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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Alec Ryrie 2017

Alec Ryrie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Map by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780007465033

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Version: 2018-02-09

Praise for Protestants:

‘Ryrie offers an admirably “long view” of the development of the Protestant faith’

Literary Review

‘A treat. Ryrie has a gift for showing how the history of religion is the history of the people … This book’s scholarship showcases one of the leading historians of Protestantism writing today, but the delight of it is the crisp prose, cool wit, wise judgements and sheer scope from the gates of Wittenberg to the streets of Seoul’ DIARMAID MACCULLOCH

‘Informative and stimulating’

Financial Times

‘This is a book of breathtaking range and penetrating insight. It will shape our perception of the Reformation and its long shadow for years to come’

ANDREW PETTEGREE, author of Brand Luther

‘Remarkably open-minded and delightfully light-hearted’

The Times

‘To cover the history of Protestantism in just 514 pages might seem a reckless task [but] Ryrie … has succeeded magnificently … A learned, humane and entertaining book’

Sunday Times

‘Ryrie guides us sure-footedly along the broad paths of Protestant history without neglecting its many fascinating by-ways. He writes with empathy but without illusions; his trademark combination of wit and erudition makes the journey as enjoyable as it is enlightening’

PROFESSOR PETER MARSHALL, University of Warwick

‘Ryrie’s agile mind, pithy style and energetic narrative bring 500 years of Protestant history to life and into the present global era. Profound and capacious, Protestants is scintillating, shrewd, incisive and proceeds at an astonishing pace. If you wish to buy one book to understand the impact Martin Luther has had on the modern world, this is it’

THE RIGHT REVEREND DR GRAHAM KINGS,

Mission Theologian in the Anglican Communion

‘A learned, lively look at the various faiths lumped together as Protestant, from Martin Luther in the sixteenth century to today’

Kirkus Reviews

Dedication

In memory of Bill Ryrie (1928–2012)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Map

Introduction

PART I: THE REFORMATION AGE

Chapter 1. Luther and the Fanatics

The Call of Reform • An Accidental Revolutionary • “Captive to the Word of God” • The Fanatics’ Reformation

Chapter 2. Protectors and Tyrants

Taming the Reformation • The Two Kingdoms • Chaos and Order • Revolutionary Saints

Chapter 3. The Failure of Calvinism

Parallel Reformations • Calvin’s Contribution • Lutheranism in Search of Concord • Dreams of Union • The Unravelling of Calvinism

Chapter 4. Heretics, Martyrs and Witches

Martyrdom and Heresy • Turning the Tide • The Luxury of Intolerance • The Devil’s Minions

Chapter 5. The British Maelstrom

An Unlikely War • Winning the Peace • Journeys into the Unknown • Quakers and Anglicans

Chapter 6. From the Waters of Babylon to a City on a Hill

An Age of Exiles • American Pilgrimages • Preaching to the Nations

PART II: THE MODERN AGE

Chapter 7. Enthusiasm and Its Enemies

The Pietist Adventure • Moravian Riders • Methodism: Pietism’s English Stepchild • The Revivals’ New World

Chapter 8. Slaves to Christ

The Emergence of Protestant Slavery • Living with Slavery • The Road to Abolition • The Gospel of Slavery • Slavery’s Lessons

Chapter 9. Protestantism’s Wild West

Big-Tent Protestantism • The Communitarian Alternative • The Narrow Way • Witnessing for Jehovah • Latter-Day Protestants

Chapter 10. The Ordeals of Liberalism

The Liberal Project • God’s Successive Revelations • The Book of Nature • Liberalism in the Trenches

Chapter 11. Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich

Making Peace with Nazism • Dejudaizing Christianity • Shades of Opposition • The Limits of the Possible

Chapter 12. Religious Left and Religious Right

Saving Civilization in the Age of the Second World War • The Gospel of Civil Rights • Prophetic Christianity in the 1960s • The Crisis of the Religious Left

PART III: THE GLOBAL AGE

Chapter 13. Redeeming South Africa

Settlers and Missionaries • Blood River • “Separate Development” • The Trek to Repentance • The Independent Witness

Chapter 14. Korea in Adversity and Prosperity

Missionary Beginnings • Revival and Nationalism • South Korea’s Journey • Full Gospels • Northern Fears and Hopes

Chapter 15. Chinese Protestantism’s Long March

Dreams and Visions • Protestants and Imperialists • Death and Resurrection in the People’s Republic • Believing in Modern China • China’s Protestant Future

Chapter 16. Pentecostalism: An Old Flame

A Tangle of Origins • The Pentecostal Experience • Becoming a Global Faith • The Politics of Pentecostalism

Epilogue: The Protestant Future

Old Quarrels and New • Protestants in the World

Plate Section

Glossary

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

Also by Alec Ryrie

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

In 1524, Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a blistering attack on a fanatical new cult that was spreading across northern Europe like a plague. These people claim to be preaching the Bible’s pure message, he said, but look at how they actually use the Bible, twisting it to mean whatever they want:

They are like young men who love a girl so immoderately that they imagine they see their beloved wherever they turn, or, a much better example, like two combatants who, in the heat of a quarrel, turn whatever is at hand into a missile, whether it be a jug or a dish.¹

This book is about that cult and how it became one of the most creative and disruptive movements in human history. At present, around one-eighth of the human race belongs to it, and it has decisively shaped the world in which the other seven-eighths live. My aim is to convince you that we cannot understand the modern age without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity.

It turns out that Erasmus was right: Protestants are fighters and lovers. They will argue with anyone about almost anything. Some of these arguments are abstruse, others brutally practical. If we look at the great ideological battles of the past half millennium – for and against toleration, slavery, imperialism, fascism, or Communism – we will find Protestant Christians on both sides.

But Protestants are also lovers. From the beginning, a love affair with God has been at the heart of their faith. Like all long love affairs, it has gone through many phases, from early passion through companionable marriage and sometimes strained coexistence, to rekindled ardour. Beneath all the arguments, the distinguishing mark of a Protestant is the feeling and memory of that love, one on which no church or human authority can intrude. It is because Protestants care so deeply about God that they have been willing to fight one another and take on the world on his behalf.

So this is both an interior and an exterior story, a spiritual and emotional drama with practical and political implications. The spirituality at Protestantism’s centre sends out waves that sometimes crest into tsunamis as they encounter the ordinary stuff of human life. This book will tell the stories of the changes they have left in their wake. Protestants have faced down tyrants, demanded political participation, advocated tolerance, and valued the individual. Equally, they have insisted on God-given inequality, valorized state power, persecuted dissenters, and placed the community above its members. They have fought religious wars against each other and have turned secular struggles into crusades. Some have tried to withdraw from the secular world and its politics altogether, and at times they have been the most revolutionary of all.

The Protestant Reformation was clearly an important event in world history, but that does not mean that it can take the credit or the blame for everything that has happened since. Nor does it make Martin Luther a prophet of individualism or a hero of self-determination. He and the Protestants who succeeded him were not trying to modernize the world, but to save it. And yet in the process they profoundly changed how we think about ourselves, our society, and our relationship with God. This book tells the story of that transformation: a story, in outline, of how three of the key ingredients of the world we live in are rooted in Protestant Christianity.

The first is free inquiry. Protestants stumbled into this slowly and reluctantly, but Luther’s bedrock principles led inexorably in that direction. The insistence that all human authority in religious matters is provisional, and that the human conscience, constrained only by the Bible and the Holy Spirit, is ultimately sovereign, means that Protestants who try to police the boundaries of acceptable argument have in the end always failed. Protestants have always been divided among themselves both in their religious and in their political leadership, making it easy for new and dissenting ideas to find spaces both at home and across borders.

Protestantism is not a paradise of free speech, but an open-ended, ill-disciplined argument. How it has come to continuously generate new ideas, and revive old ones, is a recurring theme of this book. Protestants’ bare-knuckle style of public debate wore down print censorship, and Protestant universities and scholars led the way in the emergence of the new natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slowly and reluctantly, one notion which a few radical Protestants put about – that religious difference and free speech ought to be accepted as matters of principle, rather than merely tolerated as unavoidable necessities – became a new orthodoxy.

