Luther's wrath...

How the 'protests' of a German friar launched a new spiritual movement of 'Protestants' and split the Catholic Church

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Next Thursday: ‘This is the End’

MARTIN LUTHER (1483-1546) was not the kind of heretic Rome was accustomed to. He was one of their own.

The stocky friar from Wittenberg was a devout Augustinian and formidable Biblical scholar.

He damned the pope as ‘the antichrist’: Martin Luther, father of the ‘Protestant’ movement. Statue in Worms, Germany. Photo: Kim Traynor

His fearless intellect, brilliant exegesis and homespun eloquence made Luther a religious pamphleteer of astonishing power.

He was also adept at exploiting the new printing technology to great advantage.

When Luther nailed, or stuck, to a door of the castle church in Wittenberg a placard listing ninety-five theses on ‘the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’, he chose his words carefully.

He attacked the sale of indulgences rather than the Catholic Church itself. The faithful were being misled, Luther argued, into buying worthless certificates that had no power to redeem their souls.

His true aim was apparent to anyone who paused to read the notice. Luther’s disgust at the sale of pardons shone an unforgiving lamp on the financial corruption of the Catholic Church.

His timing, following the greatest sale of indulgences in the church’s history, to finance the construction of St Peter’s in Rome, was calculated to inflict maximum damage.

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By singling out indulgences, Luther deemed rotten the entire system by which the church put a price on people’s fear of the afterlife.

Purgatory was superfluous if its only function were to fleece the people while their souls burned in salvation’s waiting room. Salvation could not be bought, Luther fumed. Only God had the power to pardon sinners.

Yet here were thousands of pardoners running around like the pope’s tax collectors, selling salvation on the promise that ‘as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs’.

Paying a pardoner brought you no closer to Heaven than giving pennies to the poor, Luther railed.

For Luther, faith in God was the only path to salvation, not pardons, or masses, or soul prayers or ‘good works’. Charity and good works flowed from ‘faith alone’, not the reverse.

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Let’s hear the great reformer in his own words, in this letter of introduction to his ninety-five theses, addressed to Albert of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz:

‘Papal indulgences are being carried about, under your most distinguished authority, for the building of St. Peter’s. In respect of these . . . I grieve at the very false ideas which the people conceive from them, and which are spread abroad in common talk on every side – namely, that unhappy souls believe that, if they buy letters of indulgences, they are sure of their salvation; also, that, as soon as they have thrown their contribution into the chest, souls forthwith fly out of purgatory; and furthermore, that . . . by these indulgences a man is freed from all punishment and guilt. Gracious God!’

The pope’s indulgences conferred ‘no good on souls as regards salvation or holiness’, Luther fumed.

In any case, he asked, if the pardoners were so concerned about the fate of one’s soul, why had they not preached with ‘so much zeal’ the importance of piety and charity to one’s chances of salvation?

Luther left the question hanging. The answer was obvious: piety and charity did not raise money.

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Several of Luther’s theses held the pope and the church directly responsible for the corrupt and ungodly practice of selling pardons.

Thesis 21: ‘Those preachers of indulgences are in error who say that, by the indulgences of the Pope, a man is loosed and saved from all punishment.’

Thesis 35: ‘They preach no Christian doctrine, who teach that con- trition is not necessary for those who buy souls out of purgatory . . .’

Thesis 52: ‘Vain is the hope of salvation through letters of pardon, even if a commissary – nay, the Pope himself – were to pledge his own soul for them.’

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At the time, Luther was a lecturer in the theological faculty at Wittenberg University and an exemplary Augustinian friar, availing himself of the church’s system of penance, confessing his sins (as his confessor felt) ‘to excess’.

Even Luther had bought indulgences – for himself and on behalf of his beloved grandfather during a trip to Rome in 1510–11. But his close interpretation of the Bible turned this thoughtful young scholar into a combustible agitator for reform.

He rejected the ancient philosophers – Aristotle infuriated him – and lost patience with the humanists, notably his great rival Erasmus.

His strongest influences were Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, chiefly their doctrines on the soul, free will, the sacraments and ‘faith alone’.

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Salvation, Luther concluded, was in God’s gift. God alone had the power to judge if a soul were worthy of Heaven or Hell. Neither the pope, nor the cardinals, nor the bishops, and certainly not the pardoners, had any say in the matter.

Of the pope’s indulgence salesmen, Luther wrote:

‘[C]onsummate fools though they are, [pardoners] have no power over souls. For no human being can kill a soul or give it life, or conduct it to heaven or hell. If they will not take our word for it, Christ himself will attend to it strongly enough where he says in the tenth chapter of Matthew, “Do not fear those who kill the body . . . rather fear him who after he has killed the body, has power to condemn to hell.” Canon law was “sheer invention” on the matter of Purgatory. For thus saith St. Paul to all Christians: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers . . .”’

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In 1521 Luther was summoned to appear before the Imperial Diet of Worms, an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire convened by Charles V, to answer the pope’s charges of heresy.

The diet found him guilty and placed him under an imperial ban, subject to punishment like a common outlaw.

But the authorities had underestimated Luther’s popularity and astonishing eloquence: his message had spread among the nobility and won many princes to his cause.

The rift was deepening. Luther’s supporters ‘denied the pope’s right to judge doctrine’, writes the historian Peter Wilson, ‘and claimed their subordination to God superseded the loyalty they owed the emperor’.

