the place and the meaning of the theses-posting within the evolving understanding of the German Reformation. It does not treat the episode as a fixed event in an unchanging narrative. Perceptions of Luther and the Reformation at the tail-end of the early modern period were different from perceptions at the beginning, so too the philosophies of history that ordered the past. And yet the theses-posting retained its prominence as the point of origin, the crucial moment in the story. Why was this? Why did this episode remain a fixed point in the history of the Reformation during a period when that entire history was reconsidered and reconceived? The main purpose of this study is to explain the reasons behind the durability of the theses-posting as the Reformation’s perceived moment of creation despite more than two centuries of historiographical change. The broader aim is to demonstrate how historical conditions can shape historical facts, even when those facts are bound to something as seemingly idealised as the origins of a new Church.

There is very little evidence to support the claim that Martin Luther (1483–1546) personally nailed a set of ninety-five theses against indulgences to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. I do not intend to revisit all of the arguments for and against the theses-posting here, but some mention must be made of the weaknesses of the historical record, for this will have a bearing on the later discussion. 8 To begin with, as mentioned above, there is only one witness to this event, namely Melanchthon, who made reference to the theses-posting in the second volume of the Wittenberg Latin edition of Luther’s works (1546). 9 But the authority of Melanchthon’s testimony is solely based on his status and his role in the Reformation. In truth he was not even in Wittenberg at the time and was inconsistent in his recollections of the event. He mentioned it in a Sunday sermon in 1557, for example, but there was no reference to it in the short historical account of the Reformation that he placed in a time-capsule left in the church bell-tower the following year. 10 Even more significant is the fact that Luther himself never mentioned the posting of the theses. The indulgence debate clearly had priority in his recollections of the origins of the Reformation, and he did consider 31 October 1517 a day of special significance, but he made no reference to the theses and the door. At times the door fell within his frame of reference, as it did when the Swiss neo-Latin poet Simon Lemnius (1511–50) was caught peddling libellous anti-Wittenberg epigrams in front of the Castle Church entrance in 1538. Luther spoke from the pulpit against the dishonour brought upon the professors, the university, and the town; but he made no mention of the dishonour brought upon the very site where the Reformation was thought to have begun, even though he had become sentimental about other sites by this time. 11

There are other problems with established accounts, though some of the counter-arguments are based on circumstantial reasoning. For instance, although it was common to post theses for disputation on church doors, in Wittenberg, as in most other German universities, this was done by beadles rather than professors. Moreover, in Wittenberg, as the university statutes make clear, the disputation placards were to be posted on the doors of all the churches ( in valvis templorum ), not just the Castle Church. (And if Cranach’s image of the entrance to the Castle Church in 1509 is anywhere near the historical reality of 1517 [ Figure 3 ], multiple postings would have been advisable.) Equally troubling is the fact that historians have yet to find an extant copy of a Wittenberg print of the Ninety-Five Theses , though a summons to a public disputation of this kind was usually given in the form of a printed broadside. The few prints that do exist were published elsewhere (Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel), and when Luther actually dispatched copies of the theses he seems to have sent them in handwritten form. 12 Even more perplexing is the issue of timing. In Melanchthon’s original account, Luther posted the theses ‘on the day before the feast of All Saints’ (‘pridie festi omnium Sanctorum’), that is, on 31 October 1517. He also dispatched letters to the archbishop of Mainz and the bishop of Brandenburg, both with a copy of the theses enclosed. The letter to Mainz still exists and is dated 31 October 1517. Context, content and later testimony would suggest that this letter to the archbishop was the first time that Luther made contact with him; however, in correspondence and recollections stretching from 1518 to 1545, Luther claimed that he had written to the bishops (sometimes suggesting more than two) before the posting of the theses. Only after waiting in vain for a response of some kind, he claimed, did he decide to make the theses public. If this was true, then Luther cannot have posted the theses on 31 October, for this was the day that he sent his appeal to the bishops. 13 Scholars were confronted with this discrepancy as soon as they began to piece together the Reformation narrative, for the letter to the archbishop was published in the Wittenberg (1539–59) and Jena (1554–8) editions of Luther’s works with the date at the bottom.

The church in 1509. Lucas Cranach, Dye zaigung des hochlobwirdigen hailigthums der stifftkirchen aller hailigen zu Wittenburg (Wittenberg, 1509). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In the mid-sixteenth century, however, when German Protestants began to write the first histories of the Reformation, there was no need to call Melanchthon’s testimony into question. Admittedly, some of the earliest accounts make no reference to the event, including important foundational histories by contemporaries such as Johann Carion, Friedrich Myconius, Georg Spalatin and Johannes Sleidan. Nor did sharp-eyed Catholic controversialists such as Kilian Leib, Johannes Cochlaeus or Hieronymus Emser recall the scene. 14 They spoke of the publication or the dissemination of the theses rather than the posting on the church door. But once a shared stream of Reformation history began to emerge in the 1570s, the theses-posting became a staple of the core narrative. The church historian Volker Leppin has recently retraced this reception process during the first century of memorialisation. Drawing on the recollection of Melanchthon, the earliest authors to mention the act repeated the basic information provided by Melanchthon and occasionally added small details, such as that Luther was surrounded by pilgrims at the time. After these first attempts, the most influential account was given by Johannes Mathesius (1504–65) in his cycle of sermons on Luther’s life (1562–4). Mathesius included Melanchthon’s version of the theses-posting, yet he also related the dispatching of the letters to the bishops as described in the recollections of Luther. He did not try to reconcile the two accounts, nor did he depict Luther as a heroic figure who actively sought to challenge the teachings of the Church. According to Mathesius, Luther had been forced into issuing the theses by the actions of Johannes Tetzel, the Dominican friar who had been commissioned by Pope Leo X to preach the Jubilee indulgence in Germany. Only later, in the Luther biographies of the 1570s and 1580s, and beginning in particular with the works of Orthodox Lutheran historians such as Nikolaus Selnecker and Georg Glocker, do we meet Luther as the resolute reformer of the Church who was driven to take a stand against a corrupt medieval Catholic Church. We also start to see the theses-posting, rather than the dispatch of the letters to the bishops, emerge as the critical act of 1517. 15

A few crucial texts should be added to this survey. One is the reworking of Melanchthon’s version of Carion’s Chronicle by his son-in-law Caspar Peucer (1525–1602), who extended the narrative from the age of Charlemagne to the reign of the emperor Charles V. Though rather vague in the first Latin edition, the subsequent German translation clearly referred to the theses-posting as the ‘occasion and origin’ of the Reformation. 16 The other important vehicles for the spread and reception of the episode were the Wittenberg and Jena editions of Luther’s works. Given that Melanchthon’s preface first appeared in the Wittenberg version, this is a rather obvious point to make; and yet it is worth noting that the editors also added a marginal comment beside the Ninety-Five Theses in both editions, thereby reminding all subsequent scholars of the theses-posting every time they consulted the German translations. 17 Moreover, because the first editions of Luther’s works opened with the theses and the indulgence debate, they tended to sharpen the sense that Reformation itself began with the theses-posting. Both the Jena and the later Altenburg versions of Luther’s works were influential in this regard, as the Lutheran Pietist Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) observed, for their chronological ordering provided ‘a much more exact notion of the entire sequence of events one after the other’. 18 Thus by the time Lutheran clergymen such as Selnecker and Glocker came to write their biographies, the theses-posting was already a central support of the broader narrative. It marked the terminus ante quem for the build-up to reform and the catalyst for the Reformation itself. To cite the words of one early biographer, 31 October 1517 was the date when Martin Luther

posted a set of public propositions and articles on the Castle Church, wherein, drawing on the Word of God and with a bountiful spirit, rigorously, just, and meet, he argued at length against the indulgence trade. This dispute was the beginning and the original cause of the Reformation and why the pure teaching of the Holy Gospel has been brought back to light. 19

The importance of 1517 was confirmed by the centenary celebrations of 1617, when Lutherans had the opportunity to celebrate the origins of the Reformation on a universal scale. Up to that point different regional churches had honoured different episodes, from Luther’s birth- and death-dates or the submission of the Augsburg Confession to events of local significance, such as the first evangelical communion in a particular place. 20 The 1617 centenary thus provided a common point of origin for public memorialisation across all these churches; but when the date arrived, because of the tense political situation and the need for Protestant unity, the main emphasis was placed on the celebration of the Reformation in general, or Protestant tropes such as the fall of the papal Antichrist or the spreading of the Word, rather than Luther’s theses-posting as the singular moment of origin. Indeed, in the initial plans for a general Protestant commemoration—which were largely put in motion by Friedrich V, the Reformed elector of the Palatinate—the main day of observation was set for 2 November. In most Lutheran territories, however, as in Electoral Saxony, the celebrations extended from 31 October to 2 November and were marked out by sermon cycles, special prayers of thanks, anniversary publications and the suspension of secular activities. 21 The theses-posting was not yet considered such a critical moment in the Reformation story that all celebrations had to be exclusively centred on this day (Hartmut Lehmann’s survey of ninety-four dated sermons, for instance, places just twenty-one on 31 October), and none of the anniversary pamphlets included an image of Luther in front of the church door; but the anniversary did confirm the widespread conceit that the Reformation originated with the posting of the theses and it did canonise this act in the public memory. Representative in this respect is the cycle of sermons preached in the Castle Church by the Wittenberg professors Friedrich Balduin, Nicolas Hunnius and Wolfgang Franz, all of whom stressed the significance of the theses as the starting-point of the Reformation. 22

For the lasting memorialisation of the theses-posting, however, perhaps the most important act of commemoration was the publication of the so-called Dream of Friedrich the Wise , a broadsheet engraving that appeared in 1617, which is thought to be the first visual representation of Luther in front of the church door ( Figure 4 ). References to the dream sequence experienced by Friedrich, who was the prince of Saxony at the time of the theses-posting, pre-date the broadsheet, but the appearance of this image, rich in detail and symbolism, marked an important juncture. As Robert Scribner observed, the image was significant because it invested the event with two forms of legitimacy. First, it provided a historical provenance for the idea of Luther and the church door. According to the pamphlet, Friedrich first related the dream to his chaplain Georg Spalatin, one of Luther’s Wittenberg contemporaries. Spalatin told Antonius Musa, the pastor of Rochlitz, who recorded it in a manuscript. While visiting the subsequent pastor of Rochlitz in 1591, the editor of the pamphlet claimed, he actually saw the manuscript and the description of the dream. With this, the historical foundations of the theses-posting were secured: all of these men were contemporary figures and their words and acts were joined by written testimony. The second form of legitimation was prophetic. In the dream related by Friedrich, which came to him as he contemplated the fate of souls in purgatory, God sent him a monk who seemed to be the natural son of Paul. Assured by God through the saints that he would not regret it if he let the monk write something on his Castle Church, Friedrich, having agreed to the request, next saw the vision of the monk scrawling oversized text on a door with a huge quill that reached all the way to Rome, where it went through the ears of a lion (representing Pope Leo X) and started to tip over the papal crown. Some of these symbols were the common stock of visual culture. Some could be deciphered with a modicum of historical knowledge. Others, such as the burning of a goose, which was an allusion to the prediction uttered by the heretic Jan Hus about the coming of Luther, were specific to the emerging prophecies of the Reformation. Harmonised in this image, they joined up the theses-posting with the emerging mytho-historical accounts of the Reformation. 23

The Dream of Frederick the Wise. Der Traum des Churfürsten Friedrich III. oder des Weisen (1617). ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

In historical terms, nothing new was added to the established account of the theses-posting during the seventeenth century. No additional sources were discovered, no new details accrued. According to this account, Luther personally nailed the theses to the door on 31 October 1517 and thereby launched the Reformation. What was new in the seventeenth century, however, was the increasing importance of the theses-posting in Reformation histories as the anchor for arguments in defence of the faith. Thus in works by Matthias Hoe von Hönegg, Johannes Müller, Caspar Sagittarius and Johannes Faber, discussions about the theses-posting and the motives behind it, which only appear after long introductory narratives about the poor state of the late medieval Church, take centre stage as a way of defending Luther against the accusations of the Catholics. Reform, in these accounts, had been a necessity, and the theses-posting was the catalyst. The theses-posting was also emphasised in works that were primarily concerned with defending the providential nature of the Reformation, as in the late-century interpretations by Johann Adam Scherzer, Johann Deutschmann and Johann Friderich Mayer. 24 In this scheme, Luther’s action on 31 October 1517 is the singular act that reveals the hand of God. Over the long term, however, perhaps the most important theoretical framework was that provided by the Lutheran statesman Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626–92) in his Commentarius historicus et apologeticus de Lutheranismo (1688). This was the most influential work on German Reformation history to appear in the early modern period, particularly after it was translated into German and supplemented by the Ulm pastor Elias Frick. That Seckendorff found such a prominent place for Luther’s early career and the indulgence debate confirmed the status of the theses-posting in Reformation history and invested the claim that it was the moment of origin with historiographical credibility. 25

The bicentennial celebrations of 1717 serve as a convenient end-point to this short survey of the incorporation of the theses-posting into the history of the Reformation. Even at this stage, after two centuries of Protestant development, the episode had not yet captured the historical or the visual imagination in the way that it would in the nineteenth century. In most accounts the theses-posting shared the stage with other dramatic opening acts, from the meeting with the papal legate Thomas Cajetan at the Diet of Augsburg to the debate in Leipzig or the hearing in Worms. Luther’s nailing of the theses to the church door was just one scene in a narrative cycle—as it is, for instance, in the Danish image prepared for the celebrations of 1717, in which Luther is depicted posting the theses, burning the papal bull, and translating the Bible ( Figure 5 ). 26 At the time, in fact, there was good reason to play down the theses-posting, which was such a uniquely Lutheran moment in German history. In 1717, the Lutheran church was in a weaker position than it had been a century before. The Counter-Reformation had long since revitalised Catholicism in the Empire; the Reformed faith, now legally recognised, had emerged from the Peace of Westphalia even stronger than before; and German Lutheranism itself had little sense of common purpose or identity, as was evidenced by the difficulties faced by the statesmen and theologians in Saxony and Hesse who tried to co-ordinate a masterplan for the bicentennial celebrations. 27 Moreover, Lutheran historians had now developed a much more source-based and sophisticated history of the early Reformation, and they recognised that the theses-posting did not represent such a radical break in the story, either with reference to Luther’s personal development or to Reformation history as a whole.