This is linked to Protestantism’s second, more dangerous contribution: its tendency towards what we are compelled to call democracy. Virtually all Protestants before the nineteenth century, and many since, regarded that word with horror, yet the undertow was there. Protestants regularly found themselves having to deal with governments that did not share their beliefs. They asserted not a right to choose their rulers but a solemn duty and responsibility to challenge them. In performing that duty, the Scottish radical John Knox wrote in 1558, “all man is equal”² Few Protestants at the time agreed, and even Knox meant something very different from what we understand equality to mean today. Most early Protestants favoured monarchy, order and social stability. But their rulers had an intolerable tendency to act in defiance of God’s will, and so, again and again, they were forced reluctantly to take matters into their own hands. This is what we should expect from consciences fired with love for God and ready to take on all comers.

Left to itself, this could lead to revolution or to the creation of self-righteous theocracies, and as we shall see, both have repeatedly happened. But these impulses have been tempered by the third, much less remarked-upon but perhaps more significant ingredient of Protestantism’s modernizing cocktail: its apoliticism. Protestants might have sometimes confronted or overthrown their rulers, but their most constant political demand is simply to be left alone. Returning to Christianity’s roots in ancient Rome, they have tried to carve out a spiritual space where political authority does not apply and have insisted that that space, the kingdom of Christ, matters far more than the sordid and ephemeral quarrels of this world. The results are paradoxical. Protestants have often been obedient subjects to thoroughly noxious rulers, taking no interest in politics so long as their own separate sphere is respected. It has also meant that rulers who will not or cannot respect that sphere have faced unexpectedly stubborn opposition. In the process, Protestants have helped to give the modern world the strange, counterintuitive notion of limited government: the principle that the first duty even of the most righteous ruler is to respect his subjects’ freedom and allow them to live their lives as they see fit.

These ideals, which seem natural to our own age, are in the span of human history very unusual indeed. That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers’ powers over us should be limited – these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvellous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.

This brings us to one of the most persistent puzzles of Protestant modernity. Ever since the great German sociologist Max Weber advanced the notion of “the Protestant work ethic” in 1904, it has seemed intuitively obvious that there is some kind of connection between Protestantism and capitalism. But for all the brilliance of Weber’s arguments, the actual evidence he advanced to prove this intuition did not really hold up, and his successors have not done much better.³ It is true both that capitalism has often flourished in Protestant societies, and Protestantism has often flourished in societies that are newly embracing capitalism, from sixteenth-century Holland to eighteenth-century England through to twentieth-century South Korea. Equally plainly, capitalism and Protestantism can each prosper in the other’s absence. Two observations, perhaps, can be made. One is that the kind of socio-political structure that Protestantism engenders – based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government – tends to favour market economics.

The other is a matter of mood. As Weber pointed out, one of capitalism’s odd features is its “restless activity”.⁴ Protestants are not always driven to restless economic activity, although the need to fill the unforgiving minutes of their lives in a manner which is both blameless and worthwhile can certainly push them in that direction. But a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability, is absolutely a core characteristic of the Protestant life. Settled peace and consensus does not come easily to Protestants. They are more usually found straining after new truths, searching out new sins or striving to recover old virtues. They have always known that their religious life is flawed and inadequate, and no sooner create an institution than they suspect it of calcifying into formalism and hyprocrisy. They are forever starting new arguments and spawning new forms. This self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning has helped to fuel and support the growth of capitalism. More broadly, it has also been, and still is, one of the engines driving modern history.

This book tells the story of how the first five centuries of Protestant history brought us to where we are now and asks what might be coming next. It is not chiefly a history of Protestantism, of doctrines and churches and theological systems, although a certain amount of that can’t be avoided. It is a history of Protestants, who see themselves as God’s chosen people. There are towering thinkers like Martin Luther, the stubborn monk whose own overwhelming encounter with God began it all, and John Calvin, the brilliant and arrogant Frenchman who came tantalizingly close to forging a single, united Protestantism. There are outsiders like the self-taught Vermont preacher William Miller, whose apocalyptic hopes swept across 1840s America, and Choe Ja-Sil, the destitute Korean nurse who co-founded a tent church that became, by the time of her death in 1989, the world’s largest congregation. There are noblemen like Justinian von Welz and Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, whose conversions drove them from their German estates to cross the world spreading their subversive religion. There are women like Rebecca Freundlich Protten, one of the first ordained Protestant women, who risked re-enslavement rather than compromise her faith, and Pandita Ramabai, the Indian widow whose campaign for women’s rights was underpinned by her Pentecostal revivalism. There are heroes with clay feet, like Martin Niemöller and Johan Heyns, who only slowly and painfully realized that their faith could not square with Nazism or apartheid; and reactionaries, like Walter Grundmann and Gustav Gerdener, whose faith seemed to find its fullest expression in those doctrines.

The book falls into three parts. Part 1 takes the story from the great crisis of the Reformation through to the eighteenth century, when it finally became clear that Protestantism would not only survive but spread around the world. The story begins in chapter 1 with Martin Luther’s attempt to work out the implications of his own personal spiritual crisis. What began as a decorous academic dispute quickly turned into a scandal, then a political crisis, and, within less than a decade, the largest mass rebellion Europe had ever seen. Chapter 2 asks how the fragmented, antagonistic reforming movements that emerged from this chaos tried to carve out space in which they could live. Some worked with the grain of existing power structures, while others openly defied them; all shared the deeply subversive assumption that Christ’s kingdom was separate from and superior to human hierarchies of any kind. Chapter 3 looks at the most promising attempt at something Protestants have always longed for, namely reunion. Calvinism’s failure to achieve this dream ended up proving that it was not only impossible but positively damaging.

Chapter 4 turns to one of the first consequences of the Protestant upheaval: more than a century of brutal religious violence, as a result of which, slowly and reluctantly, some Protestants began to harbour notions of tolerance. Chapter 5 stops for a more detailed look at one particularly significant example of that process: the English Civil War of 1642–46 and its aftermath, the most fertile nursery of new Protestant sects and ideas since Luther’s day. Chapter 6 considers one vital consequence of violence: mass migration. Protestantism was profoundly shaped by the experience of exile, for good and for ill. In this first age of globalization, Protestants scattered not only across Europe but across the world, especially, fatefully, to North America. Here they tried and failed to build model societies, while initially making astonishingly little effort to convert non-Christian peoples.

In part 2, we see how Protestantism in Europe and North America recovered from its late seventeenth-century nadir only to face new crises in the modern world. Chapter 7 describes how, around the turn of the eighteenth century, Protestants rediscovered some of their old sources of spiritual strength and began a wave of global expansion that has scarcely paused since. This quickly led them into confronting the defining spiritual and political crisis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Atlantic slavery. Chapter 8 looks at how slavery was defended and opposed by Protestants with equal vigour on both sides of the ocean. The slow but decisive shift to a Protestant consensus that slavery is intolerable would have lasting effects. Chapter 9 looks at another aspect of the early United States: the third great explosion of sectarian creativity in Protestant history, giving rise to a kaleidoscope of utopian, apocalyptic, antihierarchical, and Spirit-led movements, some of which continue to shape modern Protestantism to this day. Chapter 10 turns to a very different feature of nineteenth-century Protestantism, namely theological liberalism, a bold attempt to outflank the emerging secularist challenge. It was, if anything, too successful, and ended up being deeply implicated on all sides in the First World War.

Chapter 11 takes up the role of Protestants in the rise of and resistance to Nazism in Germany, where old Protestant orthodoxies and new liberal ideals combined to smooth the path to genocide. Chapter 12 follows that story to the present in Protestantism’s old heartland, arguing that the rise of secularism in Europe and in parts of the United States reflects many denominations’ inability to find a distinctive voice after the immense moral shock of the Second World War. The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left.

