Life of Luther

by Julius Köstlin

No sooner had Luther resumed his official duties at Wittenberg, than he again undertook extra and very arduous work. Bugenhagen went in October to Lübeck, as he had previously gone to Brunswick and Hamburg. The most important advance made by the Reformation during those years when its champions had to fight so stoutly at the Diets for their rights, was in the North German cities. Luther, soon after his arrival at Coburg, had received news that Lübeck and Lüneburg had accepted the Reformation. The citizens of Lübeck refused to allow any but Evangelical preachers, and abolished all non-evangelical usages, though an opposition party appealed to the Emperor, and actually induced him to issue a mandate prohibiting the innovations. To organise the new Church, the Lübeckers would have preferred the assistance of Luther himself; but failing him, their delegates begged the Elector John, when at Augsburg, to send them at least Bugenhagen. Under these circumstances Luther agreed that Bugenhagen should be allowed to go, although the Wittenberg congregation and university could hardly spare him. His friend was wanted at Wittenberg, said Luther, all the more because he himself could not be of any use much longer; for what with his failing years and his bad health, so weary was he of life that this accursed world would soon have seen and suffered the last of him.

Nevertheless, he again undertook at once, so far as his health permitted, the official duties of the town pastor, who this time was absent from Wittenberg for a year and a half, until April 1532; Luther, accordingly, not only preached the weekly sermons on Wednesdays and Saturdays, on the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, but attended continuously to the care of souls and the ordinary business of his office. He would reproach himself with the fact that under his administration the poor-box of the church was neglected, and that he was often too tired and too lazy to do anything. The pains in his head, the giddiness, and the affections of his heart now recurred, and grew worse in March and June 1531, while the next year they developed symptoms of the utmost gravity and alarm.

All this time he worked with indefatigable industry to finish his translation of the Prophets; in the autumn of 1531 he told Spalatin that he devoted two hours daily to the task of correction. He brought out a new and revised edition of the Psalms, and published some of them with a practical exposition.

In addition to these literary labours, which ever remained his first delight, Luther's chief task was to advise his Elector upon the salient questions, transactions, and dangers of Church politics, which, with the Recess of the Diet and the period thereby allotted for their consideration, had become matters of real urgency. And, in fact, it was to his valuable and conscientious advice that the Protestants in general throughout the Empire looked for guidance.

On November 19 the Recess of the Diet, passed in defiance of the Protestants, was published at Augsburg. They accepted the time allowed them for consideration, but the Emperor and the Empire insisted on maintaining the old ordinances of the Church, and the Protestants were now required to surrender the ecclesiastical and monastic property in their hands. The latter observed, moreover, that the Recess contained no actual promise of peace on the part of the Emperor, but that the States only were commanded to keep peace. In fact, the Emperor had already promised the Pope on October 4 to employ all his force to suppress the Protestants. He immediately subjected the Supreme Court of the Empire—the so-called Imperial Chamber—to a visitation, and instructed it to enforce strictly the contents of the Recess in ecclesiastical and religious matters. Thus the campaign against the Protestants was to begin with the institution of processes at law, with reference particularly to the question of Church property. Furthermore, to secure the authority and continue the policy of the Emperor during his absence, his brother Ferdinand was to be elected King of the Romans. John of Saxony, the only Protestant among the Electors, opposed the election. He appealed to the fact that the nomination was a direct violation of a decision of imperial law, the Golden Bull, which declared that the proposal for such an election, during the lifetime of the Emperor, must first be unanimously resolved on by the Electors. The Emperor had a Papal brief in his hands which empowered him to exclude John, as a heretic, from electing, but he did not find it prudent to make use of it. The election actually took place on January 5, 1531.

The Protestants now sought for protection in a firm, well-organised union among themselves. They assembled for this purpose at Schmalkald at Christmas 1530.