Luther’s case collided with the entire apparatus of Rome: all the power the pope and his officers had arrogated to themselves, and used to intercede between souls and the hereafter, was a grotesque imposition, he charged, a giant sham that defrauded the people and denied them the true path to God’s grace and forgiveness.

Luther dared to defend past reformers whom Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor had condemned to death: notably the Englishman John Wycliffe and the Czech Jan Hus.

The latter’s execution had infuriated his Czech disciples, who established the Hussite Church in his honour in defiance of Rome. Of the Hussites, Luther wrote with grim satisfaction that they were ‘so hated by our papist monsters’.

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The more Luther thought about papal power, the more it perplexed him – until, in his most virulent outburst, he damned the pope as the Antichrist:

‘Let us, therefore, awake, dear Germans, and fear God rather than men [Acts 5:29], that we may not share the fate of all the poor souls who are so lamentably lost through the shameful and devilish rule of the Romans, in which the devil daily takes a larger and larger place – if, indeed, it were possible that such a hellish rule could grow worse, a thing I can neither conceive nor believe.’

Luther accused the Catholic Church – and the popes in person – of acting ‘against God’ and the people’s salvation:

‘The popes . . . have accomplished the very thing they should have forbidden; but it has brought in money and strengthened false authority . . . The salvation of your soul is of more importance than tyrannical, arbitrary, wicked laws, which are not necessary for salvation and are not commanded by God.’

The pope had as much power to save souls ‘as he has to forbid eating, drinking, the natural movement of the bowels or growing fat’.

Worse, the popes were responsible for the mass of lost souls, deluded by the church’s false pardon, and for ‘all the consciences which are thereby confused and tortured’.

For strangling so many people in ‘this devil’s snare’, the popes should be driven ‘out of the world’, Luther thundered: ‘Nothing good has ever come out of the papacy and its laws, nor ever will.’

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Luther appealed to Christ to ‘look down, let the day of thy judgment break, and destroy the devil’s nest at Rome! . . . What else is the papal power than only the teaching and increasing of sin and evil, the leading of souls to damnation under Thy name and guise?’

Mortuary, anniversary and ‘soul’ masses should be abolished, he cried, because they had ‘become nothing but a mockery, by which God is deeply angered’.

Their only purpose was ‘money-getting, gorging and drunkenness. What kind of pleasure should God have in such a miserable gabbling of wretched vigils and masses?’

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During his onslaught against Rome, Luther planted a pure and seemingly simple idea upon which the Lutheran Church would be built: ‘faith alone’ in God the Father and his son, not money or pardons, would lead you to salvation.

By ‘faith alone’ the human soul would be ‘justified’, or saved, Luther taught. Salvation was the reward for your steadfast belief in God.

But what of charity and good works? Were they not a precondition for salvation? Hadn’t the pardoners and the priests insisted on charitable donations as a down payment on eternal life?

No, Luther insisted. In one of his finest treatises, On the Freedom of a Christian (1520), Luther argued that God ‘cannot be received and honoured by any works, but by faith alone’. For if the soul could be saved (‘justified’) by other means (such as charitable works), of what use was the word of God?

For this reason, the soul was saved ‘by faith alone and not by any works’.

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Luther used the authority of the Bible against the claims of popes and priests; the words of Saint Paul and Christ himself were his cata­pults.

‘Faith alone’ was the efficacious ‘use’ of the word of God, he explained.

By ‘use’, he meant understanding the truth of Romans 10:9:

‘If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.’

And Romans 1:17: ‘The just shall live by his faith.’

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The Bible, then, was the ultimate source of truth, not the popes or their priests, monks and pardoners.

Which is why Luther was determined to preserve the Bible from papal interference, by resolving to translate it into German. Words mattered, especially when they were believed to be the words of God.

The first complete Lutheran Bibles were published in 1534. Their presence in church and in the wider community at once challenged the authority of the priests and bishops and elevated the power of the word.

The German Bible inflamed ‘protests’ against the authority of Rome, and these coalesced around an evangelical movement that won the support of powerful princes who refused to accept the majority Catholic decision, taken at Speyer in 1529, to crush the Lutheran heresy.

Papal intransigence forged a coherent Lutheran opposition whose members felt compelled to define their beliefs, clearly, in writing.

Their statements of protest began with the defiant Augsburg Confession, sent to the emperor in 1530.

Around the same time, the Lutheran ‘protests’ acquired a collective label: to the disgust of Rome, they were called the actions of ‘Protestants’.

Next Thursday, 2nd October 2025: ‘This is the End’

Selected sources and further reading:

Boyd Brown, C. (2017) ‘Martin Luther’s Life, 1517–1525’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Karant-Nunn, S.C. (2016) ‘Martin Luther on Death and Dying’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.

Luther, M. (2019) Collected Works of Martin Luther, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.

Raunio, A. (2016) ‘Martin Luther and Love’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.

Roper, L. (2016) Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, London: The Bodley Head.

Stoellger, P. (2017) ‘Martin Luther on Faith’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.

Whitford, D.M. (2018) Martin Luther in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Bible (New King James Version) Romans 1:17; 10:9.

Whitford, D.M. (2017) ‘Religious Violence and Martyrdom’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, P.H. (June 2008) ‘The Causes of the Thirty Years War 1618–48’, The English Historical Review, 123(502) June, pp. 554–86.