In part 3, the book’s final chapters look at what has now become a global story. Chapter 13 traces the longest and bitterest of Protestantism’s African adventures: South Africa, where an indigenous African Protestantism took root quickly but ran up against a settler population that justified white supremacy in explicitly Protestant terms. Protestantism was crucial both to apartheid’s beginnings and to its end. Chapter 14 turns to modern Protestantism’s strangest success story, Korea, where colonial and cultural politics combined to give Protestants an opening unparalleled in Asia. The other great Asian story, that of China, examined in chapter 15, is very different; here a long-standing missionary effort bore relatively little fruit, but the pressures of Communist rule have now given China the world’s fastest-growing Protestant population. Finally, chapter 16 looks at the greatest revolution in modern Protestantism: Pentecostalism, a global phenomenon from its inception, which for over a century has been quietly putting down roots in the United States, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere and now has a fair claim to be the modern world’s most dynamic religious movement. Its persistent avoidance of politics has allowed it to deflect attention, but that may turn out to be its most subversive feature of all. The epilogue asks, in the light of this story, where Protestantism might be going next: for it may be that its history is still only beginning.

Protestantism has affected every sphere of human life. I have focused on its political effects, especially how it has eaten away at established orthodoxies and distinctions of race, nation, and gender, sometimes despite itself. I have not paid much attention to its role in driving economic change or in fostering modern science, though we will touch on both subjects. I have said virtually nothing about the arts. It would take a whole chapter to do justice to Johann Sebastian Bach; here he gets a single sentence. If you finish this book impatient to know about the parts of the story I have skated over or left out, I will feel I have succeeded.

It will already be obvious that I am using the word “Protestant” broadly. There are narrow definitions, restricting it, for example, to Lutheran and Calvinist Christians and their immediate descendants. One of the things Protestants like to fight over is who does and does not count as a proper Protestant. As a historian, I prefer a genealogical definition: Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church. They are a tree with many tangled branches but a single trunk. So in this book “Protestant” includes those who are often shut out of the party, such as Anabaptists, Quakers, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostals. These groups have radically different beliefs, but they share a family resemblance. They are as quarrelsome and fervent as any other Protestant, and that first spark, the life-changing encounter between the individual believer and the grace of God, is visible in all of them.

One definition does need a little more attention: the one on which Erasmus focused. As a much-quoted seventeenth-century Englishman put it, “The BIBLE, I say, The BIBLE only is the Religion of Protestants!”⁵ It is a truism that the Bible, the ancient library of Jewish and early Christian texts that Christians regard as Scripture, is close to Protestantism’s heart. It is also clear that one of the things Protestants love to fight over is what the Bible is and means. To understand those battles, we need to ask just what Protestants’ relationship with the Bible is – as a matter of historical practice, not of theological principle.

Some Protestants insist that Protestantism is “Bible Christianity”, a religion that takes the whole, inspired Bible as the only and final authoritative source of truth. This view makes Protestantism’s history of division easy enough to understand; these are simply arguments about the interpretation of a complex text. But the claim that Protestantism is mere Bible Christianity does not stand up. For one thing, there is that love affair. What Protestants share is an experience of God’s grace rather than a doctrine of authority. Martin Luther had his life upended by God’s grace before he decided that he could not be bound by any authority outside Scripture. Indeed, many Protestants have not treated the Bible as their sole authority. Some have found authority elsewhere, through (as they believed) the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others have questioned whether and in what sense the whole text as we have it is authoritative at all.

Even those who do use the whole Bible as their sole authority do so in two different ways. They are Erasmus’s lovers and fighters. The Bible has from the beginning been Protestants’ weapon for defending their beliefs and dismissing their opponents’, citing chapter and verse to prove the point. This works best if you believe in the word-for-word authority of the entire text, and the earliest Protestants were as adept as any modern evangelicals at that kind of close-quarters biblical combat.

And yet, before the Bible is a bludgeon that can be used to batter your opponents into submission, it is a source of inspiration. Before you can wield it like a fighter, you must read it like a lover. We can see this through one of the strangest features of Protestant Christianity. Although Protestants have from the beginning vigorously asserted that the Bible is authoritative, they have been strangely slow to argue that that is so. When the case has been made, it has often been done without much energy: citing biblical texts to justify the Bible’s authority, an obviously circular argument, or making shaky deductions to the effect that God must have inspired it. This is not because Protestants are avoiding an awkward subject or know they do not have a leg to stand on. It is because, in truth, their faith does not hang on these arguments. They do not need to convince themselves of the Bible’s authority, because they already know it.

Early Protestantism’s greatest systematic theologian, John Calvin, confronted the question head-on. In an extraordinary passage, he simply refused to argue the case for the Bible’s authority at all. “We ought”, he said, “to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.” In other words, we know that the Bible is the Word of God not by arguing about it but by reading it with “pure eyes and upright senses”, for then and only then “the majesty of God will immediately come to view”. The Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, and only the Holy Spirit can convince you that that is true. Therefore, Calvin concludes,

Scripture is indeed self-authenticating. . . . We feel that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there, . . . a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself.⁶

The Bible itself provides its own authority, and either you feel it (through the Spirit) or you don’t. This is Scripture for lovers, who can talk rapturously of the vision before them but cannot in the end compel anyone else to see it.

Across the span of Protestantism’s history, the experience Calvin describes is fundamental. The same argument, in essence, was made by seventeenth-century Puritans, eighteenth-century revivalists, nineteenth-century liberals, and twentieth-century Pentecostals. The Bible is woven into Western, and now global, civilization more deeply than any other book, and none of us can come to it cold. Yet in every generation, Protestants have felt that they are reading the Bible for the first time and have been enthralled by its stories, its poetry and its arguments. This is why they persistently refuse to let anyone else tell them how to read their Bibles. “I acknowledge no fixed rules for the interpretation of the Word of God,” Martin Luther told Pope Leo X, “since the Word of God, which teaches freedom in all other matters, must not be bound.” The following century, John Bunyan gently refused to submit to anyone else’s interpretation. “I am for drinking Water out of my own Cistern; what GOD makes mine by evidence of his Word and Spirit, that I dare make bold with.”⁷ Protestants have been finding refreshment and boldness in their own cisterns ever since.

When Protestant groups have distanced themselves from the Bible, like the Nazi-era “German Christians” for whom it was intolerably Jewish, they end up looking not very Protestant any more. But if to read the Bible as a lover is common to all Protestants, whether and how to use it as a weapon is not. Many Protestants have concluded, as Calvin did, that the entire text must be fully inspired. This seems the most openhearted way of honouring their encounter with God in the text and also makes the text much easier to use in combat. Others have for various reasons concluded that they cannot accept it as authoritative in that way, on some variant of a principle first articulated by Martin Luther himself. Luther argued that the Bible contains the Word of God rather than that it is that Word. He even called it “the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies”.⁸ But even those who have picked up that idea and run with it most daringly still keep coming back to the manger to worship.

Protestants have no consensus on the question of how and in what sense the Bible is authoritative. Some would defend every comma. Others are more free and easy with the text. Both positions are attractive and both present formidable problems. But for all their arguments, both parties continue to drink from this cistern out of a shared conviction that here, supremely, is where they hear God’s voice – even if they are unable to agree on what he says.

A brief note about how and why I have written this book. I have written about a very wide range of religious movements. I find some of them admirable, some of them repellent, and some of them tinged with madness. In each case, I have tried to treat them with sympathy. This is not because I myself believe that witches should be put to death or that apartheid is God’s will. It is because earnest, God-fearing Protestants who were no more inherently wicked than you or I did believe these things, even at the same time as other Protestants passionately opposed them. Condemning ugly beliefs is easy, but it is also worth the effort to understand why people once believed them. If we are lucky, later ages might be as indulgent towards us. We all live in glass houses. Those who are without sin are welcome to cast the first stone.