The more imminent, however, the danger to be encountered, the more necessary it became to determine the question whether it was lawful to resist the Emperor. The jurists who advised in favour of resistance, adduced certain arguments, without, however, stating any very clear or forcible reasons of law. They quoted principles of civil law, to show that a judge, whose sentence is appealed against to a higher court, has no right to execute it by force, and that if he does so, resistance may lawfully be offered him; and they proceeded to apply this analogy to the appeal of the Protestants to a future Council, and the action taken against them, while their appeal was still pending, by the Emperor. They were nearer the mark when they argued that, according to the constitution of the Empire and the imperial laws themselves, the sovereignty of the Emperor was in no sense unlimited or incapable of being resisted; but then the difficulty here was, that the right of individual States to oppose decrees, passed at a regular Diet by the Emperor and the majority of the members present, was not yet proved. There was a general want of clearness and precision connected with the theories then being developed of the relations of the different States and the interpretation of their rights. Upon this matter, then, Luther was called on again, with the other Wittenberg theologians, to give an opinion. The jurists also, especially the chancellor Brück, were associated with them in their deliberations.

On the question about Ferdinand's election as King of Rome, Luther strongly advised his Elector to give way. The danger which, in the event of his refusal, menaced both himself and the whole of Germany appeared to Luther far too serious to justify it. The occasion would be used to deprive him of the Electorship, and perhaps give it to Duke George; and Germany would be rent asunder and plunged into war and misery. This, said Luther, was his advice; adding, however, that as he held such a humble position in the world, he did not understand to give much advice in such important matters, nay, he was 'too much like a child in these worldly affairs.'

But a change had now come in his views about the right of resistance; a change which, though in reality but an advance upon his earlier principles, led to an opposite result. He taught that civil authorities and their ordinances were distinctly of God, and by these ordinances he understood, according to the Apostle's words, the different laws of different States, so far as they had anywhere acquired stability. With regard to Germany, as we have seen, his good monarchical principles did not as yet prevent his holding the opinion that the collective body of the princes of the Empire could dethrone an unworthy Emperor. The determining question with him now was what the law of the Empire or the edict of the Emperor himself would decide, in the event of resistance being offered by individual States of the Empire, which found themselves and their subjects injured in their rights and impeded in the fulfilment of their duties. The answer to this, however, he conceived to be a matter no longer for theologians, but for men versed in the law, and for politicians. Theologians could only tell him that though, indeed, a Christian, simply as a Christian, must willingly suffer wrong, yet the secular authorities, and therefore every German prince having authority, were bound to uphold their office given them by God, and protect their subjects from wrong. As to what were the established ordinances and laws of each individual State, that was a matter for jurists to decide, and for the princes to seek their counsel. Accordingly, the Wittenberg theologians declared as their opinion that if those versed in the law could prove that in certain cases, according to the law of the Empire, the supreme authority could be resisted, and that the present case was one of that description, not even theologians could controvert them from Scripture. In condemning previously all resistance, they said, they 'had not known that the sovereign power itself was subject to the law.' The net result was that the allies really considered themselves justified in offering resistance to the Emperor, and prepared to do so. The responsibility, as Luther warned them, must rest with the princes and politicians, inasmuch as it was their duty to see that they had right on their side. 'That is a question,' he said, 'which we neither know nor assert: I leave them to act.'

Luther gave open vent to his indignation at the Recess of the Diet and the violent attacks of the Catholics in two publications, early in 1531, one entitled 'Gloss on the supposed Edict of the Emperor,' and the other, 'Warning to his beloved Germans.' In the former he reviewed the contents of the Edict and the calumnies it heaped upon the Evangelical doctrines, not intending, as he said, to attack his Imperial Majesty, but only the traitors and villains, be they princes or bishops, who sought to work their own wicked will, and chief of all the arch-rogue, the so-called Vicegerent of God, and his legates. The other treatise contemplates the 'very worst evil' of all that then threatened them, namely, a war resulting from the coercive measures of the Emperor and the resistance of the Protestants. As a spiritual pastor and preacher he wished to counsel not war, but peace, as all the world must testify he had always been the most diligent in doing. But he now openly declared that if, which God forbid, it came to war, he would not have those who defended themselves against the bloodthirsty Papists censured as rebellious, but would have it called an act of necessary defence, and justify it by referring to the law and the lawyers.