The cycle of events. Cyprian, Hilaria Evangelica (1719). Image by permission of Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Halle, http://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/vd18/content/pageview/2394295 ( CC-BY-SA 4.0 ).

Nevertheless, even though there were good reasons to shift the narrative away from 31 October 1517, once the bicentennial celebrations had taken place the Lutheran church continued to emphasise the importance of the theses-posting for the Reformation. The Helmstedt professor Christoph Heinrich Rittmeier (1671–1719) made this point in the build-up to the celebrations. As he remarked, although Luther had been preaching against indulgences before the dispute with Tetzel,

nevertheless, because in the following year of 1517 the issue was further flaming up, Luther was forced by the disagreeable circumstances and the audacious conduct of his antagonists to draw up and publicly post ninety-five theses or principles, which began as follows: ‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent!”, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance’. This happened on 31 October 1517, and for this reason, as is well known, the Reformation is reckoned from this date. That is why the anniversary of the first Lutheran century was celebrated in 1617. And now with the passage of the second century, yet another is just around the corner. 28

As was the case one hundred years before, the preachers and the historians continued to stress the importance of the dramatic scene on the eve of All Saints’ Day for the outbreak of the Reformation. Doubts were creeping in about the reliability of the early accounts, including Luther’s recollection of events, and there was a growing tendency to look for historical rather than providential explanations for Luther’s actions, but the theses-posting remained the crucial and decisive act in Reformation history. For the vast majority of Lutherans in 1717, Luther standing before the door of the Castle Church on 31 October 1517 was the image that came to mind when they recalled the origins of the Church.

Why did the theses-posting emerge and then endure as the defining moment in early modern Reformation history, and what does its lasting importance in the narrative say about Lutheran modes of remembrance and interpretation? Before answering these questions, it is worth pointing out that there were better candidates for what the theologians termed the annus climacterius or the annus restauratae religionis than the year 1517. Indeed, even within the compass of that year, there were more consequential acts than the theses-posting—for if its purpose was to initiate an academic debate, then Luther failed, as no disputation ever took place. In purely historical terms, the dispatching of the theses to the archbishop of Mainz was the crucial act, as Luther himself recalled. Moreover, the theses themselves can hardly be considered a proclamation of evangelical reform. They were, as the theologians acknowledged, a mix of evangelical insight and Luther’s abiding ‘Papisterey’; and, as more was learned of Luther’s early teaching and preaching in Wittenberg, in which similar glimpses of a fledgling evangelical theology were revealed, their importance as the Reformation’s first public utterance began to diminish.

A strong case could be made for other points of origin, as contemporary scholars came to recognise. Few went so far as the Kemberg provost Johann Heinrich Feustking (1672–1713), who proposed that the Wittenberg thesis defence by Bartholomäus Bernhardi in 1516, at which Luther presided, was in fact the first evangelical attack on the ‘six-headed beast’ in Rome and thus the actual starting-point of the Reformation. 29 But there was enough knowledge and nuance in the histories of the time for scholars at least to imagine other scenarios. As turning-points in history, for instance, the Leipzig debate of 1519 or Luther’s burning of the Bull in 1520 could be seen as more significant. Nor was it difficult to make a case for the importance of the Diet of Worms (1521), as indeed Johannes Mathesius did in the first substantial Luther biography ever written. In a similar vein, in his study of the origins of the faith, the martyrologist Ludwig Rabus (1523–92) provided illustrated accounts of the main dramatic events in Luther’s early life, including the meetings in Augsburg, Leipzig, Worms, and the burning of the papal bull, but he did not emphasise the posting of the theses. 30

Understanding the place of the theses-posting in the narrative of Lutheran history requires some awareness of the broader process of memorialisation at work. From the very outset of the Reformation the public memory of the Church was closely controlled, just as it was deeply affected—as all public memory is deeply affected—by shifts of sentiment and perception over time. Thus, while the first histories of the Reformation were primarily concerned with finding a place for the faith in the traditional narratives of Christian history—which explains why they were so confessionally charged and so theologically precise—later histories started to tailor their arguments to fit the temper of the times, with the result that Enlightenment histories spoke openly of reason, liberty and freedom of conscience, while the histories of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned Luther into a proto-nationalist and the Reformation into the first great unfolding of the German spirit. Very few details appeared by chance in teleological narratives of this kind, for everything was meant to serve a higher purpose in the wider historiographical scheme, whether that was to legitimise or justify the faith, provide the community with a sense of identity, or sanction the role of the secular authorities. 31 Moreover, as Lutherans also had to uproot the established Catholic narrative, some delicate acts of reinterpretation were required: simply dismissing the past wholesale ran the risk of alienating their broad base of support. Writing a history of the Reformation was thus a very complex, and very deliberate, process of historical fabrication. Indeed, we can see Luther’s own hand in that process from the start, not only in his own accounts of events from Heidelberg to Worms—as in his acta Augustana , for instance, with which he rushed his version of the meeting with Cajetan into print—but also in his attempts to define which episodes properly belonged to a history of ‘his’ Reformation. Revealing of Luther’s involvement is Natalie Krentz’s recent reconstruction of the early history of the Wittenberg Movement (1521–2), which recovers the acts of inclusion and exclusion at work in the process, reaching from Luther’s writing desk to the categorisation of the material in the Ernestine archives in Weimar and Gotha. 32 These were the first steps in an ongoing process of Lutheran memorialisation that began in Wittenberg and took on greater definition throughout the confessional age.

By the mid-seventeenth century, as a consequence, Lutheranism had developed a broadly consistent sense of its past with a fairly crowded calendar of red-letter days. From the 1580s onwards, sermons regularly marked the anniversaries of Luther’s death and birth, or of important events such as the posting of the theses, the burning of the bull, or the Diet of Worms. In the following century the calendar became more formalised as a series of universal foundational moments entered into the cycle. The centenary celebration of 1617, for instance, was followed by similar festivities marking the centenaries of the Augsburg Confession (1630), the Schmalkaldic War (1647), the Peace of Augsburg (1655) and the Book of Concord (1680). Annual events were also marked at the regional and local level, with some cities and territories mandating the days of observance in their church orders. Given that the reformers had been so vigorous in condemning the medieval cycles of holy days and papal jubilees, Catholics were quick to point up the seeming contradiction. As the Catholic author Johann Weislinger (1691–1755) observed, each day seemed to bring a new cause for celebration in Lutheran lands: ‘cheer and rejoicing in every Lutheran land, city, village, cottage, and spinning room; cheer and rejoicing in the universities, from the pulpits, dance floors and river-side laundry banks; from every preacher, labourer, odd-jobber, horse-doctor, bathhouse-attendant, and sow-gelder there is nothing else to see, hear, or talk about than cheer and rejoicing’. 33 Weislinger was taking aim at the Lutherans of Strasbourg, who had used the bicentenary of the Augsburg Confession as an occasion for launching polemical attacks against the Catholics. And he was correct to stress the local dimensions of these rites of public memory. The best evidence of this was the massive assemblage of material brought together by the Orthodox Lutheran scholar Ernst Solomon Cyprian (1673–1745) in his Hilaria Evangelica (1719), a huge collection of reports of the local celebrations marking the bicentenary of 1717. Reports came in from all over the Lutheran world, including descriptions of the celebrations in places as distant from Cyprian’s German town of Gotha as Dublin, Aarhus and The Hague.

Despite this crowded landscape of memorialisation, growing in complexity over time, and the weakness of the historical evidence discussed above, the theses-posting preserved its place as the moment of creation. It remained the crucial turning-point in the story of the Reformation. At one level there is a simple reason for this: Luther said it was so. Although he did not mention the actual posting of the theses on the church door, in all of his recorded reflections on the early stages of his career and the origins of the Reformation, Luther considered the indulgence controversy to be the cause and the catalyst. He made this claim in letters to Pope Leo X (May 1518) and Elector Friedrich the Wise (21 November 1518), in which, out of deference to both figures, he tried to justify his criticisms of Tetzel and the indulgence trade and prove that his intervention had arisen out of good faith and a desire for religious truth. And he made the same claims much later in life in his pamphlet Against Hans Worst (1541), in which he set out in detail the origins of the controversy and the reasoning behind his actions. Further reflections were made in his preface to the Wittenberg Latin edition of his works, occasional sessions of his Table Talk , and the preface to his Bible, in which he simply declared that ‘this present strife began with indulgences in the year 1517’. 34 All of the early biographers followed Luther in his assessment that the indulgence controversy was the catalyst of the Reformation and that it was Tetzel, that ‘most impudent sycophant’ (to quote Melanchthon), supported by a coterie of papal yea-sayers, who forced Luther to challenge the teaching of the Church. 35

But there was a deeper logic at work than just deference to Luther’s memory. Faced with Catholic accusations that they had founded a new religion, the early reformers needed to justify the break with Rome while making a case for the antiquity and the orthodoxy of their faith. One of their answers to this dilemma was to remove the human element from Reformation history. Luther’s teachings, it was argued, were not based on personal opinions or internal visions, but rather on the understanding that gradually came to him through the diligent reading of the Word. Melanchthon portrayed Luther in this manner in his Vita Lutheri , the first evangelical biography, in which Luther appears as an agent of the divine awoken to his purpose by the Spirit and fulfilling the will of God. But he does not have a vision or an agenda of his own. The purpose, and the essence, of all his works is to call men’s minds back to the ancient truths of the Church. 36 Further proof of this, indeed the best proof of this, is offered by the Ninety-Five Theses . Luther did not emerge out of obscurity in 1517 with a ready-made confession of the faith but simply with a long list of speculative propositions about indulgences. This was not the foundation document for a new religion but an appeal for dialogue by an anxious Christian concerned with religious truth.

In light of this fact, the reformers argued, there had to be other forces at work in the Reformation, as ancient as the Church itself: namely, the spirit of the Christian community (by which they meant something approximating the medieval notion of the sensus fidelium ) and the providential hand of God. Both testified to the truth and antiquity at the root of Luther’s call for penance in the theses-posting. In the context of late medieval religiosity, few things were more universal than the concern with proper penance and how mankind could make good its sins in the eyes of God. By speaking directly to this question of ‘doing enough’ ( satisfactio ), which was the underlying theme of the Ninety-Five Theses , Luther took on the role of a preacher of penance, a figure of long-standing significance in medieval Christianity, and so placed himself at the very heart of late medieval faith. He was articulating the common spirit of the age. 37 Even more profoundly legitimising, however, was the suggestion that the Reformation was not the work of human hands but rather the predestined work of God. Using the theses-posting as a form of historical proof, the theologians played down Luther’s role and projected the incident as an instance of divine intervention along the lines of Belshazzar’s feast or the burning bush. Had there ever been a greater miracle than this, later memorialists would ask, than the fact that a single monk in a small university town was able to topple the pope from his throne, something that even the greatest potentates had been unable to do? And all on the basis ‘of a few propositions’? 38

This, then, was the importance of the theses-posting for the first few generations of Lutheran historians: it opened with a call for repentance, woke believers from their centuries-long slumber, unveiled the errors of the papacy, and led pious Christians back to the Word. 39 For the Reformation’s founding fathers, who had to avoid the Catholic accusation of novelty, it was the ideal point of origin, for ultimately its importance was not based on the thought or the acts of an individual. On the contrary, this was the moment when God intervened in human affairs, with Luther playing the role of a latter-day John the Baptist pointing the way to Christ. The Wittenberg professor Wolfgang Franz (1564–1628) put it in these terms:

In these propositions—or rather, as we now say, in these theses—Doctor Luther demonstrates the danger, ambiguity, and vanity of the papal indulgence while also showing how a man who, on account of his sins, was suffering great anxiety and burdens of conscience, could console himself in a true Christian manner by way of the Holy Gospel. 40

Admittedly, some scholars saw more than just this. After Luther’s death it was not uncommon for theologians to find traces of his mature theology in the theses. Melanchthon was the first to do this and others followed his example, finding references in the theses to his notions of Scripture alone, grace alone, the distinction between law and gospel, and even justification through faith. And they were not misguided in their views, as modern scholars have pointed out, for even if the theses were more of an exercise in ‘soundbite theology’ than systematic thought, they were based upon long reflection and it is likely that Luther had developed many of his central insights by that stage. 41 But the real value of the theses as a confession of faith, and one of the reasons why the posting was so quickly accepted as the moment of creation, was precisely because Reformation theology was so hard to find in the theses. It would only emerge after the act, once Christians had paid heed to the call to repentance and God had begun to reveal his Word.

Claiming that the Reformation church was founded on Scripture and that it was brought into being by an act of divine intervention enabled Lutherans to answer the Catholic questions about origins. It also enabled them to develop powerful teleological arguments in defence of their church. There were two main lines of thinking in this regard, one historical and the other providential. Both considered the theses-posting to be the culmination of a preordained passage of time.