So I have tried to explain what all kinds of Protestantism felt like from the inside, but like all of us I also have my own corner to defend, and it is only fair to be plain about it. I am myself a believing Protestant Christian and a licensed lay preacher in the Church of England. This book was not, however, written to convert you to my views, and I should be amazed if it did. It was written to convince you of the richness, the power, and the creativity, as well as the dangers, of this vast religious tradition. If you are yourself a Protestant, I hope this book will show you your own tradition in a new perspective: to help you understand more about where it came from, how it ended up the way it is today, and where it might be going next. If you are not, I hope it will show you why so many people have been and still are. I hope you will also see how this tradition has not only made the modern world but also made itself at home in it.

PART I

The Reformation Age

CHAPTER 1

Luther and the Fanatics

If God be for us, who can be against us?

– ROMANS 8:31

Everyone knew how it was supposed to end. The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, headed on earth by the bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter and vicar of Christ, had endured in Europe for over a thousand years. Nothing survives that long by accident. For Christians in the early sixteenth century who reflected on that astonishing fact, the explanation was obvious. This was no human institution. It was the visible Body of its founder, guided by the Holy Spirit. It would outlast this fading world and the carping of its critics, enduring for ever to God’s glory.

Nowadays, we prefer more mundane explanations. Catholic Christendom was flexible and creative, a walled garden with plenty of scope for novelty and variety, and room to adapt to changing political, social, and economic climates. But it also had boundaries, marked and unmarked. Those who wandered too far would be urged, and if necessary forced, to come back.

So if a professor at a small German university questioned an archbishop’s fund-raising practices, there was a limited range of possible outcomes. The archbishop might ignore it or quietly concede the point. Or the professor might be induced to back down, by one means or another. If none of this happened, the matter would be contested on a bigger stage. Perhaps one party or the other in the debate would persuade his opponent to agree with him. Or, more likely, the process would be mired in procedure until the protagonists gave up or died. But if it reached an impasse, the troublesome professor would eventually be ordered to give way. In the unlikely event that he refused, the only recourse was the law, leading to the one outcome that nobody wanted: he could be executed as an impenitent heretic, in a fire that would purge Christendom of his errors and symbolize the hell to which he had wilfully condemned himself.

This system had worked for centuries. But in 1517, when that professor, Martin Luther, challenged Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, his challenge instead kindled a series of increasingly uncontrollable wildfires that swept away many of the Catholic Church’s ancient structures and its walls. We call this firestorm the Reformation and the new form, or forms, of Christianity that emerged from it, Protestantism.

This was not what Luther had intended. When he voiced his local protest, he was not trying to start a fire. He was working out the implications of his own recent spiritual breakthrough and trying to start an argument about it. It turned out that those implications reached much further than either he or his opponents initially imagined. Once the smoke began to clear, they were forced to realize that they were in a new world.

The Call of Reform

With hindsight, we can see that Luther’s fire caught because fuel had been quietly building up for some time. The principal fuel was desire for reform of the Church.

Churches always need reform. They are staffed by human beings, some of whom will inevitably be fools, knaves, or merely incompetents. The Church of the later Middle Ages was no more “corrupt” than usual, and in many ways much less so. Yet three problems converged to make it appear worse than it was: money, power, and high principle.

The Western Church was very rich. It had to be; it was responsible for a continental network of parish priests, church buildings, and monastic houses, supported by an international bureaucracy of unparalleled sophistication, and these things do not come cheap. It had to preserve its political independence in a dangerous world, which meant choosing leaders of royal and noble stock. These were men – and some women, the great abbesses – whose dignity and effectiveness in their offices depended on maintaining the high courtly style to which they had been born.

Yet this was also an age that actively valued poverty, lauding it as a positive virtue like no Christian society before or since. The ideal late medieval cleric was a friar, who was forbidden even to touch money and who was supposed not even to own the rough clothes on his back. The contrast between that ideal and the Church’s corporate wealth was disturbing. Surely all that money must be corrupting? Once, as a rueful proverb had it, golden priests had served from wooden chalices; now wooden priests served from golden chalices. Every time the Church extracted rents, tithes, or other payments from its flock, it fed a resentment that went beyond ordinary taxpayers’ grumbles. And when there were real or perceived financial abuses, the gap between high ideals and sordid reality yawned dangerously wide. Martin Luther was a friar as well as a professor. When a man in his position accused the Church of moneygrubbing, people were ready to listen.

Then there was power. Back in the eleventh century, the popes had wriggled free from political control and established a vigilantly guarded independence. By the fifteenth century, they had quietly dropped some of their more startling claims. In theory, they were lords of Christendom, able to depose kings and demand universal obedience, but they knew not to push their luck. They had never really recovered from the ghastly schism of 1378–1417, when Europe was split between first two and then three rival popes. The schism was ended by a great reforming Church council, which seemed to promise an era of renewal – a hope that slowly evaporated over the following decades, leaving a residue of bitterness. By 1500, virtually all Western Christians acknowledged the papacy, but they were not proud of it. Eye-popping tales were told about Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), Rodrigo Borgia, who in 1501 supposedly held an orgy in the papal apartments for his son, to which he invited fifty chosen prostitutes and select senior clerics. True or not, it was widely believed.

Inadequate leadership and financial corruption make a dangerous mix. All the more so in “Germany”, the vast, north-central European territories that fell loosely under the so-called Holy Roman Emperor. The rivalry between popes and emperors was ancient, and as the papal court became dominated almost exclusively by Italians after the schism, it seemed increasingly foreign north of the Alps. National stereotypes came into play. Germans were, in their own minds, bluff, honest, easily duped, but firm in the defence of the right. Italians, by contrast, were scheming, malevolent, effeminate, avaricious, and cowardly. So when a German friar accused Italians of extortion and tyranny, German ears were ready to hear him.

There was also a matter of principle at stake. As well as some memorable popes, the Renaissance gave Western Christendom a slogan: ad fontes, “to the sources”, an urge to return to the ancient, and therefore pure, founts of truth. By 1500, this fashion for antiquity was sweeping into every field of knowledge. Renaissance linguists tried to recover the glories of Cicero. Renaissance generals tried, with dubious success, to remodel their armies as Roman legions. The problem with the ancient world was that it happened a long time ago, and reconstructing it involved guesswork. But late medieval Europeans never doubted that it had been a world of pristine perfection. They measured their own age against that imagined ideal. Inevitably, it fell short. And so the most devastating critiques of the late medieval Church came not from the discontented or marginalized but from within: from powerful establishment figures who believed in an ideal Church and who would not hide their disappointment with the reality. They wanted to renew the Church, not destroy it.

Leading these critics was the age’s intellectual colossus, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a brilliant, sharp-tongued, penny-pinching, peripatetic monk who combined a deliberately simple piety, an acid wit and a finely judged sense of when and with whom to pick a fight. The wit was displayed in his satire The Praise of Folly (1509), which told his readers that almost every aspect of the world they lived in was ridiculous. The piety and shrewdness were seen in his pathbreaking 1516 Latin translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Its preface recommended that the Bible be made available in all languages so that it could be read even by those on the very extremes of Christian civilization: the wild Scots, the Irish, even – he strained himself – women. Characteristically, he wrote that dangerous preface in Latin. He knew what he could get away with. He also knew that the content of his New Testament mattered less than the fact of its existence. He was offering the chance to use the Bible to judge the Church.¹

The Church’s old guard was duly provoked. Erasmus himself always stayed on the right side of trouble, but others were less careful and more vulnerable. The great cause célèbre of early sixteenth-century Germany was Johannes Reuchlin, a pioneer of Christian Hebrew scholarship. Unfortunately, the only people who could teach Christians Hebrew were Jews, and late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews. Reuchlin, however, both was openly friendly with certain Jews and acknowledged his debt to Jewish biblical scholarship. Inevitably, he was denounced for crypto-Judaism, which the Church regarded as heresy. His denouncer, with grim irony, was a Jewish convert to Christianity. German Renaissance scholars rallied to his defence, viciously mocking his opponents as self-serving obscurantists. For them, this was a war between fearless, cutting-edge German scholarship and corrupt, ignorant Italian power politics. The court case dragged on until 1516, and even then it was merely suspended; Reuchlin was never formally cleared. In the court of public opinion, however, the new scholarship was triumphantly vindicated, and the brethren sharpened their pens in readiness for the next skirmish. Enter Martin Luther.

