The New Christianity; or, The Religion of the New Age

by Salem Goldworth Bland

The immense capital locked up in vast ecclesiastical buildings and estates was naturally, also, the object of envy. Clerical immunities from municipal taxation, and episcopal jurisdiction over otherwise free towns added to the general irritation.

It might possibly have been foreseen that, sooner or later, a revolt would come and a new sort of Church would take form. That revolt came under Luther. Many motives conspired in it. With Luther himself and many of his followers the motive was a genuinely religious one. It was a revolt against the legalistic interpretation of Christianity and against the moral failure of the Roman Catholic Church. But with the mass of the city people, who were the main support of Luther, the motive was mainly a passion for freedom and only subordinately and sporadically a passion for a purer faith or a holier life.

In the new Church that was fashioned in varying forms in the northern races where the revolt was most general and thorough-going, one feature naturally predominated--the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. That Church, or rather group of Churches which by seeming accident, but, perhaps, by that deeper philosophy which moves even through the seeming accidents of history, came to be known as the protesting or Protestant Church, was the Church which suited a predominately middle class society as Roman Catholicism suited a feudal society.[#] Protestantism, in a word, is bourgeois Christianity. It is the Christianity of the middle, or trading, classes. It was born where these classes were strongest--in Germany, Holland, Switzerland, England, France. It has exalted the middle classes and the middle classes have exalted it. It has been with them in their struggle and has shared their triumph. It sanctions their ethical standards, falls in with their tastes, emphasizes their virtues, is indulgent toward their faults, condemns their aversions.

[#] "The 'true inwardness' of the change of which the Protestant Reformation represented the ideological side, meant the transformation of society from a basis mainly corporative and co-operative to one individualistic in its essential character. The whole polity of the middle ages, industrial, social, political, ecclesiastical, was based on the principle of the group or the community--ranging in hierarchical order from the trade-guild to the town-corporation; from the town corporation through the feudal orders to the imperial throne itself; from the single monastery to the order as a whole; and from the order as a whole to the complete hierarchy of the Church as represented by the papal chair. The principle of this social organization was now breaking down. The modern and bourgeois conception of the autonomy of the individual in all spheres of life was beginning to affirm itself."--Belfort Bax: The Peasants' War, p. 19.

It would almost seem that it was a consciousness of its specific class limitations which led the new movement promptly and decisively to turn away from the claims of the lowest class, though the distinct refusal of German Protestantism to champion the cause of the oppressed peasants in 1524 may be credited to the imperfect sympathies of Luther and his jealousy for the reputation of the new movement. Luther was a peasant's son, but his attitude to other peasants was one almost of contempt, mingled later with fear.[#]

[#] "The wise man saith: food, a burden, and a rod for the ass; to a peasant belongs oat straw. They hear not the word and are mad; then must they hear the rod and the gun and they get their due. Let us pray for them that they obey; otherwise there need be no pity for them. Let only the bullets whistle around them. Otherwise they are a hundred fold more evil."--Letter to Rühel. De Wette. Vol. II., p. 619.

Luther's glorification of the liberty of a Christian man, his stirring appeals to the German nobility to shake off the rapacious tyranny of Rome found response in other hearts than those he was addressing. His impassioned words, like hot coals kindling a fire whereever they fell, helped to bring to a head the discomfort which had been growing among the peasants. This was due, in part, to the increased cost of living, a fifty per cent. advance, it has been estimated, from 1400 to 1415, for which the increased output of silver from the mines in the Tyrol and elsewhere was chiefly responsible. But the chief cause was the increased exactions of the German princes, sustained in their oppressive claims by the growing recognition of the Roman law, which found no place for the peasants except as slaves. Eventually, in 1524 the peasants drew up twelve demands which they submitted to Luther with an appeal for his support. Luther found the demands mainly just and urged the princes to make concessions, but strongly condemned any effort, in case the reforms were not granted, to secure them by violence. The demands were refused and the peasants rose. They were successful at the outset, as most of the professional soldiers of the princes were in Italy with the Emperor, Charles V., then at war with the Pope. On their return, these trained forces scattered the undisciplined bodies of peasants, already demoralized by wine and plunder and lack of leadership. The princes took a ferocious revenge. It is estimated that from one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand peasants were slaughtered; many more were blinded and maimed.

Luther, angered and terrified by the uprising, had urged the princes on to the slaughter in words that are an ineffaceable blot on his memory.

"First, they [the peasants] have sworn to their true and gracious [!] rulers to be submissive and obedient, in accord with God's command (Matt. 22:21), 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's,' and (Rom. 13:1), 'Let every soul be subject to the higher powers.' But since they have deliberately and with outrage abandoned obedience, and in addition have opposed their lords, they have thereby forfeited body and soul, as perfidious, perjured, mendacious, disobedient rascals and villains are wont to do."

[Later, Luther approved and justified the revolt of the Protestant princes against the Emperor to whom they had sworn obedience--so early had Protestantism one standard for the lowly and another for the high.]