The idea that Christianity, from the age of Constantine onwards, had experienced a relentless trajectory of decline was a commonplace in the late medieval period. It was particularly popular among heretical groups, but mainstream theologians and humanists made use of it—as did the evangelical reformers in their early struggles with the papacy. Once the first great Lutheran histories appeared, it took hold as the main interpretative framework of Protestant history. Its central assumptions were clear: namely, that over the medieval period the Catholic Church had declined to the point of apostasy and that the pope was in fact the Antichrist. Melanchthon’s edited version of Carion’s Chronicle was the first Lutheran history to work this scheme into its analysis, but the seminal text in this regard was the Magdeburg Centuries (1559–74), composed by the theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus (1520–75) and the other centuriators of Magdeburg. According to Flacius, all of Christian history since the age of the apostles was a tale of unremitting decline. There were, however, inspired individuals (the so-called testes veritatis , the witnesses to truth) who surfaced on occasion through the centuries and testified to the eternal presence of the Word of God, including recent figures such as Jean Gerson, Girolamo Savonarola, John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. All of these men were witnesses to the Christian truth to some degree, though it was not until the Gospel was liberated by Martin Luther and his Reformation that the Church of Christ was reborn and the trajectory of decline was reversed. 42

Lutheran scholars developed a number of historical arguments to bear out this theory of decline, from the rise of papal power to the excesses of medieval monkery, but one of the most persuasive drew its strength from the history of the indulgence trade. Building on the first-hand accounts of Luther and Friedrich Myconius (1490–1546), whose recollections of Johann Tetzel’s campaign provided some of the most scurrilous details (including Tetzel’s infamous claim that indulgences could remit any sin ‘even if someone had slept with Christ’s dear mother’), Lutherans were quick to deploy the example of the late medieval indulgence trade as a riposte to Catholic accusations that there had been no warrant for the Reformation. Indulgences were the ideal case-study for this purpose, for they could be used in a general sense to reveal the alleged failings of the late medieval church, from its empty sacramentalism to the wealth and corruption of the papacy, and they could also stand as a specific example of papal deception. To cite the words of the pastor-biographer Paul Seidel in 1581: ‘In [indulgences] the sheer power amassed by the pope and his cronies becomes clear and present, so too the wretched blindness of our ancestors, who were taken in by such devilry and monkey business and paid for it, to their detriment, dearly enough’. 43

Based on this historical proof, among others—many of which, the Lutherans pointed out, had been provided by loyal sons of Catholicism such as Jean Gerson and Johann Staupitz—it was not difficult to argue that the Church had never been in more desperate need of reform than just before the outbreak of the Reformation. Nor was it difficult to argue that 31 October 1517, when the abuses of the indulgence trade reached the point where Luther was forced to take a stand, was the great turning-point in this long trajectory of decline. Many of the histories written by the Orthodox Lutherans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries open with extended discussions of the decline of the medieval Church and then present the indulgence controversy as the pivotal moment when the long chain of decline finally came to an end and the age of evangelical truth began. Even in studies by members of the post-Seckendorff generations it was common to identify the indulgence controversy as the crucial turn in the Reformation story when, through the intervention of Luther under the guiding hand of providence, the time had finally arrived to reverse the decline of the Church and initiate a new Christian age. 44 As one of his four proofs of the supernatural origins of the Reformation, the Jena theologian Johann Georg Walch (1693–1775) evoked this argument of historical necessity. It was no accident, he proposed, that the Reformation occurred when it did, for God had prepared the ground by allowing the Church to reach the lowest point in its history. ‘In particular’, reasoned Walch, ‘we find that the Reformation had to begin at such a time when the papal atrocities had never been more manifest, namely just as the indulgence racket had reached its final extremes. Luther opposed the trade as something contrary to both reason and Holy Writ, and that is why he was so quickly supported’. 45

Walch’s allusion to divine intervention evokes the other powerful argument a posteriori : namely, the belief that the Reformation was a preordained event in the history of Christianity, brought into being by the guiding hand of God. Adopting this view, as Geoffrey Dickens once remarked, meant that historians began to think of the Reformation as ‘a supernatural act in the history of salvation, to which they [Lutherans] traced their religious roots, but which they viewed in a way that can only be described as profoundly ahistorical’. 46 Scholars could take different approaches to this type of providential analysis. Some adopted the Flacian notion of the ‘witnesses to the truth’ mentioned above, in which a bloodline of true Christians reached all the way from the age of the apostles to the present day, preserved in their perfect faith by the superintending hand of God. Other scholars, particularly during the heyday of Lutheran Orthodoxy, pieced together florilegia of prophecies and predictions to prove that the Reformation was the final act in Christian history. An extremely eclectic range of sources was used in order to support this interpretation, ranging from Scripture and the works of the Church Fathers to other writings such as the Sibylline Oracles, Hermetic literature, late medieval reform literature and Jewish apocalypticism. 47

Within this providential framework, it is interesting to note how many of the prophecies were resolved specifically with reference to the indulgence controversy and the theses-posting. Soon after Luther’s death, historians started to emphasise the prophecies that spoke explicitly about the coming of Luther and his quarrel with the papacy in 1517. Granted, the two most famous prophecies of all—those by the Bohemian heretic Jan Hus and the Eisleben Franciscan Johann Hilten, both of whom predicted that a reforming monk would appear in the year 1516—did not match the year exactly; but most historians passed over this discrepancy in silence or made subtle distinctions about intentions, as did Mathesius when he claimed that 1516 was the year when Luther ‘began to sing’, but 1517 was when his views became public. 48 Other prophecies, however, were easier to relate to the year 1517, including those attributed to respected figures such as the famous Doctor Fleck of Laussig, Johann Staupitz, Martin Pollich von Mellerstadt and Friedrich the Wise. Some scholars made the connection using more ingenious means. Using the logic of typology, for instance, it was common to correlate the year 1517 CE to the year 1517 BCE, the latter date signifying (it was alleged) when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. On a similar note, a popular chronogram of the Ambrosian chant was circulated in which certain highlighted letters stood in for Roman numerals and so pointed to the theses-posting. According to this theory, the proper rearrangement of the letters Tibi Chervbin et Seraphim Incessabili voce proclamant reveals the sequence MCCCCLLVVIIIIIII, which gives the year 1517. 49 This list of prophecies, predictions, acrostics and forewarnings continued to accumulate for well over a century and a half after Luther’s death. Even the Orthodox Lutheran Valentin Ernst Löscher (1673–1749), an exponent of the source-based study of Reformation history, devoted an entire chapter to the prophecies leading up the Reformation. Löscher did not dwell on the year 1517, but, having reduced the various predictions to an essential core—namely, that a learned monk from Wittenberg would emerge who would bring about the fall of the Antichrist and the school philosophies (by which was meant indulgences) on the basis of Scripture—he did not leave much room for speculation. 50

Prophecies and acrostics of this kind provided important proofs for providential narratives, but there was a deeper rationale at work as well. By the mid-seventeenth century, as the Luther biography reached its apogee as a mode of apologetics, the theses-posting was confirmed in its place in the grand arch of providential history. Of course, the conceit that the Reformation more broadly fulfilled the biblical prophecies and thus had to be understood in the light of the Book of Revelation was evident from the very first days of the movement. Indeed, Luther’s identification of the pope as the actual Antichrist, rather than just one of the many predicted by John to appear before the End Time, brought about a heightened concern with sacral history and eschatology, not least because it meant that the latter days were immediately at hand. 51 But the concern with the Reformation’s place in the providential scheme was particularly marked in the seventeenth century, and it often reflected back on the theses-posting.

In the popular exegeses of Revelation 14, for instance, which usually drew on a wide range of biblical prophecies, Luther came to assume the figuration of the first angel flying through the midst of heaven preaching penance and the eternal Gospel. To explain the reference to heaven, the clergy equated it with the Church; but to explain the idea of heavenly flight, many referred to the Ninety-Five Theses . Did they not fly through the lands of Germany and Europe at a miraculous speed and reach the ears of all nations? Indeed, they were born aloft by the great miracle of print, God’s gift to the German people. Were the theses not a call to repentance, sounded from the north at midnight, that brought down the Antichrist from his throne? And was their power not solely based on the Word rather than force, as the prophecies foretold? As Wolfgang Franz (1564–1628) put it, the theses were nothing more than an appeal to the Gospel, landing ‘softly and benevolently’ among the people ‘like rain on dry fields’. 52 Typologies and allegories of this kind were sometimes difficult to relay to parishioners in sermons. Before Johann Friedrich Mayer (1650–1712) began his own reading of Revelation 14 on the anniversary of the theses-posting in 1677, for instance, he advised his public to think of the angel’s wings in abstract, allegorical terms rather than like a painting in the church. Only then could their meaning as something so seemingly impossible as Luther’s flight ( Lutheri Flug ) be understood. 53

Martin Luther the theses-poster, caught up in the flow of providential history, was the ideal figuration of a church founder in the confessional age. For, as 31 October 1517 made clear, he was not a self-proclaimed prophet, just an uneasy Christian, plagued by uncertainty and hedged in by human flaws. Nor was he a self-proclaimed visionary who set out to create a new church. 54 On both counts, the theses offered ample evidence that Luther alone could not have been the founder of the Reformation, for he did not have a prophetic sense of mission or a perfect vision of religious truth at the time. On the contrary, as Löscher wrote, the very conservatism of the Ninety-Five Theses, written when Luther was still in thrall to the papacy, was proof that the Reformation was a miracle; for God worked his miracles through the meek, and the theses were certainly the work of a mild-mannered monk who had not yet grasped the truth. It is worth quoting Löscher in full:

They were clearly written in weakness, for Luther acknowledges the supreme authority of the pope in the same. He takes this as a given, and indeed he rises in defence of the idea, as can be seen in theses 5, 6, 9, 20, 22, 25, 26, 38, 42, 48, and following 61, 78, number 90 and the following theses. And those are mistaken who claim that Luther was already writing about the pope here in a satirical manner and secretly taking shots. On the contrary, at that time Luther’s veneration of the pope was sincere. The evil state of affairs in Rome distressed him, but he had only the best hopes for, and belief in, the Roman See and the pope himself. It may be that he had some doubts at the time on the issue of Purgatory, nevertheless he let it stand here, as theses 10, 17, 19, 22, 25, 29 and others demonstrate. Nor in principle had he rejected the indulgences of the Roman church at the time, as theses 71 and 73 in particular attest, and indeed he still speaks of them with respect and without false Apostolicas venias . 55

In order to sustain the broader framework of providentialism, it was important to emphasise that Luther was merely a tool of God’s will, rather than a supernatural agent directly shaping the destiny of the Church. Thus, even though he was likened to prophets, angels, and Biblical heroes from Noah and Moses to John the Baptist, Daniel and the third Elijah, by the age of Orthodoxy this was meant in a typological or analogical rather than a literal sense. He was termed the instrument or the mouthpiece of the divine, a temple or vessel through which God effected the ‘last Reformation’. But this was not the same thing as being a heaven-sent agent of the divine will, as Georg Nuber (1590–1667) remarked: ‘Although we must concede that Doctor Luther should not be numbered among the prophets and the apostles, nevertheless we hold him to be a unique, glorious, and distinguished teacher of God’s Church’. 56 Luther’s status as an interpreter of the Gospel occasionally reached the point of ‘quasi-papalisation’, but most theologians did not claim that Luther was directly inspired by the divine or ‘completely enlightened’ at the moment of conversion, like Paul. On the contrary, although he may have been ‘awoken’ by God, Luther’s path to the truth was gradual, it had several stages, and it was only possible because he had discovered ‘this new and unheard-of manner of teaching’, by which was meant his turn to Scripture. 57 Some traced this insight back to his first stay in Wittenberg in 1508, others ascribed it to subsequent years; but most were in general agreement that ‘he should be recognised as belonging to those men, as Augustine writes of himself, who rose through teaching and writing and not to those who are suddenly elevated from a low rank without having any substance, without having put in any work, without having wagered anything, or without having learned through experience’. 58 Luther did not have a direct relationship with the divine, so there was no need to treat him as a prophet or claim that his words were infallible. He came to the truth by exercising his office as a preacher and a teacher in the Church.

The issue of Luther’s calling is an appropriate point with which to conclude this analysis of the theses-posting in the early Reformation histories. For even when they were addressing a question so seemingly straightforward as Luther’s credentials as a clergyman, which became a particular point of contention in the seventeenth century, it is interesting to note how often historians invoked the posting of the theses in order to defend Luther’s role as the founding father. For instance, one of the arguments deployed by a long line of Catholic critics from Cochlaeus to Bellarmine was that Luther had no authority to challenge the Catholic magisterium and no warrant, either institutional or prophetic, to assume the mantle of reform. The only reasons he did so, the Catholics argued, were, first, his thirst for power and wealth (by which they meant his desire that his own Augustinian order, rather than Tetzel’s Dominicans, be placed in charge of the indulgence trade); and, secondly, that he was just acting on behalf of his prince the Elector Friedrich the Wise, who wanted to disrupt the designs of his dynastic rival Albrecht of Mainz. 59

On all counts, the Lutherans argued, the claims of the Catholics could be easily disproved by a thorough examination of what happened on 31 October 1517. When Luther stepped up to the church door with his theses in hand, he did so as a legitimate member of the Church, ordained in office by the local Catholic authorities. His purpose was to debate his fellow theologians on the theme of indulgences, which was a right that had been conferred on him in 1512 by virtue of his Wittenberg doctorate. His aim was not to increase the power of his order or elevate his own fame, for he gained nothing by the gesture and he remained very deferential to the Catholic authorities, as the sources attest. Rather, he intended to point out the dangers of the indulgence trade, for which he was accountable to the Christian community on account of his office as a preacher and a teacher in the Church. 60 Indeed, according to the Eisleben clergyman Anton Probus (1537–1613), it was the very posting of the Ninety-Five Theses that fulfilled Luther’s prophetic role in his office as a preacher and teacher of the Word, for that was the moment when he brought about the renewal ‘of the primal, prophetic, apostolic, and catholic teaching, which had been snuffed out and obscured in terrible and miserable fashion by the pope’s terrible idolatry, false teaching, lies, and human opinions’. 61

Sometime around the beginning of the eighteenth century the writing of Reformation history began to change. The model of providential history discussed above attracted more and more criticism, and many of the basic features of the foundational narrative that had been in place since the early sixteenth century—such as the distinction between secular and spiritual history, the Flacian chronologies of rise and decline, the importance of religion in human history, and the role of divine intervention in earthly affairs (including so-called Protestant miracles such as the posting of the theses)—were questioned and often rejected outright. 62 Ultimately, all aspects of the Reformation narrative would be subject to revision, but three trends in particular threatened the survival of the paradigm that had emerged during the confessional age. First, history became much more of an exact discipline, by which is meant, in the first instance, that scholars placed greater stress on archival research and critical use of the primary sources. That is why Seckendorff’s Commentarius was considered to be so important, for it was the first work in which ‘one can see, in an orderly and detailed manner, the process at work in dear Luther’s Reformation’. 63 Secondly, as has been mentioned, historians began to divest Church history of the supernatural. There was no longer a place for divine intervention, no justification for the preservation of theological tradition at the expense of truth, and no need for revelation in works of history where research and reason would suffice. And finally, and following from both of these factors, the study of Church history gradually succumbed to secularising trends, both intellectual and social. Scholars began to apply the same standards of historical exegesis to the sources of ecclesiastical history as they did to documents of political or military history. Even in the study of the Reformation, the primary materials were no longer simply accepted as testimony of God’s greater plan. The records of the past contained ‘mere facts’, nothing inherently revelatory or sacred, and the historian needed to apply the same standards to the interpretation of the spiritual as the secular past. 64

Drawing on these new interpretative techniques, together with the new philosophies and the shifting sentiments of the early Enlightenment, and with a larger body of published primary materials at their disposal, scholars began to revisit some of the foundational episodes of the Reformation narrative, including the posting of the theses. 65 Eventually this led to a change in how historians portrayed the event, though without challenging the long-held conviction that the theses-posting marked the starting-point of the Reformation. On the contrary, with the emergence of the Enlightenment portrayal of the Reformation, Luther and the church door started to monopolise the centre stage.

