Luther and His Times

By Michael Grzonka

When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in 1517, the hammering in Wittenberg was heard across Europe. As we commemorate this event five hundred years later, the echos are still reverberating throughout Western civilization. For Lutherans and non-Lutherans alike, this brief backgrounder explains why the Protestant reformation happened, what it meant at the time, and why it still remains relevant today - half a millennium later. The book focuses on the historic roots and context of the Reformations in Germany and England, as well as the key spiritual concepts behind them. Over 300 footnotes serve as pointers to original sources, many available online and for free. A kick-starter for your own Reformation research!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365515897

Book preview

Luther and His Times

Luther

and His Times

A Historic Backgrounder on

500 Years of Protestant Reformation

For Lutherans and non-Lutherans

by

Michael T Grzonka, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2016 by Clocktower Consulting LLC

Cover Design by the author.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First eBook Edition: Fall 2016

To learn more about Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation and additional group and Bible studies featuring his sermons and tracts, visit us today at

www.LutherBibleStudies.com

ISBN 978-1-365-43466-2 (Print Edition)

ISBN 978-1-365-51589-7 (eBook Edition)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

How this book is organized

Part I

Living in Medieval Europe

Life in Early Medieval Times

The Black Plague

The People

Language, News and Communication

Church Life

A Force to Reckon with

Travelling

Worldly and Spiritual Powers

A Glance at Medieval Economy

Serfdom

A New Force Emerges

Guilds

New production systems to circumvent the guilds

Poverty and Begging

Medieval European Trade

Banking in Medieval Europe

Checks and Credit

Connections

The Emergence of Private Wealth

A Suspect New Partner

A Threatened Empire

The Silk Roads interrupted

The quest for alternative trade routes

The Turks threaten Vienna

Ancient Manuscripts Travel West

Renaissance Catholicism

Pope Innocent VIII: Not quite so innocent

Pope Alexander VI: Catholicism Inc.

Pope Julius II: A Warrior to Proceed Leo X

Leo X - The Reformation Pope

Enter: Martin Luther

Part II

The German Reformation

What are Indulgences?

The Concept of Purgatory

Doing penance with Good Works

Holy Relics

Indulgences Sold for Money

Selling the Mother of all Indulgences

How to Buy a Bishopric

Selling Indulgences in Germany

Publishing the Ninety five Theses

The Predicament of a Confessing Believer

Luther's Radical New Insight

Exposing the Scheme

Standing with the Wittenberg Faculty

Church Doctrine as if Through a 'Funny Mirror'

Hammering in Wittenberg

The Theses go Viral

The Catholic Reaction

Habemus Imperator!

The Causa Lutheri

Excommunication and the new limits of Papal authority

Travelling to see the Emperor

At the Imperial Diet of Worms

In Bird Land

At last: The German New Testament

A Bible in the Vernacular: How to Map Meaning?

Manuscripts: A new Original with Every Copy

The Greek Bible of Erasmus of Rotterdam

Finally: A Printed Greek Edition of the New Testament

Understanding Translation Pitfalls

Meaning over Words

Shaping the German Language

Creating new German Words – and Meaning

Saved by Faith Alone

Which Sources to Trust?

The Whole Bible in German language

The Reformation Unfolds

The Meaning of the Lord's Supper

Infant Baptism

The Protestation at Speyer

The Augsburg Confession

The Birth of Lutheranism - Officially

The Movement Continues to Grow

The Peace of Augsburg and the Book of Concord

Part III

The English Reformation

Scripture in the English Language

What’s in a Word

Sola Scriptura: Scripture as the only yardstick

Every Layman a Priest, too

Coming to a New Mind: Repenting, not 'Doing Penance'

The First New Testament in English

Holy Smugglers

At Last, a Bible for Every Plow Boy

The Birth of the Anglican Church

Marriage is Forever – or is it?

Parliament over Pope

Terminating the Catholic Church in England

A Reformation With no Reformed Outcome

The Coverdale and Matthew Bible

An 'Official' Bible in English

The Time After Henry VIII

Reforms During the Regency Council

Catholic Restoration

Yet Another Mandatory State Religion

Not a Reformation Luther Would Have Liked

English Exiles in Geneva and a new Bible translation

Purifying the Anglican Church

The Marian Exiles: Englishmen in Geneva

A Geneva Bible

Lost in translation, again

Updating the Great Bible: The Bishop's Bible

At Last One New, Official Bible

The Fourteen Commandments of James

The King James Bible

The most popular translation

State Religion in the Colonies

Part IV

What does this mean?  The Lutheran Legacy

Everyone a Priest

The Disappearance of the Holy Stand

Marrying and Moving Out

Katharina von Bora

Education is Every Believer's Duty

A New School System in Lutheran Lands

Who Pays for Education?

