But who was it who was responsible for having provoked the war?
Occasional counsels to patience and endurance, to self-restraint and consideration were indeed given by Luther from time to time[864] (they have been diligently collected by his modern supporters), but, generally speaking, they are drowned in the din of his controversial invective.
What was to be expected when the people, who were already profoundly excited by the social conditions, were told: “Better were it that all bishops were put to death, and all foundations and convents rooted out than that one soul should be seduced” by Popish error.[865] “What better do they deserve than to be stamped out by a great revolt?”[866] If his reforms were rejected then it was to be wished that monasteries and foundations “were all reduced to one great heap of ashes.”[867] “A grand destruction of all the monasteries, etc., would be the best reformation!”[868] What wonder “were the Princes, the nobles and the laity to hit Pope, bishop, priest and monk on the head and drive them out of the land?”[869] The “Rhine would hardly suffice to drown” the many “bull-mongers,” Cardinals and “knaves.”[870]
The Death-Penalty Sectarians within the New Fold
In the above we have dealt with Luther’s intolerance in theory and practice towards the Catholic Church. It remains for us to look at his attitude towards the sects within his own camp.
The question, how far they were to be tolerated, or whether it would be better forcibly to suppress them was first brought home to Luther by the Anabaptist movement under Thomas Münzer. Sure of the upper hand, Luther decided, as we know, at the end of July, 1524, to advise the Saxon Princes to leave the Anabaptists in peace so far as their doctrines were concerned. “Let them preach as they please,” was his advice, for “there ‘must needs be heresies’” (1 Cor. xi. 19).[871] He explained to Lazarus Spengler of Nuremberg on Feb. 4, 1525, that the Anabaptists were not to be punished, particularly with “bodily penalties,” because, in his opinion, they were no real blasphemers, but merely “like the Turks or straying Christians.”[872] In May of the same year he showed himself disposed to universal toleration. “The authorities are not to hinder anyone from teaching and believing what he pleases”;[873] a principle which, as we have shown above (p. 239), he himself had contravened in practice as early as 1522, and was finally to set aside altogether.
As for the Anabaptists, in 1527 Luther was not yet in favour of the “putting to death” and bloody “rooting out” of these sectarians. In 1528 he even taught in his exposition of the Parable of the Good Seed and the Tares that “we are not to fight the fanatics with the sword.”[874] What made him hesitate to advise the putting to death of these heretics was, as he told his friend Wenceslaus Link of Nuremberg in 1528, the apprehension that this might lead to abuses; he feared lest, in the time to come, we might turn the sword against the best “among us.”[875] But without a doubt he approved of the Edict of the Elector Johann (Jan. 17, 1528) which proscribed the writings of the Anabaptists, Sacramentarians and fanatics throughout the land—if indeed the Edict itself may not be traced directly to Luther, as Zwingli suspected.[876] In 1528 it also seemed to him right to decree the penalty of banishment in the case of the Anabaptists.[877]
When, however, the danger had become more evident, which the Anabaptist heresy spelt both to the land-frith and the foundations of Christianity, not to speak of the Lutheran teaching, Luther adopted a sterner line of action.
His views altered in 1530. After a Mandate had been issued in the Saxon Electorate against the “secret preachers and conventicles, Anabaptists and other baneful novel teaching,” six Anabaptists were executed early in the year at Reinhardsbrunn in the duchy of Saxe-Gotha. The discussion which took place on this event gave Melanchthon occasion to declare in Feb., 1530, that, “even though the Anabaptists do not advocate anything seditious or openly blasphemous” it was, “in his opinion, the duty of the authorities to put them to death.”[878] In the spring of 1530, with the Anabaptists in his mind, Luther, in his commentary on Ps. lxxxii. dealt with the question whether the authorities “ought to forbid strange teachings or heresies and punish them, seeing that no one should or can force men into the Faith.”[879]