As mentioned earlier, there were some discrepancies in the original accounts of the theses-posting with reference to the issue of timing. Did Luther dispatch letters before posting the theses? If so, how long was the interval between the two acts? None of the early historians had dealt with this issue in any systematic way. The martyrologist Ludwig Rabus was one of the very few even to touch on it, and his solution was to backdate the Mainz letter to 1 October. 66 Only with the rise of the new historiography did this become a concern, and while (to my knowledge) no Lutheran scholar ever challenged the veracity of the theses-posting outright, some started to question, or at least to re-examine, the facts. Seckendorff, for instance, did not doubt that letters to four bishops had been dispatched, as Myconius claimed, but he did concede that it was difficult to prove this one way or another on account of the absence of source materials. He could only conclude that ‘one can well see how Luther wrote more letters to the bishops than are presently to be found in his collected works’. 67 Löscher was also uneasy about the fact that there was no evidence to support the claim that Luther wrote to four bishops—not even a clear reference from Luther himself. Ernst Salomon Cyprian (1673–1745), like Löscher one of the great Lutheran Orthodox thinkers of his day, had fewer doubts, but he was unable to make a stronger case for the sequence of events than the historians before him. As one writer noted, Cyprian’s use of the word ‘then’ or ‘subsequently’ ( mithin ) in his account of events did little to clarify things. 68

Ultimately, even historians who defended the idea that Luther wrote to the bishops and then waited for their responses undermined, by virtue of their more exacting methods of research, the credibility of the original source-base. Having surveyed the various arguments pro and con , for instance, Johann Gottlob Walter (1704–82) reached the conclusion that the words of Myconius and Luther were more than enough proof that letters had been sent out in advance of the posting. On the basis of this conviction, he then cast doubt on the competence of Georg Rörer (1492–1557) and the editors of the Jena edition of Luther’s works, who had erroneously interpreted Luther’s reference to ‘prelates’ to mean only the archbishop of Mainz and the bishop of Brandenburg. This mistake ‘is all the more remarkable’, Walter added, because these men were in daily contact with Luther during the editing and correcting process. He then added in the footnote that it only goes to show ‘that there are some things in the older works touching on both Reformation history and Luther’s life that are in need of correction’. 69

There were similar concerns about the sequence of events in Wittenberg that led up to the theses-posting. As many of Luther’s early sermons had not yet been recovered or dated, there was only rudimentary knowledge of Luther’s views on indulgences before All Saint’s Eve, and this left room for speculation. Having seen an indulgence letter signed by Tetzel on 5 October 1517 in Berlin, Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel (1659–1707) concluded that the main developments must have taken place after this date—though he knew that Luther had preached against indulgences earlier in the year, just as he knew that Luther had disputed against scholastic theology in September. 70 Similarly, in his compilation of primary materials relating to the indulgence controversy, Johann Erhard Kapp (1696–1756) took up the issue of timing by examining the provenance of Luther’s Sermon on Indulgences and Grace . Kapp correctly dated the sermon to 1517; but he confessed that there was always room for doubt when examining this period of the Reformation, particularly when scholars were forced to rely on the first editions of Luther’s works, ‘as it is well known that the compilers of Luther’s works did not always observe the appropriate level of accuracy, which holds true with reference to dates as well’. 71 Finally, some scholars began to doubt the authenticity of The Dream of Friedrich the Wise , which had emerged as the most powerful support of both the historical and the providential theory of the theses-posting. Catholics had been denying its authenticity for years, of course, but in the early eighteenth century some Lutherans also began to express doubts about the timing, the meaning and the authenticity of the source. As the critics pointed out, neither Luther nor Spalatin ever mentioned the dream; and, they added, it was unlikely that the reformers would have relied on visions of this kind, for such dreams were the stuff of Anabaptism. Convinced that the sources did not add up, Christoph August Heumann (1681–1764) devoted a chapter in his work Lutherus Apocalypticus to the proposition that Friedrich’s dream was nothing more than a fable. 72

Critical re-evaluation of the sources along these lines thus did much to weaken the assumptions of the original providential accounts, but ultimately even more subversive were the new interpretations of the meaning of the theses-posting. Löscher touched on the two main strands of these when he accused Heumann, who was an Enlightenment enthusiast, of indifference and syncretism—by which he meant the growing tendency to look for causation in historical laws rather than in providence, and the application of standards of reason to issues of belief. 73 This was the framework for the revised meaning of the theses-posting during the age of Enlightenment. No longer the moment of divine intervention, as in the providential accounts, 31 October 1517 now became the great turning-point in the history of western civilisation as historical necessity and the use of reason began to displace faith and tradition. Both approaches were still bound to the broader idea that the theses-posting marked the crucial moment in the medieval Church’s trajectory of decline, but they were fundamentally at odds in terms of explanation.

In the works of the early Enlightenment, as profane historians began to outnumber the theologians, it became more and more common to apply the new modes of historical analysis to the Reformation, and this encouraged scholars to view 31 October 1517 in a different light. In place of the providential readings of the past, secular-minded historians started to think of the theses-posting as one link in a chain of historical causation that did not necessarily have to have led to Luther’s separation from Rome. Blame for the division was placed squarely at the door of the papacy, for if the papal theologians had reacted differently to demands for reform, and if the popes had responded with more humility and good will to the critics of the indulgence trade, the Catholic clergy of northern Europe would still be watching over their sheep. 74 To make their case historians began to publish detailed histories of the Church on the eve of the Reformation, drawing on the source materials in order to prove (and not just to preach, as in earlier works) that religion was in a state of crisis at the time and in desperate need of reform. Most scholars still acknowledged that the theses-posting was the critical moment in the story—or, as Erdmann Uhse (1677–1730) put it, ‘the main and most immediate cause of the Reformation’—but it was just still one link in a chain of events. 75

In place of the earlier notion of divine intervention, scholars started to dwell on the mistakes made by the papacy during the indulgence controversy, the underlying idea being that the essential cause of the Reformation was human error. As the jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94) remarked, ‘it was a big mistake on the part of Leo X that he was so quick to take the side of the indulgence peddlers and that he responded to the emerging disputations with the new Bull of November 1518. With this he eliminated all paths to accommodation and removed any hopes Luther may have had about a consensual solution’. 76 Some scholars went even further than this, conceding that Catholic corruption and human error had undoubtedly played their part, but anyone with an understanding of historical causation could see that the coming of the Reformation was inevitable. As Gottlieb Samuel Treuer (1683–1743) put it, ‘by human reckoning, the beginning of the sixteenth century was simply the right time for a great revolution in the Church. Anyone of intelligence could have taken a leaf from Machiavelli and quite easily have seen this coming’. 77

There was also a change in the way historians treated the subject of indulgences. In the foundational narratives, the indulgence controversy had been depicted as the episode that forced Luther to take a stand, the posting of the theses being his divinely inspired act of defiance. But more than this, indulgences perfectly exemplified the teaching and practice of medieval Catholicism for an evangelical audience and thus served as a foil to Luther’s new insights on repentance, grace, and justification. 78 By the late seventeenth century, however, Lutheran historians could no longer assume that their readers even knew what indulgences were. In his 1646 anthology of Luther quotations, for instance, Philipp Saltzmann (1614–67) included a glossary at the end of the work with a number of ‘special terms’ that had fallen out of German usage, including a number relating to the indulgence trade ( Ablassbuben, Ablassnarren, Ablassvogt ). 79 As a way of illustrating the problem, one historian told the story of John Maylorn, an Irish Catholic, who could not believe that Tetzel said the things he said, particularly the infamous quote about sinning against the Virgin Mary, and wagered a thousand pounds that it was not true. Eventually Maylorn was shown the historical proofs, but he never paid up and was last seen living as a Mennonite in Amsterdam. 80

In the face of fading knowledge, Orthodox Lutheran historians started to publish compilations of medieval letters of indulgence or devoted whole chapters in their Reformation histories to the topic in the hope that it would revive memories of the practice. Indeed, Tetzel himself found worthy biographers in Gottfried Hecht and Johann Jacob Vogel, whose detailed treatment of Tetzel’s life, thought, and career helped to explain how he ‘pulled in so many fish with his golden net’. 81 But this effort to preserve the memory of the indulgence trade and remind Protestants of the great danger to salvation that it had posed had little effect on a public that had started to look back on the medieval period as an age of superstition. Historians, too, thought about indulgences in a different manner and were more likely to stress the corruption or the irrationality of the trade than its sacerdotal dangers. Pufendorf, for instance, suggested that Luther posted the theses on ‘good and reasonable’ grounds and that his adversaries were ‘such individuals, whose foolishness and wickedness bring people of honour to sigh’. 82 In his historical survey of the rise of the Reformation, even the theologian Johann Georg Walch stressed the irrationality of the practice before mentioning that it was contrary to Scripture. In his words: ‘The matter itself was unreasonable … something simply illogical and unreasonable’. 83

For Orthodox Lutheran scholars such as Valentin Ernst Löscher, Ernst Salomon Cyprian and Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, all of whom thought of themselves as the keepers of the public memory of the Church, these trends were alarming. To treat the Reformation as a historical event like any other, to suggest that it was brought into being due to political miscalculation (as Pufendorf did), or to propose new models of interpretation (as Heumann did), was to challenge the time-honoured providential reading of the Reformation and lead Christians down the path to religious indifference ( Indifferentismus ). 84 In response these great scholars embarked on an extended campaign of research and recovery in an effort to bring together as much source-material as possible and thereby confirm the original narrative and its assumption that the Reformation was the work of God and the outcome of providence. But there was no denying the shift in perception. The Lutheran histories of this period are shot through with complaints about the lack of interest in Reformation history and the life and the works of Luther. This lack of knowledge was particularly marked among the younger people, as Georg Nuber remarked, who knew ‘next to nothing, or at best very little, about Luther and who he was’. 85 But even more alarming was the growing tendency to treat the Reformation as a purely secular event, and one, moreover, that could be explained with reference to the rise of reason or as the outcome of political decision-making. The Mecklenburg theologian Georg Friedrich Stieber (1684–1755) identified the changing approach:

For just as the secular reigns have their revolutions, their particular times and periods, so too have the Church and the sciences experienced great changes, especially at the start of our own eighteenth century. I’ll make no mention now of philosophy, which has taken on such a different form in our age, nor will I speak of theology, whose discourse and form have also changed over time, and begins to depart from the main methods of the previous century. Rather, I will stick just to history, for even though one may be of the opinion that, because it is based purely on stories and facts, it must remain the same through all times. And yet as we have experienced in our own time, this too can take on a completely different aspect. 86

No one dreaded these changes and the related rise of Indifferentismus more than Löscher. He was also quick to recognise the dangers of the early Enlightenment, and he did not hesitate to cite Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) as its prime mover in Germany. In the work of Thomasius, Löscher saw all of the principles that would eventually bring about the collapse of his mode of Lutheran history, including the displacement of the providential narrative by secular thought, the primacy of reason over revelation as a mode of interpretation, and the supersession of scriptural warrant by natural, social or historical laws. He spent the better part of his life trying to hold back the tide, but in the end, as he recognised, his efforts were in vain. 87 Löscher’s worst fears were realised when Enlightenment thinkers turned their attention to Luther and the origins of the Reformation. In many respects the faith and dogmatism of the Reformation were alien to the Enlightenment mind, and this was demonstrated in its approach to Luther himself. As a historical figure, as Goethe once remarked, the public found Luther’s character fascinating, but this was really the only thing that held their attention. 88 Enlightenment intellectuals had little sympathy for the figure of Luther as the monk who, riddled with doubt and anxiety, rose up against something so trivial as indulgences. The indulgence dispute still held its place as the moment of origin, but historians such as Johann Matthias Schröckh (1733–1808) now had alternative explanations as to why it was that ‘the Reformation, the greatest and most incredible revolution to occur in the Church since the days of Christ and the apostles, emerged out of such a minor dispute’. 89 For Schröckh, as for many other thinkers of the time, the reasons why the Reformation emerged out of so small a matter had little (and perhaps nothing at all) to do with theology or divine providence. Rather, the Reformation came into being because Luther was an early proponent of the values and ideas held so dear by the Enlightenment. Thus for thinkers ranging from church historians such as Walch and Schröck to literary men such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Goethe, or universal scholars such as Anton Friedrich Büsching and Johann Salomo Semler, Luther became the heroic prefiguration of the Enlightenment. In their eyes, Luther’s resolve to take a stand in the indulgence debate was a result of his desire to defend reason and free the Christian conscience from the yoke of late-medieval superstition: and he launched his campaign with the theses-posting. As Friedrich Germanus Lüdke (1730–92) put it, in doing this Luther became in effect the guardian angel of ‘the rights of reason, humanity, and freedom of conscience’, and took on the defence of religious liberty, religious tolerance and the German people against the tyranny of the papacy—which was reason enough, according to Friedrich the Great, ‘for altars to be erected in his honour as the liberator of the Fatherland’. 90 This last point became very important in the age of Romanticism that followed, when Luther took his place among the pantheon of German heroes.