The Lutheran Difference

Building up the New Church

A New Work Ethic

The Catholic View on 'Work'

Work in the Lutheran View

The Worthiness of a Work

The Condition of the Worker

Dealing Fairly

In this World, but not of this World

Calvinist Work Ethics – the Spirit of Capitalism?

Poverty in Medieval times

Poverty as an Opportunity to do Good

Striking at the Roots of Poverty

Poverty as Indicator of being Condemned

Two Separate Kingdoms: A Spiritual and a Worldly

Charged To Serve the Believers

Thoughts on a More Lutheran Economy

Questioning the Economical Imperative

Modern Poverty Policy: A Reflection of Religious Beliefs?

Rhenish Capitalism in Germany

Could Lutheran Social Market Economies be More Resilient?

Conclusion

Appendix A

The Age of Exploration: Unprecedented Change

Why did Columbus sail west?

Navigation improves

Finally, Ships Improve, Too

Out to the high seas

Globalization 2.0

The Making of Little Venice

Outsourcing Conquest

Appendix B

The Story of the Comma Johanneum

Index

Selected Publications of Martin Luther

C:\Users\owner\Documents\Mick Projects\Bible Studies on Luther's Writings\Study #2 - Luther on the role of the State\separator.png

Acknowledgements

A book like this is impossible to make without the contributions of others. Some of these contributors can be identified specifically, and attributions to their work are made throughout the text with specific citations where possible.

Other contributions are more subtle but no less significant. My Lutheran upbringing was the work of many who, mostly unbeknownst to each other have yet cooperated across time and space to help weave the spiritual fabric whose bandages support my soul. Without them I would not have had access to the basic understanding and the backdrop that made the idea of this book a task I could hope to accomplish. Standing out among the many are my parents, who lived their faith, occasionally even without realizing that this acted as their guiding principle. My Catholic father and my Lutheran mother were my most important example of a Christian faith that values principle over denomination.

A special note of thanks and gratitude to the authors and contributors to the German- and English-language pages of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia. Although they remain anonymous, their work has made fact-checking easy and straightforward. And for some unexpected connections I can present here it was a hint in some of their work that provided my first clue. Although this is not a scholarly work, every effort was made to back up and verify by independent reference the facts and the conclusions these facts lead to. The references to original sources and other material I used contribute most of the over two hundred footnotes throughout this book.

I am also grateful for all those I could talk into reviewing the early drafts of this book. Specifically, I would like to thank Philipp Beckmann of Kiel, Germany; Steve Biello, Ron Brown, and Ed Champagne of New Hampshire; John Luetjen of Massachusetts; and Steve Pries of Texas for their encouragement and their valuable feedback. Among my most critical reviewers is also my wife Christiane, whom I need to thank for enduring bouts of cantankerous negligence of my share of daily duties whenever the work on this book seemed to demand my undivided attention. Although I have not always been able to follow their suggestions or accept their conclusions, their assistance has enabled me to make this book rather less imperfect than it would be otherwise.

Whatever errors, omissions, misrepresentations or other shortcomings may remain, are owned by me.

Introduction

As we commemorate the 500-year anniversary of the German Reformation in 2017, it is difficult to overestimate its lasting effects on the political and social landscape of Western cultures. Set off somewhat serendipitously in 1517 in the otherwise unremarkable town of Wittenberg in Germany’s Eastern part, the German Reformation met with a medieval culture that was ripe for change.

But rather than the result of a lonely, enlightened saint acting in isolation, Luther also was the leader of a like-minded group at the University of Wittenberg. That group formed well before the nailing of his Ninety-five Theses made their grievances public. What is more, the Reformation that Martin Luther started in Germany happened in a pan-European environment. Indeed, it happened in the context of a rapid globalization movement that would literally come to encircle the entire planet during Luther’s lifetime. When Luther was born in Germany on November 10, 1483 the world was on the brink of what could perhaps fairly be called "Globalization 2.0". This development happened on a global scale, and the accidental discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 was merely one aspect of it.

A most symbolic event from this period, which is more widely known as the Age of Exploration[1], crystalizes its planet-wide dynamic: Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan, while en route on the first circumnavigation of the world, died in the Philippines on April 27, 1521 – just as on the other side of the planet, in Germany, Luther left the Imperial Diet in Worms returning to Wittenberg. Magellan sailed in the employ of the very Emperor Charles V before whom Luther had just appeared days before to defend his teachings.