An Accidental Revolutionary

Martin Luther was the Reformation’s indispensable firestarter. Would there have been a Reformation if young Martin had followed his father’s wishes and become a lawyer? Who knows, but the Reformation as it actually happened is unimaginable without him.

Luther does not fit the stereotype of a great Christian revolutionary. He never held high office, and he remained professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg to the end of his life, squeezing his revolution in between his regular lectures. He was not a man of heroic virtues. He was grouchy, obstinate, and an unabashed sensualist, from his boisterous, flirtatious, and deeply affectionate marriage to his well-documented fondness for Saxon beer. In later life, he was frankly fat, and for most of his life he struggled with constipation. Fittingly enough, his religion was a matter less of the mind than of the heart and the gut. Spiritually as well as physically, he was larger than life. Even his flaws were outsized. His piercing insights, his raw honesty and the shattering spiritual experiences that drove his life still leap off the page five centuries later. They do so because they resonate with the modern age, an age that he made.

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 the whole thing just a ghastly misunderstanding? For myself, I suspect not. Luther’s ideas were so radical that a Catholic Church that conceded them would have turned itself inside out. And Luther himself was never amenable to being house-trained. But he could, perhaps, have been outflanked and isolated, if his opponents had been wily and farsighted enough to poach some of his ideas.

Instead, they tried to face him down. He had launched his protest in October 1517 with a short set of “theses”: bullet-point statements summarizing his views. It was a standard way of starting an academic debate, and Luther had done it many times before on different subjects. In this case, there were ninety-five theses, and the subject was the sale of indulgences: documents in which the Church promised to bestow God’s grace in recognition of a charitable gift. A great many thoughtful Christians reckoned that the indulgence trade stank, so much so that sales were dropping and the indulgence sellers were forced to redouble their efforts and coarsen their rhetoric. Luther had been preaching against indulgences since the start of the year. His October theses might or might not, as legend has it, have been nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.⁶ More to the point, he sent a copy to Archbishop Albrecht, the sponsor and one of the chief beneficiaries of the current indulgence campaign.

It was a challenge that could not be ignored, and because Luther refused to back down, the argument steadily escalated. A series of set-piece debates between Luther and increasingly formidable theological opponents took place during 1518 and 1519. They settled nothing. Luther, in fact, found them intensely frustrating. He wanted to talk about God’s grace, true repentance, and how nitpicking legalism was rendered meaningless by Christ’s astonishing gift of salvation. But his opponents would not let him. From the beginning, they accused him of questioning superiors to whom he ought instead to submit. There were crude financial considerations at work; by attacking indulgences, Luther was threatening a major income stream. There were also institutional rivalries: the Dominican friars, watchdogs of orthodoxy, distrusted Luther’s modish Augustinian order. After the first debate, in 1518, Luther was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy. He did not go. After the second, the pope required Luther, as a matter of obedience, to accept the official line on indulgences. Again Luther refused, insisting that the pope needed to produce arguments, not commands. The establishment had decided that this was a matter for lawyers, not theologians. But if there was one thing Luther’s theology opposed, it was law.⁷

Most of us, in Luther’s place, would have crumbled. Perhaps from prudence: a charge of heresy is not a game. Or from conscience: when the Church, Christ’s representative on earth, commands us to be silent, who are we to disagree? But Luther rejoiced in rejecting prudence, and his conscience was marching to a different beat. During 1518 and 1519, he discovered in himself an epochal, adamantine stubbornness. The more he was assaulted, the more firmly he took root.

At the third debate, a full-scale scholarly disputation at Leipzig in 1519, he faced the ablest theological opponent of his life, Johann Eck of Ingolstadt. Eck, who had no real hope that Luther would concede, aimed to unmask him as a heretic. He pursued the apparent points of agreement between Luther and the Czech theologian Jan Hus, who had been executed for heresy in 1415. Eventually, he forced Luther to concede and indeed to trumpet that he, too, held the beliefs for which Hus had been condemned.

Still Luther did not budge. If what he believed was incompatible with what the Church had decreed, then, he insisted, the Church must be wrong. To his opponents, this was almost comically grotesque. Luther was choosing his own frail opinion over the collective weight of the whole Church, guided through the ages by the Holy Spirit. It was a textbook example of heresy: wilful disobedience. But to Luther, it was a liberation. If the Church’s most authoritative decrees could be wrong, there was no longer anything that could separate him from the love of God. Only now did he realize how far he must go. Eck had succeeded in pushing Luther out of the Church, but the result was not quite what he had intended. If 1517 was the beginning of the Luther scandal, 1519 was the real birth of Protestantism.

Luther, now outed as a plain heretic, should have been arrested and dealt with. He was saved by politics. Rome had more pressing concerns than this squabble between German friars. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, had been dying for years and doing so unconscionably slowly. Since 1514, he had taken a coffin with him everywhere he travelled. Long before he finally died in January 1519, plans were being laid for the contest to follow. For the imperial title was not hereditary; it was elected, chosen by seven senior German princes and bishops. Since 1440, the electors had chosen members of Austria’s Habsburg dynasty, but there was nothing to stop them from choosing someone else, and this time there was a good reason to do so: the Habsburg candidate, the eighteen-year-old Charles, was also king of Spain and of the Netherlands. The prospect of one man’s controlling such a vast set of territories was alarming, not least to the pope. The king of France was a realistic rival. Even Henry VIII of England was considered. The looming election overshadowed everything.

It just so happened that one of the seven electors was Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s local prince and the founder of the University of Wittenberg. Frederick’s relationship with Luther was an odd one. The two men never met in person, and Frederick, who was an avid collector of holy relics, never quite saw the point of Luther’s theological preoccupations. Yet he was determined to defend the celebrity professor from his prized university. The celebrity was certainly part of it. Luther had put Wittenberg on the map in a very pleasing way, was beginning to attract star academics and distinguished students, and had vaulted the town’s printing industry into the first rank. In this sense, Frederick’s protection was a side effect of Luther’s mass-market appeal. But Frederick also wanted to defy outside interference as a matter of principle. And in 1518–19, Frederick’s wishes mattered. In the impending imperial election, he was seen as a crucial swing vote. He was even considered an imperial candidate himself. If, at this moment, he wanted to shelter a suspected heretic, no one was going to force the issue.

In the end, on June 28, 1519, Charles was unanimously elected emperor, and became Charles V. But the damage was already done. The crucial Leipzig disputation was unfolding when the election was held. Frederick had bought Luther enough time to turn his personal crisis of conscience into a mass movement threatening the Church’s entire structure of authority.

During 1520, Luther wrote a series of tracts laying out the core of his ideas. His legions of readers snapped them up like episodes of a serial drama. The Freedom of a Christian described his understanding of God’s free grace in rapturous terms. Other books reviled the Church’s hierarchy and the corruption he thought it had spawned. Luther declared that the Church’s ceremonies and sacraments were an elaborate confidence trick, fleecing Christians before abandoning them to hell. All Christians, he insisted, had both the right and the responsibility to reform the Church, and they should act on that right whatever the priests say. In fact, the distinction between priests and laypeople was meaningless. All Christians are priests. At the end of the year, he defiantly burned the papal bull that had condemned him as a heretic.