Thus in the historical imagination of the age of the German Enlightenment, the Martin Luther who stepped up to the door of the Castle Church on 31 October 1517 was very different to the figure depicted by Mathesius, Selnecker, or even Löscher. The image that emerged in this period was that of a man full of courage, resolve and certainty of purpose who was determined to free the German Church and the German people from their medieval captivity. He was a freedom fighter of the soul and a champion of the spirit, a hero in the classical mould. ‘Luther was a man of this kind’, read an entry in the Berlin Journal for Enlightenment , ‘as are all who play a leading role in the theatre of the world. Enterprising, fearless, resolute, merciless in the face of prejudice and superstition...’. 91 His main concern was liberty of conscience, which is why he posted the theses in the first place, for all Christians had been created equally and none should be subjected to the judgements of the Church against his or her will. For Semler this was Luther’s lasting legacy to the modern age—that he ‘gave every Christian the freedom to think for himself about Christian ideas and truths and to follow his conscience’. 92 From this liberation of the individual it was a small step to the liberation of the nation, and this too became part of the Enlightenment discourse. For Luther was no longer just a religious but a cultural hero, the man who turned German into a literary language and, to cite a passage in Zedler’s Universal Lexicon , ‘sought with the utmost diligence the uprooting of ignorance among the people’. 93 And of course he was a German as well, a fact eloquently captured in the thought of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the architect of German nationalism, who once remarked that ‘Luther was a powerful mind and the true prophet and preacher of our fatherland’. 94 With Luther being all of these things in the German imagination of the eighteenth century, it is little wonder that something as dramatic as the theses-posting preserved its place in the narrative.

Artists did not really begin to capture this revised image until the gothic revival of the nineteenth century, when Luther emerges with hammer in hand, but we can get some sense of the extended meaning of the theses-posting in Christian Siegmund Georgi’s portrayal of a Wittenberg procession held in 1755 as part of the Peace of Augsburg bicentennial celebrations ( Figure 6 ). Georgi relates how the procession, having begun with a meeting of the professors and other university luminaries in the Lutherstube , made its way through the city streets in the direction of the Castle Church, accompanied throughout by drums, trumpets and choirs. What is particularly interesting is the social mix, for it was not just a parade of university academics and clergymen but an event that included the entire social profile of the town, from noblemen and city councillors to local residents and students, and they were all marching towards ‘the church door on which Doctor Luther of blessed memory posted his propositions against Tetzel’s indulgence trade’. 95 By this stage, the people of Wittenberg, as indeed the people of Germany as a whole, would have been thoroughly familiar with the importance of the theses-posting in German history and they would have associated it with the courageous actions of the great German hero Martin Luther. He was no longer just a religious figure guided by the hand of God but a historical personage of the type projected by the Enlightenment historians, and he had become the common property of the people at large. Commemorating the Reformation and its heroes in this manner became very popular in the eighteenth century; indeed, at some stage in the build-up to the bicentennial celebrations in Wittenberg the magistracy had to order that soldiers with fixed bayonets be deployed in the town, just in case there was trouble with the press of the crowd. This was a rather different scenario to the one faced by the magistracy five years later, when Prussian soldiers patrolled the streets and prepared the defences against an imperial bombardment that would ultimately destroy over half of the town, including the Castle Church and its famous door.

The Procession: Georgi, Wittenbergische Jubel-Geschichte (1756), pp. 49–50. Image by permission of SLUB Dresden, http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id427022533/80 ( CC-BY-SA 4.0 ).

Christian Siegmund Georgi, Wittenbergische Klage-Geschichte (Wittenberg, 1760), p. 28. For the history of the Castle Church and its destruction and reconstruction, see M. Steffens and I.C. Hennen, eds., Von der Kapelle zum Nationaldenkmal: Die Wittenberger Schlosskirche (Wittenberg, 1998).

Matthaeus Faber, Kurzgefasste historische Nachricht von der Schloss- und Academischen Stiffts-Kirche zu Aller-Heiligen in Wittenberg (Wittenberg, 1717), mentioned in the preface by Gottlieb Wernsdorff.

Georgi, Wittenbergische Klage-Geschichte , p. 6.

H. Lehmann, Luthergedächtnis 1817 bis 2017 (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 17–34; on nineteenth-century memorialisation, see M. Steffens, Luthergedenkstätten im 19. Jahrhundert. Memoria—Repräsentation—Denkmalpflege (Regensburg, 2008); S. Reichelt, Der Erlebnisraum Lutherstadt Wittenberg. Genese, Entwicklung und Bestand (Göttingen, 2012).

Georgi, Wittenbergische Klage-Geschichte , p. 56.

E. Benz, ‘Symbole und Ereignisse der Reformation’, in R. Schmidt, ed., Die Bedeutung der Reformation für die Welt von Morgen (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), p. 70; see also the discussion in V. Leppin, ‘Die Monumentalisierung Luthers: Warum vom Thesenanschlag erzählt wurde—und was davon zu erzählen ist’, in J. Ott and M. Treue, eds., Luthers Thesenanschlag—Faktum oder Fiktion (Leipzig, 2008), pp. 69–92.

U. Barth, Aufgeklärter Protestantismus (Tübingen, 2004), p. 94.

For recent discussions of the theses debate, see Ott and Treue, eds., Luthers Thesenanschlag ; V. Leppin and T. Wengert, ‘Sources For and Against the Posting of the Ninety-Five Theses ’, Lutheran Quarterly , xxix (2015), pp. 373–98; and the articles in I. Dingel and H.P. Jürgens, eds., Meilensteine der Reformation. Schlüsseldokumente der frühen Wirksamkeit Martin Luthers (Gütersloh, 2014). For a wide-ranging survey of the theses-posting through history, see now P. Marshall, 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation (Oxford, forthcoming).

Recent research has proposed that a marginal comment about the theses-posting by Georg Rörer in Luther’s working copy of the Bible may precede Melanchthon’s published remarks (and perhaps even Luther’s death). But even if this were the case, Rörer’s comment remained buried in his research notes and would have been seen by very few. See M. Treu, ‘Urkunde und Reflexion: Wiederentdeckung eines Belegs für Luthers Thesenanschlag’, in Ott and Treu, eds., Luthers Thesenanschlag , pp. 59–68.

Johann Christian Crell, Sächsisches Curiositäten Cabinet (Dresden, 1731), pt. ii, pp. 82–9.

Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke (65 vols., Weimar, 1883–1993) [hereafter WA], l. 348–51. In 1532 Luther feared that renovation work on the town defences threatened to destroy his study where ‘ich doch das bapstumb gesturmet habe’; quoted in H. Schilling, Martin Luther. Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs (Munich, 2012), p. 127.

It is interesting to note that early modern scholars regularly declared that Luther had the theses printed in Wittenberg before posting them on the church door, and indeed some even professed to own a copy. The Husum clergyman Johann Melchior Krafft, for instance, claimed to have a Wittenberg original, and Johann Quodvultdeus Bürger, among others, claimed to have consulted it, though the description Krafft gives of the format also matches the Nuremberg print. See Johann Melchior Krafft, Das andere Hundert-Jährige Jubel-Jahr der Evangelischen Kirchen, von der 1517 angegangenen Reformation (Hamburg, 1717), p. 10. Both Bernd Moeller and Andrew Pettegree have convincingly argued that the Nuremberg and Leipzig prints were based on an original by the Wittenberg printer Rhau-Grünenberg; see B. Moeller, ‘Thesenanschläge’, in Ott and Treu, eds., Luthers Thesenanschlag , pp. 9–31, and A. Pettegree, Brand Luther (New York, 2015), pp. 70–72. According to the Nuremberg jurist Christoph Scheurl (1481–1542), the copies sent out by Luther were ‘bloss geschrieben’; see E. Iserloh, Luthers Thesenanschlag: Tatsache oder Legende? (Wiesbaden, 1962), p. 31.

H. Volz, Martin Luthers Thesenanschlag und dessen Vorgeschichte (Weimar, 1959), pp. 19–27; Iserloh, Luthers Thesenanschlag , pp. 3–40. The matter is further complicated by the account by Friedrich Myconius in his Historia Reformationis . According to Myconius, Luther first wrote to the bishops of Meissen, Frankfurt [Brandenburg or Lebus], Zeitz and Merseburg as well as Mainz. With no response forthcoming, he had the theses printed and made his criticisms public. This question of timing has recently been re-examined in H. Junghans, ‘Martin Luther, kirchliche Magnaten und Thesenanschlag’, in Ott and Treu, eds., Luthers Thesenanschlag , pp. 33–46.

Iserloh, Luthers Thesenanschlag , p. 20. Spalatin did not comment on the theses, but his history in its published form only begins in 1518 due to the fact that the manuscript (to cite the editor) ‘durch die Länge der Zeit beydes Anfang und Ende gantz verlohren gegangen, in der Mitte aber vieles durch Nässe und Moder zerfressen und verderbet worden’; see the preface by Ernst Salomon Cyprian in Georgii Spalatini Annales Reformationis (Gotha, 1718), fo. a3v.

V. Leppin, ‘“Nicht seine Person, sondern die Wahrheit zu verteidigen”. Die Legende vom Thesenanschlag in lutherischer Historiographie und Memoria’, in H. Schilling, ed., Der Reformator Martin Luther 2017. Eine wissenschaftliche und gedenkpolitische Bestandsaufnahme (Berlin, 2015), pp. 85–97. On early representations of Luther in general, see L. Roper, ‘Martin Luther’s Body: The “Stout Doctor” and his Biographers’, American Historical Review, cxv (2010), pp. 351–84.

Caspar Peucer, Liber quintus chronici Carionis a Friderico Secundo usque ad Carolum Quintum (Wittenberg, 1566), fo. Vv3r; Caspar Peucer, Chronica Carionis (Wittenberg, 1588), p. 1080.

Der Neundte Teil der Bücher der Ehrnwirdigen Herrn D. Martini Lutheri (Wittenberg, 1557), fo. 9v; Der erste Teil der Bücher und Schrifften des theuren, seligen Mans Doct: Mart: Luther, vom XVII Jar an, bis auff des XXII (Jena, 1555), fo. 2v. The Jena edition terms them ‘Sprüche’, the Wittenberg edition ‘Propositiones’.

Quoted in S.J. Lee, ‘Luther-Rezeption bei Gottfried Arnold’ (Marburg Univ. diss., 2010), p. 75.

Paul Seidel, Historia und Geschicht des Ehrwirdigen unsers in Gott lieben Vaters, Herrn Doctoris Martini Lutheri (Wittenberg, 1581), pp. 1–2; similar views were expressed in Anton Probus, Renovalia Lutheri (Jena, 1590), fo. C1v; Georg Glocker, Wahrhafftige Historia, und gründlicher summarischer Bericht (Strasbourg, 1586), fo. C3r; Nikolaus Selnecker, Historica Oratio vom Leben und Wandel … Martini Lutheri (Leipzig, 1576), fo. 11v; Johannes Mathesius, Historien von des Ehrwirdigen in Gott seligen thewren Manns Gottes, Doctoris Martini Luthers, Anfang, Lehr, Leben und Sterben (Nuremberg, 1567), fo. CCXv.

On the role of local pastors for the preservation of memory, see S. Dornheim, Der Pfarrer als Arbeiter am Gedächtnis. Lutherische Erinnerungskultur in der Frühen Neuzeit zwischen Religion und sozialer Kohäsion (Leipzig, 2013).

H.J. Schönstädt, Antichrist, Weltheilsgeschehen und Gottes Werkzeug. Römische Kirche, Reformation und Luther im Spiegel des Reformationsjubiläums 1617 (Wiesbaden, 1978), pp. 10–85, 200–253; T. Kaufmann, ‘Reformationsgedenken in der Frühen Neuzeit. Bemerkungen zum 16. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche , cvii (2010), pp. 285–324; R. Kastner, Geistlicher Rauffhandel. Form und Funktion der illustrierten Flugblätter zum Reformationsjubiläum 1617 in ihrem historischen und publizistischen Kontext (Frankfurt, 1982), pp. 195, 244, 310–19, 352–5.

Balthasar Meisner et al., Christliche Evangelische Lutherische Jubel Predigten, auff das Erste, hohe Lutherische Jubelfest (Wittenberg, 1618), pp. 18, 64–5, 75, 83–4; Lehmann, Luthergedächtnis, pp. 17–24; Kaufmann, ‘Reformationsgedenken’, p. 321.

R.W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987), pp. 310–13; H. Volz, ‘Der Traum Kurfürst Friedrichs des Weisen vom 30./31. Oktober 1517’, Gutenberg Jahrbuch , xlv (1970), pp. 174–211.

For a bibliographical overview of the various works, see Ernst Gustav Vogel, Bibliotheca Biographica Lutherana (Halle, 1851), pp. 31–4, 84–7.