For more than a generation the discovery of new continents had widened people's perspectives as their world grew in size. At the same time a largely agricultural economy based on farming, artisans and craftsmen was slowly replaced by early forms of a money-based economy and an early version of capitalism. Then, as now, people were subject to major changes during their lifetime. Much of that change they never asked for. Some of it was uprooting them and utterly unwelcome. Then, as now, they experienced discontinuity and uncertainty all around them. The changes that happened were caused by transformations on a large scale, with both, causes and effects decidedly beyond the control of the individual.

And much like our current situation a generation's worth of globalization and the change in production methods triggered by new tools and methods did produce winners and losers. As both groups looked to their religious beliefs for explanation, consolation and justification many found Renaissance Catholicism wanting on numerous counts. Indeed, at the time many among the educated and among the ruling class had identified the Catholic Church as part of the problem, rather than offering solutions.

When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in October 1517, his insights and messages were the spark meeting with a highly combustible blend of pressing questions and unresolved issues. It is against this backdrop that the events in Wittenberg could spawn a pan-European Protestant movement that ushered out the Middle Ages in Europe, and that prepared the way for modernity and an age of enlightenment.

The reason for this is that Luther's insights profoundly changed the way people thought about the meaning of life, how they wanted to life together, how to conduct business and commerce, and what they expected from their ruler and their priests. This newly-won perspective of Luther and his fellow Reformers deeply penetrated every aspect of people's life. The new thinking reached way beyond any boundaries of faith, language, or culture. Within less than a generation all of the major countries in Europe had their own version of the Reformation to reckon with. A hundred years later, countries in continental Europe were at war with each other for an entire generation in a conflict that recognized allies and adversaries strictly along those in favor of, or opposing, the teachings of the Reformation.

That Thirty Years War ended in 1648, more than a century after Luther's death. But the radical societal changes that followed the German Reformation continued to cause countless flows, eddies and undercurrents that we still experience today. Benefitting from the technological advances in sea travel, printing technology and science the European colonial powers served to spread their economic and political influence into every corner of the planet for the next two hundred and fifty years. They were accompanied by their religious convictions, including the spiritual, moral and intellectual guidance the Reformation provided.

The arrival of October 2017 will see large parts of contemporary Christianity commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther’s nailing his Ninety-five Theses to the castle church in Wittenberg. Germany, in whose territory Wittenberg and the center of the German Reformation lays will conclude its ten-year-long "Luther Decade". Shifting to a new focus each year, the Germans since 2007 have collectively revisited their cultural heritage high-lighting how the Reformation changed literacy and education, the arts, sacred music, the economy and politics.

Indeed, when we take the wide-angle view our current situation can seem not much different than it was five hundred years ago. Once again we find ourselves in yet another bout of globalization; once again we are in an age, where disruptive technological causes widespread change in society (think Internet, cell phones and social media). To many, our current area resembles the pre-Reformation age of a young Luther[2]. And it is perhaps for this reason that the insights from Martin Luther and his fellow reformers feel so relevant and applicable today. Beyond the narrow constraints of doctrine and theology, Lutheran thinking is also a way of looking at the world and at one's parts within it. As the Reformation profoundly altered the way people saw their goals in life, their relationship to their neighbors and fellow beings, for many 'becoming Lutheran' meant a radical of their conduct, and the things they considered important in life. As these thoughts and concerns are timeless it should not surprise us that the new way of thinking about all aspects of life has lost little of their relevance as we commemorate their quincentennial anniversary.

---

[1] Others know it as the Age of Discovery.

[2] Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna, published May 2016

How this book is organized

This book will explore the key thoughts and concepts of the Reformation in their historical context. Comparing the Reformation in Germany and in England it will review the roots of many differences we can observe today between Protestantism in the Lutheran countries of Northern Europe, and much of the English-speaking world today.

Whoever, this is not a book on religious teachings. And therefore our focus will remain on exploring the reasoning the historic actors derived from their differing views.

We begin in Part I with a bird's eye view on medieval society, its economy, and the political landscape. This will serve as our representation of the general societal backdrop in which the Reformation will unfold.