By then, his enemies were finally assembling. The new emperor formally assumed his imperial title in October 1520. Luther had had a magnificent run, but justice was closing in on him. An imperial Diet, the empire’s highest legislative body, was planned at the southwestern German city of Worms. Luther was summoned to attend and, undoubtedly, to be condemned. He was promised safe-conduct from Wittenberg to Worms and back, but promises made to convicted heretics were not necessarily binding. Jan Hus, whom Luther had praised in Leipzig, had been burned despite just such a safe-conduct promise. Luther fully expected the same fate, and friends urged him not to go. His correspondence as the Diet approached shows a man torn. Naturally, he was frightened and agitated. He prayed urgently for safety and doubted his prayers would be granted. Yet in another mood, he relished the Diet as an apocalyptic confrontation, at which he would at last testify to his doctrines, seal them with his blood, and win a martyr’s crown. And so he went to Worms as Christ went to Jerusalem, a three-hundred-mile journey, pausing to preach on the way. When warned of the dangers ahead, he replied that if there were as many devils in Worms as there were tiles on the roofs, he would still go. He arrived on 17 April 1521, to find the rooftops crowded, not with devils, but with supporters and spectators. The streets were so thronged as to be impassable. He was borne through to the Diet and brought before the estates of the empire.⁸

Luther expected to have his long-delayed argument about God’s grace. Once again he was denied. He was simply presented with his books and asked to repent of the heresies in them. To everyone’s surprise, including perhaps his own, Luther asked for twenty-four hours to think it over. This unexpected request was granted, and it raised some hopes that he might actually concede. The one surviving letter which he wrote that night suggests such hopes were not entirely foolish. “With Christ’s help,” he wrote, “I shall not in all eternity recant the least particle.”⁹ Apparently, he feared that he might crumble. He could be forgiven for finding the empire’s assembled glories a little overbearing.

He returned the following afternoon and was kept waiting outside the palace for two hours. The crowd pressed about him. Voices shouted that he should stand firm. One called out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you.”¹⁰ Finally, he was allowed in, and the previous day’s question was put to him again. He answered carefully. Yes, they were his books. Would he disown them? Only if it could be shown to him, on the basis of the Bible and the Bible alone, that he was wrong. Otherwise, his conscience was captive to the Word of God. He might even – as one witness claimed, many years later – have concluded with a famous declaration of helplessness: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

Luther often looked back on that moment. In retrospect, his “humility and deference” troubled him: he reproached himself for having “held my spirit in check”. He promised that “they would hear other things, if I would come before them again.”¹¹ In other words, Luther at Worms was not quite the roaring lion of Protestant legend. He spent a week after that famous exchange locked in debate with a formidable roster of German prelates and princes. They had enough to talk about that the emperor extended his safe-conduct for forty-eight hours to allow the discussions to continue. But in vain. Neither side would budge. So Luther was condemned as a heretic and outlawed. The young emperor, principled, prudent and a touch naive, honoured the safe-conduct. Luther left Worms on 26 April, having been granted neither his argument nor his martyrdom. Even so, the Diet of Worms would be the epicentre of his life and of what would become the Reformation: humble, unyielding defiance of the whole world in the name of Scripture and conscience.

“Captive to the Word of God”

Part of Luther’s achievement at Worms was to enact, with unforgettable vividness, a new way of doing theology, which has defined Protestantism ever since. At the Diet, the archbishop of Trier’s secretary, Johann Eck (a different Eck from Leipzig) accused Luther of being “completely mad”. This was not just abuse. Eck was genuinely shocked. Luther had demanded to have his errors proved to him, from the Bible, to his own satisfaction. Eck pointed out the obvious problem:

If it were granted that whoever contradicts the councils and the common understanding of the Church must be overcome by Scripture passages, we will have nothing in Christianity that is certain or decided.¹²

If individual consciences are sovereign, then how can Christians ever again agree on anything? Eck’s point was essentially unanswerable. Much of the rest of this book is about the endless arguments that he correctly predicted. Some Protestants have tried to evade his charge. Others invert it: if the individual conscience is not sovereign, how can anyone call themselves Christian at all?

But it is worth noticing the detail of Luther’s position at Worms. He took his stand on two authorities, which he saw as intimately linked: his own conscience and God’s Word. The Word, he said, had his conscience captive, and it was neither safe nor right to disobey conscience.

The Bible’s role here was crucial. To appeal simply to inner conviction would have indeed looked like madness. But for Luther, an acknowledged expert in biblical interpretation, to take his stand on the Bible was altogether different. His stirring, empty offer to submit himself to its correction was widely imitated in the years that followed. This is the “Scripture principle”: the conviction that the Bible is the only and absolute source of authority and that all believers are equal before it. It is often taken to be Protestantism’s central, unifying idea.¹³ But, while it is certainly a pervasive one, it is not the whole story. Luther’s own relationship with the Bible was subtler than that.

What made Luther’s stance so outrageous was not that he valorized the Bible. That is hardly unusual for Christians. What was shocking was that he set it above everything else. He treated the views of the early Church fathers, of more recent scholars, even of Church councils, with great respect, but he would not be constrained by them. In the end, anything outside the Bible, including anyone else’s interpretation of the Bible, was a mere opinion. This was the true and enduring radicalism of Protestantism: its readiness to question every human authority and tradition. The formulation of the English Thirty-nine Articles, half a century later, captures the same spirit in a careful double negative:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be . . . thought necessary or requisite to salvation.

Not, everything in the Bible is essential; but, nothing that is not in the Bible is essential.

On the crudest level, this was a brilliant manoeuvre. In a Christian society which had always revered the Bible, which was rediscovering its original text in the midst of a scholarly vogue for ancient truths, which was ready to measure the Church’s hierarchy against its own ideals and find them wanting – in this context, for a monk and doctor of theology to stand alone, at risk of his life, and wield the Bible against all the forces of the establishment was dreadfully persuasive. Erasmus had called for a simple Christian life informed by Scripture. What could be simpler than the cry “Scripture alone”? It allowed Luther to shrug off every authority the Church could throw at him while still submitting to the highest authority of all. Best of all, the authority to which he was submitting could not answer back. As Erasmus would soon argue, this is Scripture for brawlers: turning the Bible into a stick with which to beat your enemies. Protestants have been weaponizing Scripture ever since, for use against outsiders and each other.

But this is too cynical. Luther was a superb scriptural street fighter, but that was not why he valued the Bible. We need instead to notice how apparently free and easy Luther could be with the Bible, to an extent that would shock many modern Protestants. It is not so surprising that he threw out the so-called deuterocanonical or apocryphal books of the Old Testament, the books such as Tobit, Ecclesiasticus and Maccabees, which survive only in Greek, not in Hebrew. Plenty of biblical scholars agreed with him on that, though it conveniently got rid of some theologically awkward passages. Yet he also dealt robustly with the rest of the Old Testament. He wanted to expel the book of Esther altogether. He thought that the books of Kings were more reliable than the books of Chronicles, doubted that large chunks of the Old Testament were actually written by their supposed authors, and reckoned that many of its texts were corrupted. He thought that most of the book of Job was fiction and that the prophets had sometimes made mistakes. He poured cold water on the huge numbers in the Old Testament narratives.¹⁴

On the New Testament, Luther was only a little more restrained. He was famously scathing about the Epistle of James, whose teaching on the role of faith and good works does not sit entirely easily with his doctrines. He called it an “epistle of straw”, claimed that it “mangles the Scriptures” and “doesn’t amount to much”. Once he told a student, “I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove.” In Luther’s Bible, James was yanked out of its normal place and sent to the end of the New Testament, along with three other books that he doubted were written by apostles (the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of Jude, and Revelation). His habit of singling out other parts of the Bible for special favour was almost equally unnerving. John’s Gospel was for Luther “the one, fine, true, and chief gospel, and is far, far to be preferred over the other three”.¹⁵ All of which suggests a Humpty-Dumptyish readiness to ignore what he disliked, choose what he wanted, and call it the Word of God.

