Luther himself had some misgivings concerning the step and its far-reaching consequences.
He wrote not long after to Jacob Probst, pastor at Bremen, whom he here addresses as bishop: “I wonder you have not heard the news, how, namely, on Jan. 20, Dr. Nicholas Amsdorf was ordained by the heresiarch Luther bishop of the church of Naumburg. It was a daring act and will arouse much hatred, animosity and indignation against us. I am hard at work hammering out a book on the subject. What the result will be God knows.” He adds: “Jonas is working successfully for the kingdom of Christ at Halle [where he had been appointed pastor] in spite of the accursed Heinz and Meinz [Duke Henry of Brunswick and Archbishop Albert of Mayence]. My own lordship and Katey my Moses greet you and your spouse. Pray for me that I may die at the right hour, for I am sick of this life, or rather of this unspeakably bitter death.”[700]
Luther’s booklet on the Consecration of Bishops
The bitter work which Luther, at the request of the Elector and the Naumburg Estates, “hammered out,” in vindication of this act of violence, appeared in the same year, i.e. 1542, under the title “Exempel einen rechten Christlichen Bischoff zu weihen.”[701]
The title itself shows that the pamphlet was no mere attempt to justify himself and those who had taken part in the act but aims at something more; Luther’s apologia becomes a violent attack; a breach was to be made in the wall which so far had hindered Protestants from appropriating the Catholic bishoprics of Germany. “Our intention,” says Luther quite plainly, “is to establish an example to show how the bishoprics may be reformed and governed in a Christian manner.”[702]
The opening lines show that the book was intended to inflame and excite the masses. The jocular tone blatantly contrasts with the august subject of the episcopate and supplies a good “example” of the author’s mode of controversy. The work begins: “Martin Luther, Doctor. We poor heretics have once more committed a great sin against the hellish, unchristian Church of our most fiendish Father the Pope by ordaining and consecrating a bishop for the see of Naumburg without any chrism, without even any butter, lard, fat, grease, incense, charcoal or any such-like holy things.” Cheerfully indeed did he own, acknowledge and confess this sin against those, who “have shed our blood, murdered, hanged, drowned, beheaded, burnt, robbed and driven us into exile, and inflicted on us every manner of martyrdom, and now, with Meinz and Heinz, have taken to sacking the land.”
With a couple of Bible passages he bowls over the legal difficulties arising out of the expulsion of the bishop-elect and the oath of the Estates: “Thou shalt have none other Gods before me”; “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves,” etc. We must sweep away the “wolf-bishops whom the devil ordains and thrusts in.” “Oath and obedience stand untouched,” for they “could take no [valid] oath to the wolf.”[703] The further question, “whether it was right to accept consecration or ordination from such damnable heretics [i.e. as he], was disposed of by saying, that the Evangel was no heresy, and that though he understood Holy Scripture but little, yet at any rate he understood it far better—and also knew better how to consecrate a Christian bishop—than the Pope and all his men, who one and all were foes of Holy Writ and of the Word of God.”[704]
This screed stands undoubtedly far below many of Luther’s other productions. It tends to be diffuse and to harp tediously on the same ideas. Luther had already overwritten himself, and when engaged on it was struggling with bad health, the forerunner of his fatal sickness three years later. His disgust with life spoiled his work.
The “Popes, cardinals, bishops, abbots, canons and parsons” he implores to look rather to the beam in their own eye, to the “simony, favouritism, sharp practices, agreements, conventions and other horrible vices” which prevailed at their own consecrations, than at the mote in the eye of the Lutherans. “You strainers at gnats and swallowers of camels, wipe yourselves first—you know where I mean—before coming and telling us to wipe our noses. It is not fitting that a sow should teach a dove not to eat any unclean grain of corn while itself it loves nothing better than to feed on the excreta which the peasants leave behind the hedge. As for the rest you understand it well enough.”[705] “Let us stop our ears and not listen to their shouting, barking, bellowing, their complaints and their abuse,” with which I have “put up for many a year from Dr. Sow [Dr. Eck], from Witzel, Tölpel, Schmid, from Dr. Dirtyspoon [Cochlaeus], Tellerlecker, ‘Brünzscherben,’ Heinz and Meinz and whatever else they may be.... The [Last] Day is approaching for which we hope and which they must needs fear, however obstinately they may affect to despise it. Against their defiance we pit ours; at least we may look forward to The Day with a happy, cheerful conscience. On that day we shall be their judges, unless indeed there is really no God in heaven or on earth as the Pope and his followers believe.”[706]