In Part II we will explore the German Reformation and follow the historic events around and after Luther's initial actions. We will study briefly the Catholic religious teachings of the time and contrast that with Luther's new and changed views. We will also ask more deeply why Luther's reformation was successful where prior attempts to reform the Catholic Church failed. After a brief look at the challenges of translating the Bible into German, and the profound impact this had on the Reformation, we will continue with the historic perspective. We will follow the ripples that originated from Wittenberg observing Luther and his fellow reformers as they come to grips with the practical meanings of their newfound views on God, religion and aspects of their daily life.

In the third Part we will take a detailed look at the Reformation unfolding in 16th century England. We will shed light on how it was possible that England, and later its colonies - including America, would end up in such a different spot when compared to most European nations.

Many of the Reformation concepts continue to influence contemporary Western views on, among other things, work, education, poverty and social welfare. In the fourth and final part we will compare the consequences of Lutheran views with that of other Protestant branches, and with the Catholics' take. For this purpose we will visit some of these concepts at their very birth hour to review their guiding principles as the reformers saw them.

Part I

Living in Medieval Europe

Life in Early Medieval Times

It is difficult to generalize about living conditions in Medieval Europe. Conditions varied considerably across specific periods of time, caused by famine, plague or war, or a combination of them. Circumstances also differed between countries, between cities and rural areas, between the affluent and the commoners. But when viewed by today's standards it is safe to say that life in Medieval Europe was a short and brutal struggle to survive.

The Black Plague

By the end of its first pandemoneous rout around the mid-1300s the Black Death, also known as "The Plague", had decimated Europe’s population by half, even more in some areas. In a mere seven years (1346–1353) an estimated 75 million to 200 million people died from the Black Plague across medieval Europe[3]. Between 1348 and 1375 life expectancy even among wealthy individuals sheltered from many societal ills and material shortcomings was down to only to 17.33 years[4].

No one could escape The Plague's consequences. In Florence, Italy, a major center of trade and commerce, only one in five people survived The Plague. Local flare-ups of that highly infectious disease would continue for the next three hundred years thereafter. For example, we have the account of Luther’s wife, Katarina von Bora, who died in a carriage accident in 1552 while fleeing from a renewed outbreak of the Black Plague in Wittenberg – some two hundred years after the main outbreak of The Plague had dissipated.[5]

In the decade of Luther’s birth, the 1480s, many villages in Germany had lost so much of their population that they had to be abandoned altogether. Across Europe it would take more than one hundred years from Luther’s birth, until the 1600s, for population levels to grow back to numbers last seen before the pandemic began in 1346. The depopulation affected both town and countryside alike. For example, the population of Florence, a mercantile center in Northern Italy, dropped from about 120,000 in the year 1338 to a mere 38,000 about one hundred years later in 1427. In those days, living in a city always bore the additional risk of becoming involved in a renewed Plague outbreak. By 1450, Europe’s population was still reduced by about 60% from what it had been in 1300. Thus, even the biggest cities at the time shortly before Martin Luther’s birth were tiny by today’s standards, the largest of them being Paris at the size of 200,000, Naples at 150,000 and Venice with about 100,000. Places well-known today were even smaller than these ‘mega cities’ of the times, with some 50,000 people living in London, Amsterdam, Moscow, Lisbon, Madrid or Rome.

During the times of The Plague the Catholic Church found itself as one of the ‘inheritors of last resort’, or as entitled by law to a portion of someone’s estate. Supported by the effects of The Plague, the church came into the possession of countless parcels of land all across Europe as the hereditary lines of the original owners died out from the disease. During medieval times the Catholic Church had come to own about one third of all land in Europe, and in Germany the Church owned one half.

The People

Were we able to zoom-in to look closer at the individuals living at the time, we would have noticed that medieval men and women were mostly young: forty-five percent of the population was under the age of fifteen. But even living to adulthood didn't mean one would live to old age[6]. According to official records about the British Royal family, who can serve as an example of the best off in society, the average life expectancy in 1276 just over 35 years. Between 1301 and 1325, during the Great Famine it was not quite 30 years[7]

Even the rich might be considered poor by our standards, and we would think the average man or woman to be desperately poor. Most Europeans went to sleep hungry most of the time, and most of them were sick. Malnutrition was widespread, and it was responsible for general weaknesses and many ills. This was further aggravated by an unbalanced diet low in iodine leading to goiter, thyroid malfunctions, and contributing to a high percentage of miscarriages and birth defects. Lack of vitamin-rich vegetables during much of the year led to bad teeth and crooked legs (rickets), to scurvy as well as a host of skin diseases such as beriberi. A diet low in protein resulted in weak bones and muscles[8].