That very brazenness tells us that this was not the whole story. Luther treated the Bible this way because of his understanding of what the Bible was. There is no doubting his profound debt to the Bible, where he had found the doctrines that shaped the rest of his life. Those doctrines were, for him, the Bible’s true heart. As he advised Bible readers in 1530,

Search out and deal with the core of our Christian doctrine, wherever it may be found throughout the Bible. And the core is this: that without any merit, as a gift of God’s pure grace in Christ, we attain righteousness, life, and salvation.¹⁶

That was the message: the Gospel, the good news of Christ crucified and risen. The reason he called the Epistle of James straw was that for all its earnest moralizing “it contains not a syllable about Christ.”

This is why, at Worms, Luther said his conscience was captive to the Word of God, rather than to the Bible. The two were not quite the same. John’s Gospel teaches that Jesus Christ himself is the Word of God made human. The Bible, Luther argued, was the same Word of God “enlettered”, clothed in a body of ink and pulped rag.¹⁷ Therefore much of its content was incidental and unimportant. If that included some factual errors or contradictions, they did not matter any more than the fit of Jesus’ clothing. The message was what counted.

Luther used his Bible to fight his battles, and did so with relish, but before he was a brawler, he was a lover. The Bible had taught him about his beloved, and so he treasured it as a love letter. He understood it through the prism of that love. Everything that could not be read through this prism was unimportant. The Bible was not to be analysed like a scholarly text but to be gazed at like a great work of art.¹⁸ This was the only way that the Word of God could speak to your soul, and this was why every outside authority had to be rejected. Like that of a great work of art, the Bible’s power was to Luther self-evident. Unless, impossibly, you could persuade him that he had not seen what he had seen, there was nothing more to be said. The difficulty, inescapable after Worms, is that not everyone who gazes on a great work of art sees the same message.

Although Luther was allowed to leave Worms in safety, he was merely given a head start. For the rest of his life, he was a wanted man, and to the end of his days he was conscious of the Diet’s still-active condemnation hanging over him. The immediate effect was that halfway home he was kidnapped on the road by what seemed to be a band of brigands. His companions were aghast, but Luther had been warned to expect it. The “kidnappers” worked for his protector, Elector Frederick. They spirited him away to the Wartburg castle, near Eisenach, where he remained in hiding for nearly a year. His captors took elaborate steps to conceal his whereabouts, even spreading rumours that he had fled to Bohemia.¹⁹ He changed his monk’s habit for the clothes of a country knight and grew his hair and beard: a disguise, but also an assertion of the Christian liberty he preached. Yet, as he joked, in his confinement he was now more truly a monk than ever. He did not waste his time in captivity; he translated the New Testament into German, among other projects. But he chafed. In the first few weeks he was “drunk with leisure”.²⁰ Soon he was brooding over what was happening in his unexpected absence.

Luther was already displaying what would become an enduring feature of Protestantism: a queasy mixture of humility and arrogance. The humility was real. Luther knew that he was the worst of sinners. He begged his followers to call themselves Christians, not “Lutherans”:

What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone. . . . How then should I, poor stinking maggot-fodder that I am, come to have men call the children of Christ by my wretched name?

He denied that his movement’s success was his own doing. In 1522, he gave this account of how it happened:

I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends . . . the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses on it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.²¹

Vintage Luther, including the beer. But for all the humility, there are some bold claims here. His teaching is Christ’s teaching, and he writes God’s Word. Increasingly, Luther saw himself not merely as a theologian but as a prophet, called by God to overturn the papacy. For one obscure professor to mobilize an unprecedented mass movement, to defy all the forces of Church and empire, and to feel them crumbling at his touch – this was heady stuff. And yet his confinement had sidelined him. His books still churned out, but there was a dangerous vacuum – especially back in Wittenberg, the eye of the storm.

Wittenberg was by now dominated by Luther’s allies. The most important of them was Philip Melanchthon, acknowledged on all sides to be one of the most brilliant minds of his age. The unpronounceable name is a sign of the times. He was born with the solid German surname of Schwartzerd, but Johannes Reuchlin, who happened to be his great-uncle, suggested he adopt the Renaissance fashion of translating his name into Greek. In 1518, Reuchlin also secured the job of professor of Greek at Wittenberg for his nephew. Luther was immediately in awe of Melanchthon, who, at only twenty-one, was thirteen years his junior. He claimed that he had never written a book as good as Melanchthon’s Commonplaces, published in 1521. It was Melanchthon who fashioned Luther’s vivid, chaotic theological insights into a coherent system. But while the two men were always close, Luther’s faith in his younger colleague was shaken during his confinement in 1521–22. Melanchthon had not kept a grip on Wittenberg. Where Luther was immovably stubborn, Melanchthon was calm and reasonable – to the point, his enemies muttered, of timidity. Luther compared their respective styles by saying that Melanchthon pricked their enemies with pins, while he himself stabbed them with pikes.²²

If Melanchthon was timid, others in Wittenberg had the opposite problem. After Luther’s condemnation at Worms, some of his fellow-travellers began to take matters into their own hands. In September 1521, Luther’s fellow Augustinian monks changed the way they were celebrating the Catholic Mass, the most prominent daily symbol of the theology they now questioned, eventually rewriting the service in German rather than Latin. Some began to abandon their cloisters. In January 1522, the university’s chancellor, Andreas Karlstadt, even got married, in defiance of the long-standing Catholic requirement that clergy remain celibate.

A nervous Elector Frederick called for restraint, but these new radicals were only just beginning. In December 1521, three men from the mining town of Zwickau arrived in Wittenberg: a former student and two weavers. They claimed that God had called them to be prophets, predicted the imminent end of the world, and demanded further dramatic reforms. In particular, they criticized the practice of baptizing infants, which, as they rightly said, has no direct biblical basis. Meanwhile, Karlstadt and his allies were demanding the destruction of Catholic images, altars, and relics in the town’s churches, so as to “cleanse” the buildings of idolatry and fit them for reformed worship. This was controversial in itself, but when the elector forbade it and some of the more excitable townsfolk started smashing images on their own initiative, it looked less like holiness and more like rioting.²³

Luther was horrified. Partly this was because, for all his spiritual radicalism, he was deeply socially conservative. His instinct was to obey rightful authorities, to respect social hierarchies, and to preserve good order. For him, Christian freedom meant inner liberation, not political upheaval. He had defied established authorities, but he was a professor and had in any case been called by God. Self-appointed prophets like the Zwickauers and the iconoclasts had no excuse.

More significantly, Luther hated these impatient reformers’ ideas. He wanted to set Christians free from rules and laws, but Karlstadt and the Zwickauers were burdening Christian consciences with new rules about baptism and images. They had missed the point. Luther wanted not to replace bad laws with good ones but to lift believers above the realm of law altogether, into the light of the Gospel of love. For him, these law-mongers were Schwärmer, “fanatics”. It was a capacious category, which expanded over the coming decades to include almost everyone Luther disagreed with.

So in March 1522, Luther decided to risk returning to Wittenberg to take charge. Symbolically, he arrived in his monk’s habit, shaved and tonsured. For a time, it worked. Karlstadt was reined in and then exiled to an obscure country parish. Luther’s success in whipping his recalcitrant colleagues into line only confirmed his sense of his unique calling.

Yet while Luther could impose order on one town, the wider movement he had sparked was now beyond anyone’s control. The early 1520s in Germany were revolutionary years. Priests, printers, peddlers, even (shockingly) women could all make themselves heard. In a ruthless, scurrilous and almost ungovernable book market, talent rose rapidly to the top. Between 1518 and 1525, fifty-one editions of anti-Catholic works by a Nuremberg shoemaker, Hans Sachs, were published in Germany: not far off Philip Melanchthon’s total of seventy-one. In parts of Germany’s jurisdictional patchwork, reformist preaching and printing were banned, but preachers were hard to keep out, and books almost impossible. Those cities where the reformers found support were confronted with Wittenberg’s dilemma: How was this Reformation actually to be implemented? By the time Luther himself finally abandoned his monk’s guise, sealed his departure from the vowed life by marrying a former nun, and promulgated a German order for the Mass, he was scrambling to catch up with a splintering, restless, hydra-headed movement, offering a hundred different local Reformations in the name of the same Gospel.

