On the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation

Craig Harline, A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation

According to tradition, October 31st, 1517, marks the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. On that day, Brother Martin Luther, Augustinian, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the parish church door in Wittenberg, Saxony. Except, Craig Harline warns, it might’ve happened differently: the university beadle often did the actual nailing. Or the nailing might’ve been purely metaphorical, and Luther simply published his theses. Or he might've only mailed them—the supposed nailing wasn't attested until decades later.

Harline, a BYU historian specializing in Renaissance European religious history, assembles a brief, plain-English history of the five years most readily associated with the German Reformation. Though he includes details of Luther’s life and works before this time window, he mainly covers the period from 1517 to 1522. During these years, Luther’s Theses, presented as routine academic disputation, generated unprecedented controversy in Catholic Europe. Luther’s critics turned him into something he never meant to become.

Even many people unfamiliar with Protestant theology know the history: Luther questioned plenary indulgences, writs sold by the Vatican which excused purchasers from earthly punishment for their sins. Except, in 1517, Vatican emissaries were selling indulgences on the claim that they excused buyers from Purgatory. Luther, who’d lived a flagellant life of self-recrimination until he discovered the Apostle Paul’s injunction that “The righteous shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17), claimed this misses the point altogether.

But Harline reveals something even most Lutherans probably don’t realize (I hadn’t): the 1517 indulgence was already deeply unpopular. It didn’t make the money its sponsor, Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, had expected, because German churches were already oversaturated with divine orders and magic tokens. Germany lost interest in Vatican witchcraft before 1517. Luther inherited a church already discouraged with Italian power-mongering; his gift wasn’t in creating dissension, but in channeling dissension toward theologically sound ends.

Brother Martin Luther, painted
by Lucas Cranach the Elder

By 1517, monarchs in Britain, France, and Spain had already softened Roman authority inside their kingdoms. Rome depended upon German loyalty to finance increasingly grandiose building schemes, and subsidize that great sybarite, Pope Leo X. Luther seized a moment, which could’ve portended international anarchy, and provided philosophical backbone to popular grumblings. Faith, Luther said, makes all people free. However, at the beginning, he had no intention to create a new church or break with Rome.

From there, Harline describes how Luther’s challengers forced him to revise his theology. His disputes with Johann Eck and Cardinal Cajetan, in particular, forced Luther to explore the ramifications of his scriptural exegesis. Challenging papal indulgences, these learned churchmen believed, inevitably challenged the papacy itself. Luther didn’t want this conclusion, but the longer he disputed, the more he realized the inevitable: popes, however sanctified, cannot bring salvation. That lies between God and individual Christians alone.

Unfortunately, then as now, powerful people misinterpreted theology to their own ends. When Luther promised freedom to believers living by faith, some people assumed that meant ealthly freedom from rules and expectations. Aristocrats began picking fights with bishops, while citizens began disregarding the law. Radical reformers like Thomas Müntzer encouraged the faithful to rebel against human authority. Luther started events in motion, then struggled to keep them under control, sometimes less successfully than other times.

Throughout Harline’s history, one recurrent image dominates: the importance of pamphlets. Many previous theologians had challenged Vatican primacy—the name Jan Hus looms large—but most lacked sufficient reach to carry the discussion. Luther enjoyed the advantages of political turmoil, benevolent patrons, and a conveniently corrupt Pope, certainly; but he couldn’t have parlayed that into a Reformation without the invention of moveable-type printing. The Reformation testifies to the importance of literacy and the portable word.

Harline writes this history with the panache of a novelist, paying particular attention to keeping both the sequences of coinciding events, and history’s inevitable cast of thousands, comprehensible enough for general readers. This includes supplementing the text with historic portraits of the major players and images of the relevant cities, mostly etchings and woodcuts. When the story covers this much territory, and involves this many characters, having authentic period images anchors everything in our minds.

By 1522, with Luther formally excommunicated and Germany splitting along sectarian lines, Luther’s Wittenberg descended into chaos, an outbreak history calls Karlstadt’s Rebellion. Luther returned from exile and, without institutional authority, resumed his pulpit, essentially beginning the native German church. Harline ends there, with a world transformed, and power devolved to regions. This isn’t a full Luther biography, just five years of rapid, world-shattering transformation. Harline delivers a punch as concise as his time frame.