On the influence of Seckendorff’s Commentarius and its mix of history and apologetics, see S. Strauch, Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff: Reformationsgeschichtsschreibung—Reformation des Lebens—Selbstbestimmung zwischen lutherischer Orthodoxie, Pietismus und Frühaufklärung (Münster, 2005), pp. 132–49; Seckendorff emphasised the first seven years of Luther’s life, considering this the crucial period ( propria historia Lutheri ).

Ernst Salomon Cyprian, Hilaria Evangelica (Gotha, 1719), p. 65.

H. Cordes, Hilaria evangelica academica. Das Reformationsjubiläum von 1717 an den deutschen lutherischen Universitäten (Göttingen, 2006), pp. 22–75.

Christoph Heinrich Rittmeier, Vorbereitung zu dem instehenden Evangelischen Jubel-Jahre (Helmstedt, 1716), fo. A2v.

Johann Heinrich Feustking, Historia Clerogamiae Evangelicae, sive de primo Sacerdote marito Lutherano, Bartholomaeo Bernardi, schediasma historico-theologicum (Wittenberg, 1703), p. 18.

E. Wolgast, ‘Biographie als Autoritätsstiftung: Die ersten evangelischen Lutherbiographien’, in W. Berschin, ed., Biographie zwischen Renaissance und Barock (Heidelberg, 1993), p. 64; Roper, ‘Martin Luther’s Body’, pp. 364–6.

See W. Müller, ed., Das historische Jubiläum. Genese, Ordnungsleistung und Inzenierungsgeschichte eines institutionellen Mechanismus (Münster, 2004); W. Flügel, Konfession und Jubiläum. Zur Institutionalisierung der lutherischen Gedenkkultur in Sachsen, 1617–1830 (Leipzig, 2005), pp. 26–84; J. Eibach and M. Sandel, eds., Protestantische Identität und Erinnerung. Von der Reformation bis zur Bürgerrechtsbewegung in der DDR (Göttingen, 2003); Lehmann, Luthergedächtnis , pp. 17–24; Kaufmann, ‘Reformationsgedenken’, 285–324.

N. Krentz, ‘Auf den Spuren der Erinnerung. Wie die “Wittenberger Bewegung” zu einem Ereignis wurde’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung , xxxvi (2009), pp. 363–95; J. Burckhardt, Das Reformationsjahrhundert. Deutsche Geschichte zwischen Medienrevolution und Institutionsbildung, 1517–1617 (Stuttgart, 2002), pp. 30–48.

Johann Nicholaus Weislinger, Huttenus Delarvatus (Constance, 1730), pp. 29–30.

Volz, Martin Luthers Thesenanschlag, pp. 19–27; Iserloh, Luthers Thesenanschlag , pp. 4–7; WA, li. 538 and liv. 180.

R. Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, Hero: Images of the Reformer, 1520–1620 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), pp. 21–5.

I. Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 1–9.

W.E. Winterhager, ‘Ablasskritik als Indikator historischen Wandels vor 1517: Ein Beitrag zu Voraussetzungen und Einordnungen der Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte , xc (1999), pp. 6–71; B. Hamm, Der frühe Luther (Tübingen, 2010), pp. 90–114; B. Moeller, Die Reformation und das Mittelalter (Göttingen, 1991), pp. 53–72.

Schönstädt, Antichrist, Weltheilsgeschehen und Gottes Werkzeug , p. 240, no. 16; Cyriakus Spangenberg, Von der Geistlichen Hausshaltung und Ritterschaft D. Martin Lutheri (Eisleben, 1563), fos. G3v–G4r.

See, for instance, Ernst Salomon Cyprian, Frederici Myconii Historia Reformationis (Gotha, 1718), pp. 102–4; Der erste Teil der Bücher und Schrifften , fo. Ar; Mathesius, Historien , fo. XIIv; Probus, Renovalia Lutheri , fo. C1v; Matthias Hoe von Hoenegg, Christliches Geburt und Lobgedächtnis des … D. Martini Lutheri (Leipzig, 1604), fo. Bv.

Wolfgang Franz, sermon of 31 Oct. 1617, in Meisner et al., Christliche Evangelische Lutherische Jubel Predigten , p. 83.

Hamm, Der frühe Luther , pp. 62–72; Thönissen, ‘Luthers 95 Thesen gegen den Ablass’, pp. 96–7; M. Schmidt, ‘Luthers 95 Ablassthesen als kirchliches Bekenntnis’, Lutherjahrbuch , xlv (1978), pp. 35–55; D. Bagchi, ‘Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and the Contemporary Criticism of Indulgences’, in R.N. Swanson, ed., Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe (Leiden, 2006), pp. 331–55, at 341. With reference to the idea of justification, Mathesius noted that Luther ‘etwas dunckler von diesem Artickel redete’ in the theses and only worked out the full implications over time; see Mathesius, Historien , fo. XIIv.

On this, see M. Pohlig, Zwischen Gelehrsamkeit und konfessioneller Identitätsstiftung. Lutherische Kirchen- und Universalgeschichtsschreibung, 1546–1617 (Tübingen, 2007), pp. 301–22.

Seidel, Historia und Geschicht , p. 25.

Elias Veiel, Historia et necessitas reformationis evangelicae, per B. Lutherum feliciter institutae (Ulm, 1692), pp. 26–8.

Johann Georg Walch, Historische und theologische Einleitung in die Religions-Streitigkeiten der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirchen (5 vols., Jena, 1733–9), i. 11.

A.G. Dickens and J.M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Oxford, 1985), p. 95.

R.B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis : Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, CA, 1988), pp. 60–258; V. Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag. Das Profil apokalyptischer Flugschriftenpublizistik im deutschen Luthertum, 1548–1618 (Gütersloh, 1999), pp. 206–92.

Mathesius, Historien , fos. Xir–XIIr, CXCVIIIr. On the strength of these two prophecies, Georg Mylius went so far as to refer to 1516 as the year of the theses-posting; see M. Pohlig, ‘Luthers Thesenanschlag von 1516 (!) und seine prophetische Legitimation. Georg Mylius’ Gedenkpredigt von 1592’, in S. Rau and B. Studt, eds., Geschichte schreiben. Ein Quellen- und Studienhandbuch zur Historiografie (ca. 1350–1750 ) (Berlin, 2010), pp. 501–6. Over time, as Thomas Kaufmann has remarked, these references were ‘corrected’ and 1517 became the standard year. In large part this was due to the authority of Luther’s own recollections. As Kaufmann writes, ‘Durch Luthers Äusserungen … war die “Kanonizität” des Initialdatums 1517 gesichert’: ‘Reformationsgedenken’, p. 292, no. 34.

Kaspar Roth, Gloria Lutheri (Leipzig, 1619), pp. 1–25; Selnecker, Historica Oratio , fos. 11r–13r; Seidel, Historia und Geschicht , pp. 10–25; Glocker, Wahrhafftige Historia , fos. C4r–C7v; on these prophecies in general, see Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero , pp. 75–126.

Valentin Ernst Löscher, Vollständige Reformations-Acta and Documenta (3 vols., Leipzig, 1720), i. 145–73.

A. Seifert, Der Rückzug der biblischen Prophetie von der neueren Geschichte (Cologne, 1990), pp. 1–10.

Franz, sermon of 31 Oct. 1617, in Meisner, ed., Christliche Evangelische Lutherische Jubel Predigten , pp. 84, 75; Simon Gedick, Solennitas Jubliaei (Leipzig, 1618), fos. Ciiv, F4r–v; Valerius Herberger, Gloria Lutheri et Evangelicorum (Leipzig, 1608), pp. 30–120 (Herberger spoke of the origins of the Reformation as an ‘Engelische[r] Federkrieg’); Schönstädt, Antichrist, Weltheilsgeschehen und Gottes Werkzeug , pp. 256–60. Revelations 14 became a popular theme for anniversary sermons, which were then often reworked and turned into substantial theological works. See Johann Friedrich Mayer, Lutherus Apocalypticus (Leipzig, 1677), pp. 150–64; Johann Müller, Defensio Lutheri Defensi (Frankfurt am Main, 1684), pp. 48–58; Christoph August Heumann, Lutherus Apocalypticus (Hanover, 1717), which is a revisionist collection of six dissertations that begins with the typology of Michael and the dragon. There is a survey of the main interpretations from Bugenhagen to Heumann in Johann Georg Walch, D. Martin Luthers Sämmtliche Schriften (23 vols., Halle, 1740–53), xv. 82–3.

Mayer, Lutherus Apocalypticus, pp. 149–50.

As Luther’s own confession that ‘I got into these turmoils by accident and not by will or intention’ seemed to confirm: WA, liv. 180.

Löscher, Vollständige Reformations-Acta and Documenta , p. 459. Löscher was primarily referring to Hermann von der Hardt in his discussion of those who claimed that Luther wrote satirically.

Georg Nuber, Lutherus Redivivus (Stuttgart, 1658), fo. (a)2v; Philipp Melanchthon, Vita Lutheri , ed. and tr. Matthias Ritter (Frankfurt am Main, 1564), fo. Vvr; Mathesius, Historien , fo. Aiiv; Georg Mylius, Parentatio Lutheri (Wittenberg, 1592), fo. A4v; Mayer, Lutherus Apocalypticus , pp. 92–4; Schönstädt, Antichrist, Weltheilsgeschehen und Gottes Werkzeug , pp. 286–303.

Selnecker, Historica Oratio , fo. 8v; Wolgast, ‘Biographie als Autoritätsstiftung’, p. 43. In 1617 many of the clergy numbered him among the ‘pastors and teachers’ evoked in Ephesians 4:11; see Schönstädt, Antichrist, Weltheilsgeschehen und Gottes Werkzeug , pp. 260–2.

Selnecker, Historica Oratio , fo. 28r–v; Mathesius, Historien , fos. xiiv–xiiiv; Matthias Hoe von Hoenegg, Martinalia Sacra Pragensia (Leipzig, 1613), pp. 26–7. These are close to the words of Luther himself, who, also citing Augustine, claimed ‘I was not one of those who from nothing suddenly rise to the top’: quoted in S.H. Hendrix, Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer (New Haven, CT, 2015), p. 41.

See the surveys in Philipp Hailbrunner, Der unschuldige Luther (Laugingen, 1599), and Johann Müller, Lutherus Defensus (Hamburg, 1634). See also E.W. Zeeden, Martin Luther und die Reformation im Urteil des deutschen Luthertums (2 vols., Freiburg, 1950), ii. 113–14.

Glocker, Wahrhafftige Historia , fos. B2r–C3r; Andreas Kesler, Luthertum (Coburg, 1630), pp. 15–59, at 57; Müller, Defensio Lutheri Defensi , pp. 69–115.

Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero , pp. 96.

T. Fuchs, ‘Das Ringen mit der Tradition. Die Kritik an Kirche und Religion in der Historiographie der Aufklärungsepoche’, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte , lv (2003), pp. 121–37.

Erdmann Uhse, Kirchen-Historie des XVI und XVII Jahr-Hunderts nach Christi Geburth (Leipzig, 1710), fo. )(3v.

P.H. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (London, 1975), pp. 2–21; John Stroup, ‘Protestant Church Historians in the German Enlightenment’, in H.E. Bödeker et al., eds., Aufklärung und Geschichte. Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 1986), pp. 169–92; D.R. Kelly, Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven, CT, 2003), pp. 9–16. On the foundations, see U. Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus und in der Aufklärung. Die Vorgeschichte des Historizismus (Munich, 1991).

The theses and the indulgence dispute were the subject of a number of university disputations over the course of the seventeenth century, including defences overseen by Wolfgang Franz (1617), Johann Conrad Dannhauer (1661), Johann Friedrich Mayer (1685) and Hermann van der Hardt (1703). Occasionally scholars mention a manuscript history of the conflict written by Konrad Samuel Schurzfleisch entitled Anfang und Ursach Doctor Luthers Predigen und Schreiben wieder den Ablass . I have not been able to locate a copy of this work.

Leppin, ‘Nicht seine Person, sondern die Wahrheit zu verteidigen’, p. 93; Ludwig Rabus, Historien der Martyrer (2 vols., Strasbourg, 1571–2), vol. ii, fo. Avir.

Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, Ausführliche Historie des Lutherthums und der heilsamen Reformation , ed. and tr. Elias Frick (Leipzig, 1714), pp. 62–84, at 66.

Johann Gottlob Walter, Ergäntzte und verbesserte Nachrichten von den Letzten Thaten und Lebensgeschichten des seligen D. Luthers (Jena, 1750), pt. i, section 2, pp. 97–8. Walter is referring to the following passage in Ernst Salomon Cyprian, Historia der Augspurgischen Confession (Gotha, 1730), ch. 2, p. 23: ‘Er schriebe auch, wie Myconius berichtet, so wohl an seinen ordentlichen Bischoff nach Brandenburg, als an den Cardinal Albrechten, sehr demüthig, bate zugleich um Unterricht, und Abstellung des grossen aus dem Ablass-Kram erwachsenden Aergernisses, mithin schluge er den 31. Octobris gewisse Sätze von der Busse und von dem Ablass, darüber zu disputiren, und die Wahrheit zu erforschen, öffentlich an’.

Walter, Ergäntzte und verbesserte Nachrichten, pp. 101, 106. Working on the assumption that Luther’s reference to ‘prelates’ in his letter to Leo X (‘aliquot magnates ecclesiarum’ in the original Latin, ‘etliche Prelaten’ in the German) signifies more than just Mainz and Brandenburg, Walter criticised the marginal note in the Jena edition for interpreting it to mean just these two men. Even worse than this, he added, is the fact that the marginal comment refers the reader back to the copies of Luther’s letters to Mainz and Brandenburg, one of which is dated 31 October 1517 (Mainz) and the other May 1518 (Brandenburg). See Der erste Teil der Bücher und Schrifften , fos. 1r–2r, 43r–44 v , 47v. See also the survey in Walch, D. Martin Luthers Sämmtliche Schriften , xviii. 31–2. Many aspects of Walter’s analysis touch on the same points that would later be raised by Iserloh, Volz and Bornkamm in the modern debate.

Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel, ed., Monatliche Unterredungen , xi (Nov. 1697), pp. 900–922; Ernst Wilhelm Tentzel, Historischer Bericht vom Anfang und ersten Fortgang der Reformation Lutheri (Gotha, 1717), pp. 234–64.

Johann Erhard Kapp, Sammlung einiger zum Päbstlichen Ablass überhaupt, Sonderlich aber zu der im Anfang der Reformation zwischen D. Martin Luther und Johann Tetzel hiervon geführten Streitigkeit gehörigen Schrifften (Leipzig, 1721), p. 309. See also Walch, D. Martin Luthers Sämmtliche Schriften , xviii. 35–6. On the dating of Luther’s pre-theses indulgence sermons, see T. Wengert, ‘Martin Luther’s Preaching of Indulgences in January 1517’, Lutheran Quarterly , xxix (2015), pp. 62–75.

Heumann, Lutherus Apocalypticus , pp. 73–115.

Valentin Ernst Löscher, ed., Unschuldige Nachrichten , xviii (1718), p. 299.

Christian Kortholt, Papa Schismaticus (Rostock, 1663), pp. 11–25; Johann Georg Lairitz, Der Römische Pabsts-Thron (Bayreuth, 1685), pp. 845–94. See also Nicholas Hunnius, Offentlicher Beweiss, dass Martinus Luther zu des Pabstthumbs Reformation rechtmässig von Gott sey beruffen worden (Dresden, 1717), preface by Löscher.

Uhse, Kirchen-Historie des XVI und XVII Jahr-Hunderts , p. 60.

Samuel von Pufendorf, Politische Betrachtung der geistlichen Monarchie (Halle, 1717), pp. 187–8.

Gottlieb Samuel Treuer, Die politischen Fehler des päbstlichen Hofes welche die Reformation Lutheri sollen befördert haben (Leipzig, 1718), p. 19.

Hamm, Der frühe Luther , pp. 90–114.

Philipp Saltzmann, Singularia Lutheri (Naumburg, 1646), ‘Sonderbare Worte’, p. 1.

Hugo Wismeider, Historische Untersuchung, ob die bekannte Lästerung wider die hl. Mutter Gottes dem päpstischen Ablass-Crämer Johann Tetzeln, mit Grund könne zugeschrieben werden? (Jena, 1718), pp. 25–6.

Johann Jacob Vogel, Leben des päbstlichen Gnaden-Predigers oder Ablass-Crämers Johann Tetzels (Leipzig, 1717), p. 125; Gottfried Hecht, Vita Joannis Tezelii Quaestoris Sacri (Wittenberg, 1717). Walch drew on the recent work on indulgences for his huge collection of sources in Sämmtliche Schriften , xv. 1–469.

Pufendorf, Politische Betrachtung , p. 175.

Walch, Historische und theologische Einleitung , i. 12.

Georg Friedrich Stieber, Vorspiel zur Historia der Reformation und Leben Lutheri (Güstrow, 1710), p. 254; Löscher, ed., Unschuldige Nachrichten , xviii, p. 295.

Nuber, Lutherus Redivivus , fo. B2r.

Georg Friedrich Stieber, Historien von des Ehrwürdigen in Gott seeligen theueren Mannes Gottes D. Martin Luthers (Güstrow, 1715), fo. a4r.

M. Greschat, Zwischen Tradition und neuem Anfang. Valentin Ernst Löscher und der Ausgang der lutherischen Orthodoxie (Witten, 1971), pp. 20–75; compare I. Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge, 2007).

A. Beutel, ‘Martin Luther im Urteil der deutschen Aufklärung. Beobachtungen zu einem epochalen Paradigmawechsel’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche , cxii (2015), p. 164.

Johann Matthias Schröckh, Das Leben Martin Luthers (Frankfurt, 1771), p. 9.

Beutel, ‘Martin Luther im Urteil der deutschen Aufklärung’, pp. 164, 168; Zeeden, Martin Luther , i. 189–316; H. Bornkamm, Luther im Spiegel der deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Göttingen, 1970), pp. 13–19, at 17; H. Stephan, Luther in den Wandlungen seiner Kirche (Berlin, 1951), pp. 35–49.

Andreas Riem, ‘Wie weit erstreckt sich die Macht der weltlichen Obrigkeit in Religionssachen’, Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung , i (1788), pp. 248–9.

Zeeden, Martin Luther , i. 231.

Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste (68 vols., Halle and Leipzig, 1731–54), xviii. 1292.

Zeeden, Martin Luther , i. 322.

Christian Siegmund Georgi, Wittenbergische Jubel-Geschichte (Wittenberg, 1756), p. 49.

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Why 1517? The Ninety-Five Theses in Context

By Yvonne Petry

Introduction

Any list of historic events or people includes Martin Luther (1483–1546) and the beginning of the Reformation in 1517 as one of the top ten historic changes in world history. The spark that Luther struck with the Ninety-Five Theses lit a fire across Western Europe, found a receptive audience among fellow clergymen and scholars, but also knights, urban middle class, and unhappy peasants. The German Reformation began in Wittenberg, where Luther taught, but within a few years spread throughout Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, then to England and Scandinavia. Over the next forty years, entire nations broke from the authority of the Roman church and redrew the map of Europe.

Martin Luther himself recognized the impact of the events of 1517. Looking back to that year thirty years later, by which time Luther was in his sixties, he wrote that

I was a preacher, a young Doctor of Theology, as they say. I began to dissuade the people from lending an ear to the shouts of the indulgence-sellers. I told them that they had better things to do and that I was sure that in these matters I had the pope on my side. … What I did toppled heaven and consumed earth by fire. [1]

One of the big questions historians ask about the history of church reform is: why did Martin Luther succeed when others before him had failed? One of the most common answers to this question is that, by 1517, European society had begun to change in fundamental ways, but the church as an institution had not.  

Late Medieval Christianity

In order to understand what happened in 1517, it is vital to begin by examining the social history of the Christian Church prior to the Reformation. Medieval Christianity was vibrant in many ways. For the peasants, who comprised the vast majority of the population, Christianity was part of village life. They did not understand complicated doctrines concerning the Trinity or the nature of Christ. Rather, they participated in the ritual life of the church, a life that was shared communally. They called on the saints for healing or protection; they watched the priest elevate the sacred host, believing he was doing something miraculous; they went on pilgrimages to view relics; they feasted and fasted according to the church calendar; and they relied on the sacraments of the church to carry them from cradle to grave and into the next life.

Most people did not worry about their salvation – after all, they were being watched over by the saints, and they had priests, monks, and nuns were praying for their souls. They understood that after death, people went to purgatory for a final cleansing or “purging” of their sins, on the path upward to heaven. Scholastic theology – called scholastic because it came out of the medieval universities – suggested that if individuals did their best, God would recognize their efforts and help them on their way.  

The Sacrament of Penance and the Sale of Indulgences

To understand the issue with indulgences, it is also important to know something about the sacrament of penance, which was the way in which the church promised people absolution of their sins. It involved three actions: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. Priests used books called penitentials which listed the appropriate action that would give satisfaction for any given sin. Typical acts of penance included fasting on bread and water, repeating the Ave Maria or Lord’s Prayer, giving alms, or visiting a shrine. Because acts of penance were often inconvenient, it became increasingly common to buy an indulgence rather than perform an act of penance.

Penitential practices evolved slowly over several centuries. Indulgences were first used during the crusades and promised remission of sins to those who fought in the Holy Land. Popes then began to issue them to those who made pilgrimages to Rome. By the fourteenth century, funds raised from indulgences were being used to repair and build churches. In 1343, Pope Clement VI began to speak of the treasury of merits, the concept that the church possessed surplus merits that could be purchased. In 1476, Sixtus IV said that indulgences could be used to help souls in purgatory; in other words, indulgences became transferable from one person to another.

With these developments, penitental practices also began to sound quite financial. In fact, scholastic theologians borrowed metaphors from the expanding money economy and the new science of bookkeeping. It was as though individuals had their own bank accounts with debits (sins) and credits (merits). Each sin committed depleted the account; fortunately, the Church possessed an inexhaustible reserve of surplus measured. As God’s representative on earth, the pope was the chief financial officer of the whole operation. By the late fifteenth century, increasing numbers of “pardoners” roamed around Europe, selling indulgences; we find one such individual in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1476) .

The penitential system was based on the assumption that sin was quantifiable, and that the Church possessed the surplus merits to allow individuals to indulge in those merits in order to receive pardon for their own or others’ sins. Whatever we may think of this system, it did possess a sort of logical coherence. And it was accepted as valid for many centuries.

In summary, by the late Middle Ages, a picture emerges of tight-knit village communities, held together by festivals, by rituals, and processions, and more or less assured that the sacraments of the Church, including the sacrament of penance, would enable them to go to heaven. However, long before the Reformation began, it was clear that there were cracks appearing in the edifice of the institutional church.  

The Church as Institution

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Christian Church was not only the most important religious institution at the centre of European culture, society, and political life. Over many centuries, the Church had also become thoroughly wedded to the hierarchical class structure of Western Europe. In other words, the Church hierarchy mirrored the social hierarchy, with some bishoprics remaining in the hands of the same noble family over generations.

The office of the pope was a hugely important political position, and medieval popes repeatedly claimed authority over kings and emperors. Papal power reached its peak during the twelfth century, but then slowly began to erode. By 1309, political instability in Rome and political manoeuvering by Philip IV of France resulted in the pope leaving Rome for southern France, where his successors would remain for the next seventy years. The Avignonese popes tended to serve the interests of the French kings. Efforts to return to Rome resulted in the Great Schism in 1378 when two rival popes claimed precedence; efforts to resolve the Schism in turn led to a period where three men claimed to be pope. This institutional chaos ended only in 1417.  

Early Reformers

Beginning in the fourteenth century, there was general recognition that the Church needed reform at many levels. In fact, nearly two hundred years before Luther was born, Oxford Professor John Wycliffe (1320–1384) was outspoken in his criticism of the wealth of the church, the immorality of the clergy, and practices such as the veneration of saints. In the 1380s, he began translating the Bible into English and saw the need to make it available in the vernacular languages. The Czech scholar Jan Hus (1369–1415) translated Wycliffe’s work and ideas and introduced his program of reform in Bohemia.

At the Council of Constance of 1414–1418, one agenda item was the ending the Schism. Another item was the investigation of the ideas of Wycliffe and Hus. Both men were declared heretics by the Council: Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic, and the Council ordered that Wycliffe’s remains were to be exhumed and burned. Nevertheless, the Church would be increasingly criticized and ridiculed – and the new generation of popes just added to the problems.

By the fifteenth century, the Italian city states were embroiled in endless warfare amongst themselves, yet produced some of the most stunning art and architecture in Western history. The Renaissance popes were men of their time and waged war, plotted against their neighbours, hired Michelangelo and Raphael to decorate their homes, and began rebuilding St. Peter’s. They did not heed the growing calls for reform.  

Meanwhile, in Northern Europe …

By the fifteenth century, there was a clear cultural and religious disconnect between northern Europe and Italy. Northern Europeans in the Low Countries and the German states had slowly invented their own religious practices, known as the devotia moderna or Modern Devotion. Groups such as the Beguines emerged, women who wanted to live communally without taking the restrictive vows of the nuns. Schools were founded by the Brothers of the Common Life who taught a new form of introspective Christianity that had more to do with meditating on one's sins, and less with processing around the church with a consecrated host. One of the classic works of Christian devotion, The Imitation of Christ, was written during this time.

Moreover, humanist scholars were beginning to question scholastic theology, considering it too narrow. Italian humanists had rediscovered their own Roman heritage in the works of Cicero, but Northern humanists turned their attention to studying the Bible in the original languages. As he studied the original Greek text of the New Testament, the Dutch scholar Erasmus realized that in some places the Vulgate (the Latin translation of the Bible) was inaccurate. Among other things, he noticed that in Matthew 3:2 and 4:17 the Greek term metanoeite was used. The Vulgate translated this as “do penance.” In his annotations, Erasmus (1466–1536) pointed out that a more accurate translation would be “repent.” The combination of the new humanistic learning and the desire for a more interior spirituality meant that for many people in towns and cities, the traditional rituals and practices of the Church began to feel rather hollow. During this period, there was a significant increase in anticlerical sentiment, expressed in pamphlets and satires that ridiculed the clergy for their greed, lack of morals and lack of education.  

The Impact of the Printing Press

The most important development that undergirded this shifting cultural climate in Northern Europe was the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg around 1450. It ushered in a technological revolution matched only by the computer revolution of our day. For the first time in Western history, mass communication was possible. Within fifty years of the invention of movable type, print shops appeared all over Europe in towns and cities, producing books, broadsheets, pamphlets, and images.

Also for the first time in Western history, a literate middle class began to emerge; it would become the engine of the Reformation. Because reading is a solitary pursuit, that literate middle class was necessarily more individualistic, and it is obvious that by the early sixteenth century, people were beginning to worry about their salvation. For both scholars and the new literate middle class, the traditional answers that the Church provided began to sound empty and unsatisfying. The fact that many of the priests, especially those in rural areas, could not read also led to dissatisfaction.

In summary, criticism of the Church increased in the early sixteenth century – not so much because it was more corrupt than it had been, but because the expectations of the laity were higher than they had been, and by all accounts, the Church was not responding to those shifting expectations.

In May 1512, at the Fifth Lateran Church Council, just five years before Luther wrote the Ninety-Five Theses, Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo declared:

I see that unless by this council or some other means we place a limit on our morals, unless we force our greedy desire for human things … to yield to the love of divine things, it is all over with Christendom.

These words would be prophetic.  