The Fanatics’ Reformation

With hindsight, we can see three broad strands of reform emerging from this chaos. One strand looked directly to Luther, with his appealing blend of spiritual radicalism and social conservatism. The other two strands were less unified. One, rooted in Switzerland and southern Germany, looked primarily to Huldrych Zwingli, the city preacher of Zurich, and several other loosely allied leaders; we will come back to them in chapter 3. The final strand was even more fractious. It lacked shared leaders, origins or doctrines. What united it was a mood, a radically impatient determination to take Luther’s insights about the futility of the old ways and to press them to their extremes. Karlstadt belonged to this radical strand. So too did Thomas Müntzer, a former pastor in Zwickau who became notorious after he was blamed for burning down a shrine to the Virgin Mary in March 1524. That summer, he publicly demanded that the princes of Saxony take up arms on the reformers’ behalf. Luther denounced him as another fanatic.

Müntzer was starting to ride something bigger than he could control. It is still unclear quite how the religious turmoil that Luther had unleashed was connected to the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25, the largest mass rebellion in European history before the French Revolution of 1789. The peasants had long-standing grievances about rents, rights and property, but reforming preachers were a vital catalyst. Suddenly peasants were denouncing serfdom as incompatible with Christian liberty, demanding that the people be able to elect their priests, and claiming that the Church’s riches ought to belong to everyone. None of this was what Luther had meant, but you did not have to stretch his ideas very far to get there. The most widespread set of demands, first adopted by the peasants of Swabia, ended with a deliberate echo of Luther at Worms: they offered to desist if they could be proved wrong from the Bible.

Some of the rebels, influenced by preachers like Müntzer, wanted much more. Abolishing private property – didn’t the Bible record that the early Church had held all goods in common? Killing monks and priests – didn’t the Bible teach that idolaters should die? Overthrowing princes – didn’t the Bible promise a future kingdom of the saints? Even if these radicals were only clinging to the rebellion’s tail, they gave the whole enterprise an apocalyptic feel. Something more than rents and landholding was at stake. It was a moment to establish a just social order in anticipation of Christ’s imminent return.

To his credit, Luther was torn. In early 1525, he wrote An Admonition to Peace, accepting that many of the peasants’ demands were fair but warning that rebellion was no way to secure them. To follow Christ meant meek submission, not pillage and insurrection. He advised the peasants, sombrely and with a magnificent lack of realism, to return home and humbly petition their betters for redress. Once it became clear that matters had passed that point, Luther’s deep social conservatism took over. His next pamphlet, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, blustered,

Nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog. . . . There is no time for sleeping; no place for patience or mercy. It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace. . . . I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. . . . Stab, smite, slay, whoever can. If you die in doing it, well for you! A more blessed death can never be yours, for you die in obeying the divine Word.

Ironically, Luther justified this in the same apocalyptic terms as Müntzer. This was not a time for soft middle ways: “The destruction of the world is to be expected every hour.” It was time to take a stand against the forces of Antichrist, whatever their guise.²⁴

On 15 May 1525, nine days after Luther’s pamphlet was written, the Thuringian peasants met a Saxon-Hessian mercenary army near Frankenhausen. Müntzer preached before the battle, pointing to a rainbow as an omen of victory and promising the peasants that bullets could not hurt them. Meanwhile, they were encircled with artillery. The peasants tried to flee to the town. Thousands died before they reached it. The wounded were left to die on the field. The town itself surrendered, but not quickly enough. The reprisals were on a genocidal scale. The victorious lords, one witness wrote, “seem bent on leaving a wilderness for their heirs”. Müntzer himself was found hiding, in disguise, and was beheaded. A few weeks later, the southern German peasants suffered equally catastrophic defeats. The total number killed during the whole appalling business is probably well over eighty thousand. And while the peasants would certainly have been crushed with or without Luther’s blessing, his moral responsibility for the slaughter is inescapable.

For the reforming movement as a whole, the Peasants’ War was a calamity. Fairly or not, it was widely blamed on reformist preaching. By no coincidence, it was in September 1524, as the violence was bubbling up, that Erasmus finally decisively distanced himself from Luther. He argued, all too plausibly, that Luther’s teaching on God’s grace left no room for personal responsibility and so threatened moral anarchy and social collapse. If this was where conscience governed by Scripture alone led, perhaps the authoritative, binding interpretation of the Church was not so bad after all.²⁵ In the early 1520s, it had been possible to hope that one of the various strands of the reforming movement might take over the old Church wholesale. That hope died on the battlefields.

The radicals, those who survived, now began to preach withdrawal from Christian society, to form perfect communities of saints in expectation of the imminent Last Judgment. For many of them, the symbol of this withdrawal was adult baptism. All the baptisms described in the New Testament are of adults able to confess their own faith. So perhaps infants should not be baptized? In which case, all Christendom had been in error since at least the second century, and the community of the faithful could only be a small, self-selected group. This meant abandoning the ideal of a universal church, to which Luther and most other reformers still aspired, for sectarianism. Beginning in Zurich in January 1525, the radicals began to mark that withdrawal by baptizing adults. “Anabaptists”, or rebaptizers, their enemies called them, and they were not short of enemies. To the old Church, they were heretics like the rest. To Luther and other reformers who desperately needed to be thought respectable, the radicals risked discrediting the reforming movement as a whole. A sharp line needed urgently to be drawn in these shifting sands.

That effort to differentiate between radical “Anabaptists” and safe, mainstream reformers was strikingly successful. To this day, it remains controversial to describe the radicals as Protestants. Yet their shared heritage is unmistakable. The Anabaptists’ doctrines were very similar to those of establishment, “magisterial” Protestantism. Even infant baptism was openly questioned by some “mainstream” reformers, before the subject became too hot to touch. One hundred and twenty years later, the Baptists, a new group with its roots firmly in mainstream Protestantism, followed the Anabaptists in renouncing infant baptism, despite coming from a distinct theological tradition.

Like Luther’s moderates, the radicals claimed to base their doctrines wholly on the Bible. But like Luther, they did so as lovers, perceiving the Bible’s core message by God’s grace and using it to interpret the rest. Some were more explicit about this than Luther. The south German radical Jörg Haugk complained that “many accept the Scriptures as if they were the essence of divine truth; but they are only a witness to divine truth which must be experienced in the inner being”. Hans Hut, a survivor of the battle of Frankenhausen who became a compelling Anabaptist missionary before his death in prison in 1527, argued that the Bible, if taken literally, bristled with contradictions. It could therefore only be properly understood by the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this way, theologically uneducated radicals could defy learned professors like Luther. One self-taught Anabaptist preacher called scholars “Scripture wizards”, arguing that their hairsplitting subtleties blinded them to the simple truth.²⁶

Luther and the “fanatics” both exemplify Protestantism at work. Both were driven by dazzling religious insights, which they discovered by reading the Bible and which then taught them how to read the Bible. Both denied that any human authority could teach them they were wrong. The Christian liberty that Luther had preached reached far further than he had anticipated. That was his tragedy, and perhaps also his glory.

For while 1525 was a catastrophe, Luther did win a kind of victory. The first revolution was over. But for those princes, city councils, and people who had imbibed the reformers’ preaching, going back to the pre-1517 world was hard to imagine. So Luther found himself representing a safe middle way, the acceptable face of reform. It was an outcome that neither he nor anyone else had expected. His Reformation neither transformed the Church nor was crushed by it. Instead, a de facto partition took shape. One by one, a series of German and Scandinavian cities and territories abolished the Catholic Mass, repudiated the Church’s hierarchy, and required preachers to proclaim Luther’s doctrines. A new form of Christianity was starting to come into being. Luther’s revolution had, like all great revolutions, failed. But like all great revolutions, it had created a new world.

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