Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

In his Larger Sermon on Usury he gives an instance where he is ready to allow transactions at interest, viz. “where both parties require their money and therefore cannot afford to lend it for nothing but are obliged to help themselves by means of bills of exchange. Provided the ghostly law be not infringed, then a percentage of four, five or six florins may be taken.”[290] Thus he here not only falls back on the “ghostly law,” but also deviates from the line he had formerly laid down. In fact we have throughout to deal more with stormy effusions than with a ripe, systematic discussion of the subject.

Later on, his general condemnations of the buying of interest-rights become less frequent.

He even wrote in 1524 to Duke Johann Frederick of Saxony: Since the Jewish tithes cannot be re-introduced, “it would be well to regulate everywhere the purchase of interest-rights, but to do away with them altogether would not be right since they might be legalised.”[291] As a condition for justifying the transaction he requires above all that no interest should be charged without “a definitely named and stated pledge,” for to charge on a mere money pledge would be usury. “What is sterile cannot pay interest.”[292] Further the right of cancelling the contract was to remain in the hands of the receiver of the capital. The interest once agreed upon was to be paid willingly. He himself relied on the practice and once asked: “If the interest applied to churches and schools were cut off, how would the ministers and schools be maintained?”[293]

With regard to the rate of interest allowable in his opinion, he says in his sermons on Matt. xviii. (about 1537): “We would readily agree to the paying of six or even of seven or eight on the hundred.”[294] As a reason he assigns the fact that “the properties have now risen so greatly in value,” a remark to which he again comes back in 1542 in his Table-Talk in order to justify his not finding even seven per cent excessive.[295] He thus arrives eventually at the conclusion of the canonists who, for certain good and just reasons, allowed a return of from seven to eight per cent.

In his “An die Pfarherrn” he took no account of such purchases but merely declared that he would find some other occasion “of saying something about this kind of usury”; at the same time a “fair, honest purchase is no usury.”[296]

All the more strongly in this writing, the tone of which is only surpassed by the attacks on the usury of the Jews contained in his last polemics, does he storm against the evils of that usury which was stifling Germany. The pastors and preachers were to “stick to the text,” where the Gospel forbids the taking of anything in return for loans.[297] That this will bring him into conflict with the existing custom he takes for granted. In his then mood of pessimistic defiance he was anxious that the preachers should boldly hurl at all the powers that be the words of that Bible which cannot lie: where evil is so rampant “God must intervene and make an end, as He did with Sodom, with the world at the Deluge, with Babylon, with Rome and such like cities, that were utterly destroyed. This is what we Germans are asking for, nor shall we cease to rage until people shall say: Germany was, just as we now say of Rome and of Babylon.”[298]

He nevertheless gives the preachers a valuable hint as to how they were to proceed in order to retain their peace of mind and get over difficulties. Here “it seems to me better … for the sake of your own peace and tranquillity, that you should send them to the lawyers whose duty and office it is to teach and to decide on such wretched, temporal, transitory, worldly matters, particularly when they [your questioners] are disposed to haggle about the Gospel text.”[299] “For this reason, according to our preaching, usury with all its sins should be left to the lawyers, for, unless they whose duty it is to guard the dam help in defending it, the petty obstacles we can set up will not keep back the flood.” But, after all, “the world cannot go on without usury, without avarice, without pride … otherwise the world would cease to be the world nor would the devil be the devil.”[300]

The difficulties which beset Luther’s attitude on the question of interest were in part of his own creation.

“In the question of commerce and the charging of interest,” says Julius Köstlin in his “Theologie Luthers,” “he displays, for all his acumen, an unmistakable lack of insight into the true value for social life of trade—particularly of that trade on a large scale with which we are here specially concerned—in spite of all the sins and vexations which it brings with it, or into the importance of loans at interest—something very different from loans to the poor—for the furthering of work and the development of the land.”[301]

With reference to what Köstlin here says it must, however, be again pointed out that Luther’s lack of insight may be explained to some extent “by the great change which was just then coming over the economic life of Germany.” It must also be added, that, in Luther’s case, the struggle against usury was in itself a courageous and deserving work, and, that, hand in hand with it, went those warm exhortations to charity which he knew so well how to combine with Christ’s Evangelical Counsels.