Luther was born in 1483 or 1484, the eldest son of a family that was newly prosperous from copper mining. He became a monk in 1505, against his father’s wishes, and remembered those early years in the monastery as a torment. He felt imprisoned in his own sin, whose grip on him grew stronger the more he struggled against it. Seemingly trivial sins tortured him. His exasperated confessor told him to go and commit some real sins, but his superior, more constructively, packed him off to the new university at Wittenberg for further study in 1507. He drank in his studies. Over the following dozen years, as he rose rapidly in both the monastic and the academic hierarchies, he gradually came to understand the Christian Gospel in a way that seemed to him completely new, authentically ancient, and utterly life changing.
Luther was not a systematic theologian, trading in logical definitions or philosophical consistency. The systematizers who followed in his wake picked out two key principles in his thought: sola fide and sola scriptura, “faith alone” and “Scripture alone”. But this risks missing the point. Luther’s theology was not a doctrine; it was a love affair. Consuming love for God has been part of Christian experience since the beginning, but Luther’s passion had a reckless extravagance that set it apart, and which has echoed down Protestantism’s history. He pursued his love for God with blithe disregard for the bounds set by Church and tradition. It was an intense, desolating, intoxicating passion, sparked by his life-upending glimpse of God’s incomprehensible, terrible, beautiful love for him. Like any lover, he found it incredible that his beloved should love him, unworthy as he was. And yet he discovered over the long years of prayer and study that God loved him wildly, irresponsibly, and beyond all reason. God, in Christ, had laid down his life for him. This was not, as the medievals’ subtle theology had taught, a transaction, or a process by which believers had to do whatever was in their power to pursue holiness. It was a sheer gift. All that mattered was accepting it.2
This went beyond anything Erasmus had imagined. Erasmus wanted to free Christians from superstition, not to interfere with Christianity’s basic theological framework. Indeed, he thought that too much attention to theology was a futile distraction from the pursuit of holiness. He called Luther doctor hyperbolicus, the “doctor of overstatement”.3 But for Luther, it was impossible to overstate God’s grace. He too wanted a radically simplified Christian life, but he wanted it because the flood of God’s grace had swept everything else away. All the structures that the medieval Church had provided for the Christian life, from pious works through sacraments to the Church itself, mediating between sinners and their Saviour – all of this was now so much clutter. Or worse, a blasphemous attempt to buy and sell what God gives us for free.
This talk of grace and free forgiveness was dangerous. If grace is free and all we need do is believe, surely that would lead to moral anarchy? The fact that free forgiveness can look like a licence to sin has plagued Protestantism for centuries. But for Luther, even to ask this question was block-headed. What kind of lover needs rules about how to love? What kind of lover has to be bribed or threatened into loving? God loves us unreservedly. If we recognize that love, we will love him unreservedly in return.
Luther’s breakthrough had a dazzling, corrosive simplicity to it. The power of those twin principles, “faith alone” and “Scripture alone”, lay in the word “alone”. There is nothing and no one else other than God incarnate in Jesus Christ worth attending to. Being a Christian means throwing yourself abjectly, unreservedly, on Christ’s mercy. Living a Christian life means living Christ’s life – that is, abandoning all security and worldly ambitions to follow him “through penalties, deaths and hell”. It is only then that we may find peace. That ravishing paradox is at the heart of Protestantism. It is a further paradox that such a profoundly personal insight should have such an impact on the outside world.
The idea’s initial impact was like that of Darwinism or Marxism in their own times: it was a concept that no one had thought of in quite those terms before but that seemed to many people, once they had grasped it, to be self-evidently true. Luther’s themes were all familiar ones, either ancient or newly fashionable. St Augustine had emphasized God’s grace, the late medievals had stressed God’s absolute sovereignty, and Erasmus had called for simplicity. What Luther did was to combine those themes as never before.
However, his idea was also powerful because it was obscure. Luther suddenly became a public figure in late 1517 not because he was preaching free salvation but because his new theology made his archbishop’s financial practices seem especially offensive. He denounced them and called for a debate on the principles behind them. It was only natural that Germans, primed to expect battles between a corrupt hierarchy and brave, pious scholars, should jump to conclusions. Luther was the new Reuchlin. Even Erasmus rallied to his side. The burgeoning scandal had run on for well over a year before it became plain that Luther was calling not only for moral reform and good scholarship but for a complete reimagining of what it meant to be a Christian.
Reuchlin had chiefly been a symbolic figure. The satires that destroyed his opponents’ reputations were other people’s work. But in 1518, Luther discovered that he could write: accessibly, pungently, mixing soaring ecstasies with brutal street fighting. He had a knack for unforgettable images and analogies and a sense of paradox that made his arguments seem almost irrefutable. He could do it in Latin, like a good scholar, but he could also do it wonderfully in German, seizing his readers by the throat and pulling them into the debate.
The new technology of print had found its first master. Printing with movable type was over sixty years old by this time. The industry seemed fairly mature, mostly producing hefty legal, medical, or liturgical texts for which there were steady, predictable markets. Luther stumbled into a new literary form, the mass-market pamphlet – short, cheap, quickly produced in large numbers. A pamphlet cost roughly the same as a hen in sixteenth-century Germany and could offer more lasting and spicier nourishment. These tiny books could reach a mass audience in a completely unprecedented way. Printers who caught the wave made fortunes. Luther’s books changed the rules of religious debate, which was meant to be a game for educated elites, played in universities in the decent obscurity of Latin. Luther flung open the gates. Now anyone who could read German, or who knew someone who could read German, could join in. Already, Protestantism was breaking down walls.
Luther’s literary achievement has no parallels in the whole of human history. If that seems an extravagant claim, consider the figures. During his thirty-year public career, Luther produced 544 separate books, pamphlets, or articles, slightly more than one every three weeks. At his peak, in 1523, he managed 55. That year, 390 separate editions of his books, new and old, were published. Luther alone was responsible for over a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets by German presses during the 1520s. One scholar has totted up the totals for his rivals and supporters and concluded that the top seventeen pro-Luther pamphleteers produced 807 editions between them during the years 1518–25, whereas Luther alone produced 1,465, nearly twice as many as all the rest put together.4 No revolutionary leader in modern history has, without the aid of censorship or state backing, towered over a mass movement to the extent Martin Luther did.
Luther’s opponents were left gasping. “Every day it rains Luther books,” wrote one horrified churchman in 1521. “Nothing else sells.” During those same seven years, barely 300 editions of anti-Luther works were published in Germany. The printers of these books complained that they “cannot even be given away”. More than half were in Latin, not even trying to reach a mass audience (only a fifth of Luther’s editions were in Latin). Orthodoxy’s defenders were entirely unprepared for the storm of print that had engulfed them. Who can blame them? No one had ever seen anything like this before. In some ways, no one ever would again.5
Even so, it should have blown over. The Church had absorbed and co-opted mass movements before. If so many Christians found Luther’s ideas appealing, surely, with a little house-training, they could be welcomed into the fold?
For decades afterwards, plenty of Catholic Christians hoped and worked for reconciliation. From a modern perspective, it remains a tantalizing what-if. Was