Travelers in medieval Europe around the time of Luther’s birth in 1483 we would still have encountered a landscape that was mostly green, forested and, outside the villages or cities, devoid of man-made structures. A quilt made of fields, meadows and wooded segments would reach all the way to the horizon, to be interrupted only occasionally by a few farm houses or small settlements. Most of the communities they would encounter would have less than five hundred inhabitants. Often these were just a few cottages around a well or a brook, inhabited by a handful of interrelated families with as few as 50 residents.

In the early 1400s societies all across Europe were agricultural, and this was still true for the majority at the time of Luther's birth. Owning some land meant a chance for economic wellbeing and prosperity because proceeds from harvests, animal husbandry and forestry contributed the lion’s share to a country’s economy. Most people were peasants of sorts. Many of the farms they actually owned, however, were small and even in a good year would barely produce enough to feed the family living there. They derived subsistence and, if any, monetary income, from the fruits of the soil and the work of their own hands.

But most peasants worked land they did not own. Only prosperous peasants would be able to afford themselves a small house built of stone. Most accommodations were shacks and cottages held together by ‘everything that sticks’: straw and horsehair mixed with mud or animal manure. The houses would be largely windowless, with a dirt floor inside and a thatched roof. The more luxurious of these homesteads would have two rooms. Yet many would be one-room dwellings, with the ‘fireplace’ being hardly more than an indoors campfire featuring some construction to make it useful for cooking.

On our travels we would find towns in general to be just a few cross streets surrounded by vast fields, and a market square somewhere in the middle. The looming threat of plague and disease meant that living in large cities carried extra risk. In the center of these communities we would find the church, usually the only stone-made building in town – besides, perhaps the mansion of the local landlord[9]. Before the German Reformation that church would have been a Catholic Church – no other choices were available. In central Europe and in the West this would be a Roman Catholic Church. In Eastern Europe the church would have been of the Eastern Orthodox variety. The Orthodox Church was split off from Roman Catholicism at the Great Schism in 1054. Since that time the Orthodox Church was headquartered in Constantinople, today called Istanbul in modern-day Turkey. The head of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope and his Holy See, were located in Rome, Italy.

Language, News and Communication

The medieval German language was a conglomerate of local dialects, not a somewhat uniform entity in the way any modern language is defined today. For large parts of the population their 'language' meant the spoken word only. Moreover, it meant the way their county spoke the language. Therefore, spelling and words in any language were not commonly shared across its many principalities and territory. How then did people from different regions or different countries communicate at all?

For the learned people across Europe the ancient Latin language served as a common language for formal communication, academic discourse and publication. On the basis of Latin, Europe's ruling class as well as others routinely engaged in cross-border communications could communicate largely devoid of any language barriers. The commoners, however, were devoid of any such a tool.

News among the commoners in those days traveled as narrative and through people that travelled. Relatively few besides tradesmen and travelling clergy would ever venture to go past the boundaries of their township or county. For commoners in the countryside, aside from the occasional word with a traveler, the church sermon on Sundays would be the only source of news from the world outside their immediate area. The local priest or vicar was almost certainly selected by, and often in the employ of, the landlord owning the premises. And it should thus not come as a surprise that, with the possible exception of ecclesiastical decrees and official declarations, such as papal bulls handed down from the clerical hierarchy, the news the priest would share in his sermon was the news the landlord wanted his serfs to have.

It is true, the printing press was invented around 1450, when in the German city of Mainz Johannes Gutenberg began printing Bibles by using movable letters in simple printing presses. The first printing devices were developed from wine presses, which were common in that area. A blacksmith and goldsmith by trade, Gutenberg had combined this technology with the idea of imprinting ink-smeared metal surfaces on paper. His key invention was to create these surfaces from of individual pieces of lead, each of them in the shape of a single letter. These letters were combined to form words, and words assembled to form sentences. For each page hundreds of individual metal pieces were assembled by hand to form the page's paragraphs of text, and then mounted into the printing press. After applying a suitable ink, which Gutenberg also had to engineer, the lettered metal surface coated in ink would be imprinted once on a single sheet of paper. The process was time consuming, especially for larger works, and print runs were generally small. But under any circumstances this new process was extremely efficient when compared to the only other method available: copying a given text by hand. For millennia, scribes had copied texts by reading it from the source document, and writing it down by hand on the copy with quill and ink. The process was slow and error-prone, and it was not unusual for a scribe to edit the text during the transcription. For a book as voluminous as the Bible, the process of creating just one additional copy could take the better part of a monk's lifetime to complete. Gutenberg's new printing presses using movable type could now make a few hundred copies