Martin Luther Enters the Scene

Martin Luther, son of a Saxon miner, was born in Eisleben in 1483. He was one of that generation of devout Germans who began worrying about his salvation. He had attended a school run by the Brothers of the Common Life. He became a monk and was scrupulous about confessing his sins and performing all the acts of penance required – so much so that his fellow monks ridiculed him. To ease his conscience, Luther’s confessor Johann Staupitz (1460–1524) encouraged him to become a scholar of the New Testament. It may very well be that Luther would not have become the man he did without Staupitz’s friendship and encouragement.

In 1512, Luther received his doctorate and became a professor of New Testament at the University of Wittenberg. It had been founded just a few years earlier, in 1502, by the prince of the region, Frederick III the Wise, Duke of Saxony. He encouraged scholars and artists, especially those interested in the new humanistic learning, to come to his territory, and Luther thrived in this atmosphere. [2] At the time he wrote the Ninety-Five Theses , he was a thiry-four year old monk, priest, and professor.  

In Wittenberg, in the person of Luther, the issue of the sale of indulgences as an example of a corrupt and outdated Church practice came to a head. To understand what happened, it is important to know the political context. The German-speaking lands were not a unified country, but a conglomeration of small principalities united under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. The title of emperor was an elected position, and there were seven princes in Germany who had the right to vote, including Luther’s prince, Frederick of Saxony. Needless to say, holding one of the elector positions was politically desirable, especially when elections became imminent. In 1516, the current emperor, Maximilian I, was rather old.

One of the elector positions – that of the Archbishop of Mainz (the highest ecclesiastical office in the Empire) – was vacant in 1516. The Hohenstaufen family was eager to place one of their own in the position. However, their candidate, Albrecht, was underage, and not an ordained priest. There were ways around this, however, if one could get a dispensation from the pope, and popes were in the habit of granting such dispensations, at a cost.

The Pope in question was Leo X, a member of the wealthy and powerful Medici family. Among other activities, he was continuing the building of St. Peter's in Rome. Leo X agreed to sell the office of archbishop to Albrecht for a large sum of money. The family negotiated a loan to pay for it. In order to pay back the loan, they struck a deal with the Pope. They agreed to allow access to the papal indulgence sellers to their territory, with the understanding that the profits of the sale would be shared. Albrecht of Mainz would use his share to pay off the family debt, and the Pope could carry on his building programme.  

The Ninety-Five Theses

Indulgence sellers such as Johann Tetzel (1465–1519) were hired, and the sale was conducted among the German peasantry. Luther was certainly aware of indulgences before this time, but it was sales techniques used by Tetzel that brought the matter to his attention. Luther began to question the practice of selling indulgences and in response wrote the Ninety-Five Theses.

The first two of the Ninety-Five Theses state:

• When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent' (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
• This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

Clearly, Luther was using Erasmus' Greek New Testament and had read his commentary.

In subsequent theses, Luther questioned the ethics of encouraging peasants to buy indulgences rather than give alms or buy food for their family. He also questioned the authority of the Church to forgive sins, a right that surely belonged to God alone. It is also important to recognize that Luther, a priest and a monk, was raising these issues as an insider. He noted in Thesis 81 that the “unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult for even learned men to rescue the reverence which is due the pope from slander or from the shrewd questions of the laity.”

Did Luther post The Ninety-Five Theses on the church door in Wittenberg? Scholars have been debating this issue for the last four decades. [3] Those who question it point out that the earliest reference to him doing so was written approximately thirty years later, by his colleague Philip Melanchthon (1495–1560), who was not present in 1517. Other scholars argue that posting notices to debate at a University was such a normal thing to do that it would not have been considered noteworthy at the time. What we do know is that the Theses were printed and circulated around Europe within a period of two months. We also know that Luther sent a copy to Albrecht of Mainz, who now held the most important ecclesiastical position in the empire. He was not aware of the deal that Albrecht had made with the Pope, or that Albrecht was himself profiting from the indulgence sale.  

The Church's Reaction

Albrecht sent his copies to the theologians in his city and a copy to Rome. There were church officials sent to debate and correct Luther’s mistaken views: Cardinal Cajetan met with him and then a few months later, Johannes Eck (1486–1543). At each interview, Luther refused to back down – his response to his critics was always along the lines of “show me in the Bible where I'm wrong”.

Leo X issued a bull of excommunication in June of 1520, stating that

we condemn, reprobate, and reject completely each of these theses or errors as either heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears or seductive of simple minds, and against Catholic truth…We likewise condemn … and reject completely the books and all the writings and sermons of the said Martin.

In other words, it was decreed that Luther’s books should be burned. He responded by calling the pope the Antichrist and burning the bull in Wittenberg, two months after he received it.

At the imperial Diet of Worms in spring 1521, presided over by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, Luther’s views were declared heretical, and he was made an outlaw. The Edict stated that

we forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favour the said Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic, as he deserves, to be brought personally before us, or to be securely guarded until those who have captured him inform us, whereupon we will order the appropriate manner of proceeding against the said Luther. Those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.  

Luther in Hiding

As a heretic and an outlaw, Luther could certainly have suffered the same fate as Hus. What saved him was his prince, Frederick, and the fact that Emperor Charles needed the support of his German princes, because he was fighting a costly war in Italy against France. Frederick spirited him away and placed him in hiding for a year. He spent that year in Eisenach making the first German translation of the Bible, using the new scholarly tools of the humanists.

Meanwhile, Luther's ideas had touched a nerve all over Europe. While Luther was in hiding, others in Wittenberg picked up the gauntlet. On Christmas Day 1521, Luther’s colleague Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541) celebrated mass in the German tongue, without clerical vestments, and gave communion in both kinds to parishioners who had not confessed. Propagandists like Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) produced anti-Catholic broadsheets, including The Passion of Christ and Antichrist , which took scenes from the life of Christ and contrasted them with activities of the current pope.  

Salvation by Grace

The years between 1519 and 1521 were seminal for the Reformation. Historians do not know exactly when Martin Luther had his “tower experience” in which he turned traditional salvation theology on its head. It was likely sometime in 1519, as he was studying Romans 1:17, that Luther began to believe that salvation came through God's grace, not through human effort. In other words, humans did not need to earn God’s favour; God would forgive them in spite of their sinfulness. In a series of three treatises published in 1520, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, The Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation , and The Freedom of the Christian, Luther laid out some of the most important features of what would become the Protestant position on many issues.  

Celibacy, Marriage, and Katharina von Bora

One of the most radical social changes for the institutional church was the abandonment of the idea of clerical celibacy. As Luther worked on a new theology of salvation, he also examined the theology around the priesthood, celibacy and marriage. In two treatises On the Estate of Marriage in 1519 and 1522, he made the bold claim that marriage is holy. For a thousand years, the Christian Church had taught that marriage was for the weak, that it was a second-best option, going back to Paul. Luther's views were pragmatic, but also realistic. His views on marriage were directly related to his views on the monastic life. He argued that only a select few were called to a celibate life.

As in other things, Luther's views resonated with the laity. German villagers knew that their priests had housekeepers, maids, cooks, girlfriends, and concubines. As long as the priest paid a fine for his misdeeds, the Church looked the other way. For Luther, the solution was simple – let the priests marry. In his Address to the Christian Nobility , he argued quite pragmatically that priests needed housekeepers to look after them. To put them together and expect them to be celibate was like putting fire to straw and thinking it would not burn.

For several years, his friends urged Luther to marry, as an example to others. But Luther stated on more than one occasion that he would not himself marry. However, theology became reality when, in 1523, nine nuns at a convent in Nimbschen became persuaded of the Lutheran message and asked for Luther’s assistance so they could escape. Luther had promised all nine Cistercian nuns that he would help them escape and find them suitable marriage partners. After two years, all of the nuns had married except for Katharina von Bora (1499–1552), a young woman from a minor noble family. Marriage to Luther was Katharina's idea. While it is obvious that Luther married Katharina out of a sense of responsibility for her and not out of any personal desire, he would later come to value her as a companion, praising her abilities and speaking kindly and fondly of her and of the goodness of the estate of marriage.  

Reformation as Political and Social Rebellion

Within a decade of the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses , the Reformation became both a political revolt and social rebellion. It is possible that the Reformation might have remained a debate among theologians and clergy. The fact that it did not, is a reflection of the power of the institution of the Church in early modern society. As noted previously, the church hierarchy was identical to the social hierarchy. Thus, all over Europe the bishop, landlord, and nobleman were the one and the same person. As a result, a lot of anger was directed against the Church because its officials were also the landowners, and city councils expelled (by violence or otherwise) the traditional elites, who were in many cases both bishop and lord, and began replacing them with representatives from the artisan class.

As with a lot of social change, the Reformation quickly became violent. Churches were ransacked, priests attacked, statues broken, and chalices stolen wherever the Reformation took hold on the continent. This was in part an attempt to purge the churches of statues, relics, and images that were thought to be irrelevant, but also an attack on the wealth of the church.

The most widespread violence occurred during the German Peasants’ War. Thomas Müntzer (1489–1525), sometimes considered the first communist, took Luther’s message and made it political – he spread his message of the “freedom of the Christian” and “priesthood of all believers” throughout Germany. The Twelve Articles of the Peasants asked for freedom to name their own pastors, and they also objected to excessive taxes, penalties against hunting, and the status of serfdom that landlords were trying to reinstate.

It ended, as most peasants’ revolts did, in failure, with tens of thousands of peasants and artisans dead at the hands of imperial soldiers.

The Reformation also became political. The German princes used Luther’s ideas to fight for their independence from the Holy Roman Emperor. Luther, for his part, appealed to the princes as political allies. Philip of Hesse organized a league of Lutheran princes. This led to three decades of warfare, concluding with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 which allowed each prince to determine the religion in his territory.

Rulers around northern Europe, most notably Henry VIII of England, used the Reformation to declare their independence from Rome and establish the first national churches. In many Protestant countries, this was accompanied by the confiscation of Church lands and estates.  

Fragmenting the Reformation

The Reformation did not result in simply the separation of Protestants from the Catholic Church, but in the development of many types of Protestantism. This was inevitable. The Catholic Church was right to argue that authority needed to be vested in the pope or chaos would erupt – because it did erupt. By placing all authority in the Bible rather than in the traditions of the Church and its decrees, the door was opened for a plethora of interpretations. In 1529 at the Marbourg Colloquy (which was an attempt by one of the German princes to create a unified Protestant front for military purposes), Luther and Ulrich Zwingli (1483–1531) nearly came to blows over interpretations of the Lord’s Supper.

While all Protestants agreed on many issues, disputes arose very quickly regarding the interpretation of scriptures, the sacraments, the structure of the church (Episcopal or Presbyterian), and the role of the church in society. There were also divisions over whether to read certain statements literally or metaphorically, over the extent to which the New Testament ought to be a role model for the Church, and how to make decisions on issues on which the Bible is silent. These divisions eventually led to the spectrum of churches that we have with us today: Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Anabaptist.

Within about ten years after Luther's writing his Ninety-Five Theses , Egidio da Viterbo words from 1512 had become prophetic – it was all over for Christendom. The Christian Church, the landscape of Europe, and the self-understanding of Europeans, would never be the same.

Further Reading

Dixon, Scott. Contesting the Reformation. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.Greengrass, Mark. Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648. New York: Viking, 2014.

Gregory, Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.Heal, Bridget and Ole Peter Grell, eds. The Impact of the Reformation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.Hendrix, Scott. Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2015.

Karant-Nunn, Susan. The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany . London: Routledge, 1997.Kolb, Robert et al, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Leppin, Volker and Wengert, Timothy. “Sources for and against the Posting of the Ninety-Five Theses .” Lutheran Quarterly 29 (2015): 373-98.

MacCulloch, Diarmid. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490-1700. London: Penguin, 2003.

Marty, Martin. October 31, 1517: Martin Luther and the Day that Changed the World. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2016.

McKim, Donald K., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Mjaaland, Marius Timmann. The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy and Political Theology. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016.Oberman, Heiko. Luther: Man between God and the Devil. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Ozment, Steven. Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution. New York: Doubleday, 1992.Payton, James R. Getting the Reformation Wrong: Correcting Some Misunderstandings. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2010.

Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther: 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation. New York: Penguin, 2015.

Pettegree, Andrew. The Reformation World. London: Routledge, 2000.

Plummer, Marjorie Elizabeth. From Priest's Whore to Pastor's Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation . Burlington: Ashgate, 2012.

Rittgers, Ronald. The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Tracy, James. Europe’s Reformations, 1450-1650: Doctrine, Politics and Community. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Wallace, Peter. The Long European Reformation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Wandel, Lee Palmer. The Reformation: Towards a New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry, ed. Convents Confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant Nuns in Germany . Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1996.

Wengert, Timothy. Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses: With Introduction, Commentary and Study Guide. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015.

*This Table Talk was given at Luther College at the University of Regina on February 7, 2017.

[1] Preface to the complete edition of Luther's Latin Works (1545), trans. Andrew Thornton, from “Vorrede zu Band I der Opera Latina der Wittenberger Ausgabe. 1545” in vol. 4 of Luthers Werke in Auswahl , ed. Otto Clemen, 6th ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), pp. 421-428,  accessible online .

[2] As a faculty member at a young university, I find that there are interesting parallels to be drawn. In 1963, University of Regina faculty wrote the Regina Beach Manifesto, which stated that the goal of a liberal arts education is not merely the transition of past wisdom, but that scholars are critics of society, and "examiners of institutions and ideas." This same spirit of social criticism characterized the University of Wittenberg in the first decades of the sixteenth century.

[3] A useful summary of the debate is provided by Volker Leppin and Timothy Wengert in their recent article, “Sources for and against the Posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, ” Lutheran Quarterly 29 (2015): 373-98. They conclude (p. 390) that “there are equally good arguments for and against the posting of the Theses .”