The father of the Protestant Reformation was a flawed prophet, but his voice was vital in the fight for religious freedom
Joseph Lokont
There is no simple explanation for why, 500 years ago, an unknown German monk decided to risk everything and challenge the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church. But by nailing 95 theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther began a Reformation with extraordinary effect. Intentionally or unintentionally, he overturned many of the basic assumptions of Western culture, sparking a revolution in human freedom that continues to shape the modern world.
At its core, Luther's protest against the church was theological, an attempt to recover the historical meaning of the Christian gospel from what he saw as a legalistic corruption. The way to peace with God, Luther insisted, was not through good works, religious rituals, or scholastic reasoning, but rather through heartfelt faith in Jesus Christ and his saving death on the cross.
However, in defending the gospel of salvation "by faith alone," Luther introduced a new source of authority into the bloodline of the West. For nearly a thousand years, every European man and woman owed allegiance to two kinds of authority: political (kings, nobles, magistrates) and religious (popes, councils, bishops, or their representatives). However, when it came to deciding matters of faith, Luther found both to be deeply flawed and unreliable.
Who was Martin Luther? What is the Reformation and why is it important? About 500 years ago, Luther is said to have nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a church in Germany.
“My conscience is a slave to the Word of God,” he told his accusers. “I cannot and will not give up anything, because to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I will stand.” The believer as an individual and his conscience, standing before God and his Word—this was a confession that redefined the meaning of faith and the dignity of man.
In the process, Luther exposed the scandal of so-called Christendom: a political society that maintained spiritual unity through coercion and violence. Dissent from orthodoxy was outlawed, heresy was eradicated and punished with fire and sword. For example, the papal bull of 1520, which excommunicated Luther from the Catholic Church, accused him of promoting 41 heresies and “terrible errors.” One of the alleged errors was his view that “the burning of heretics is against the will of the Holy Spirit.”
Luther did not address the issue of freedom of conscience in his Ninety-Five Theses, nor did he ever invent a political theory that supported religious pluralism. But his major letters and works leave no doubt that the father of the Protestant Reformation hoped to reconstruct the entire medieval approach to religious belief. Luther provides his most thorough treatment of these issues in Secular Authority: How Far We Must Obey (1523), where he clearly distinguished the purposes of church and state, limiting the scope of government to the preservation of life and property.
“For God cannot and will not allow anyone to rule the soul except Himself,” Luther wrote. “Therefore, when temporal power presumes to prescribe laws for the soul, it violates the command of God and only deceives and destroys souls.”
Rejecting the notion of a Christian commonwealth, Luther argued that the state possessed neither the authority nor the mandate from God to intervene in spiritual matters. “The soul is not under Caesar’s power,” he wrote. “He cannot teach it, nor lead it, nor kill it, nor raise it.” Other reformers called for a radical separation of church and state, a concept that Luther ultimately rejected. Others went further to defend the rights of all religious believers, even heretics and nonbelievers, in civic and political life.
Yet almost every important defense of religious liberty in the 17th century—the liberal politics of William Penn, Roger Williams, Pierre Bayle, and John Locke—took Luther’s teachings for granted. “The only narrow way that leads to heaven is no more known to the judge than to private persons,” Locke wrote in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), “and therefore I cannot safely accept him as my guide, as he may perhaps be as ignorant as I am of my way, and who certainly cares less for my salvation than I do myself.”
In the 18th century, the United States became the first nation to include the Protestant concept of rights of conscience in its constitution. James Madison, the mastermind of the First Amendment, was inspired by Luther’s achievements. In an 1821 letter to FL Schaeffer, Madison explained that the American model of religious freedom “illustrates the perfection of a system which, with the proper distinction, to which the genius and courage of Luther led us, between that which is Caesar’s and that which is God’s, best promotes the performance of both obligations.”
When the modern human rights movement took shape after World War II, a committee of public intellectuals embraced Luther’s thinking as they sought a philosophical basis for an international bill of rights. Their 1947 UNESCO document cited the Reformation, because of its “appeal to the absolute authority of the individual conscience,” as one of the most significant historical events in the development of human rights.
Similarly, the language of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” – pays homage to Luther’s vision. The main author, Lebanese Ambassador Charles Malik, a delegate to the original UN Commission on Human Rights, was also a student of the Reformation. “The minds and consciences of men are the most sacred and inviolable things they possess,” Malik wrote, “not their belonging to this or that class, this or that nation, this or that religion.”
Today the Catholic Church, once a fierce opponent of religious freedom, is one of its most powerful defenders on the world stage. “Man demands civil liberty so that he may lead a life worthy of a man in society,” writes John Courtney Murray, an architect of Vatican II’s support for the rights of conscience. “And this demand for freedom from coercion is made with particular force in matters of religion.” Here, it seems, is a silent homage to Luther’s revolution: “I will preach it, I will teach it, I will write it, but I will not force anyone, for faith must come freely without compulsion.”
The social realities of Christianity—the profound entanglement of church and state—prevented Luther from working out the implications of his political theology. Once Protestantism became an established faith, he endorsed the use of force against heretics; his harsh treatment of Jews followed the pathetic pattern of European Christianity.
Yet the moral courage and intellectual coherence of Luther’s dissent should not be underestimated. If Luther was a flawed prophet of human freedom, his voice was nevertheless vital in the long march toward a more just and pluralistic society. In Luther, we find a defender of human dignity who challenged the forces of religious oppression and reimagined the political ideals of medieval Europe.
With his rebuttal, Luther made a challenge to the conscience of the West like no other since the Sermon on the Mount—something as essential today as it was half a millennium ago.
Joseph Lokont is an associate professor of history at King's College in New York City and the author of "God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West." / National Geographic – Bota.al
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