Scholars have long argued the extent of Luther’s influence on the outbreak of revolution among the German peasants in 1524-1525. Those who would give him significant blame for it point to his intemperate remarks against institutional authority of the day, his arguments for spiritual equality, and his elevation of the individual conscience over spiritual and civil authorities. But others point to his 1522 opposition to the Zwickau Prophets and Andreas Karlstadt as an example of his early stands against populist movements that opposed or challenged civil authority by force.1 Indeed, it is hard to read Luther’s writings between 1520 and 1525 and take seriously the view that he directly or indirectly promoted civil revolt.
On the contrary, Luther is more fairly accused of elevating the status of the prince at the expense of the church as well as the individual, at least in civil matters. His 1520 Address subordinates the church in civil matters. His 1523 discourse on the Secular Authority made clear that the civil sword was firmly in the hands of the civil magistrate, who was not to be actively opposed, even when overreaching and tyrannical. Even in religious matters, which he acknowledged were outside the civil ruler’s legitimate oversight, he taught that spiritual “outrage is not to be resisted, but endured.”2 Duly constituted civil rulers were not to resist their unjust and ungodly superiors.3 All this was written more than a year prior to the events directly leading to the Peasants’ War. These events began unfolding in the summer of 1524 in southwest Germany.4
As the revolt spread, Luther wrote to clearly distinguish his reforms from the populist uprisings advocated by the peasants. In May of 1525 he released a tract aimed at both the rulers and the peasants, pointing out the excesses and abuses of both sides, and calling for restraint by the princes and submission by the peasants.5 He systematically outlined how the peasants’ claims diverged from his gospel teachings. But he also insisted that the civil rulers should not punish the peasants for wrong beliefs, but only for sedition. “No ruler,” Luther wrote, “ought to prevent anyone from teaching or believing what he pleases, whether gospel or lies. It is enough if he prevents the teaching of sedition and rebellion.”6
A month later, after the peasants had engaged in greater bloodshed, he wrote a tract whose title betrayed its target and its polemical tone—Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. In this pamphlet, he criticized the religious aspirations and leadership of the peasants, particularly fingering Thomas Müntzer and his brand of apocalyptic, revolutionary mysticism.7 It is here that he first clearly and forcefully confronts ostensibly spiritual beliefs that are seditious and thus the legitimate target of the civil sword.
Luther is often criticized for the extreme tone of his Against the Peasants tract (“Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous than a rebel.”).8 Luther’s tone was newly harsh. But the revolt did not work a change in the substance of his position toward the authoritative role of the magistrate in civil affairs. Luther had always, to that point, clearly rejected any active, forceful opposition to secular authorities.
That this was widely understood at the time is perhaps most clearly shown by the fact that German princes for the first time began formally adopting his cause in 1525, including some who had been most active in quelling the peasants.9 If Luther’s teachings had been seen as a moving part of the peasant revolt, men such as Duke Johann and Philip of Hesse would have been very unlikely to formally identify with Luther’s movement the very year of the revolt itself.10
What the peasant revolt did do was to confirm in Luther’s mind the connection between certain types of radical religion, especially of the mystical bent, and seditious, anarchic doctrine. In Luther’s view, these mystical, seditious tendencies were also associated with the Anabaptists, whom he came to view as continuing the work and tendencies of Thomas Müntzer and the Schwarmer, the demagogic spiritualists.11
This lumping of the left wing of the Reformation was a tendency that Luther persisted in for the rest of his life. It explains, at least in part, his willingness to persecute the Anabaptists, despite his previous statements on the inappropriateness of using force against heresy.
Luther, Melanchthon, and Heretics
Luther wrote his most extended work on Anabaptists in 1528, not long after they had become a movement, and while he knew little about them. He was asked by two of his followers who were dealing with the Anabaptists, and had a brief description from them of the Anabaptists’ beliefs and practices.12 Luther’s main concern in his tract was to deal with the question of infant baptism, and to show that the Anabaptists’ rejection of it was not scriptural.
Issues of tolerance and persecution were secondary, as the letter was being sent to a Catholic territory, and Luther’s followers did not have to decide on the appropriate civil fate of the Anabaptists. Still, Luther touched on this topic, and raised the charges that Anabaptists left family and home to wander with their coreligionists—a type of anarchy.13 Luther did not develop the anarchist point further in his tract, although he did apply the term Schwarmer to the Anabaptists, clearly tying them to the earlier spiritual enthusiasts whom he counted as seditious. In a letter written to a contact in Bavaria about the same time as the tract, he explicitly accused the Anabaptists of following Müntzer in believing that Christians should kill the godless, and thus that they were completely seditious.14
It is apparent that Luther viewed the Anabaptists as the heirs of the Zwickau Prophets, Thomas Müntzer, and the spiritualist leaders of the peasants’ revolt—gone underground, perhaps, but poised to resurface—and all the more deadly because of their indirection and deception in preaching pacifism.15 Shortly afterward, Luther and Melanchthon had their views on Anabaptism put to the practical test.
In 1529 in Gotha, a Lutheran territory, 10 Anabaptists had been captured. They all recanted, but upon release, relapsed into their dissent. Six were recaptured and executed. Some leaders at Gotha were disturbed at the severity of the punishment, and wrote to Wittenberg for guidance. Melanchthon expressed his view that not only rebels, but blasphemers should be executed.16 Blasphemy, according to Melanchthon, included any public teaching of a heretical doctrine, including the rejection of infant baptism.
Luther did not go on record as opposing Melanchthon’s definitions. But in a separate letter to the leadership at Gotha, he noted that the Anabaptists were not only blasphemers, but seditious. Thus, they should be executed.17 Luther had a different emphasis and approach on the topic from that of Melanchthon. Luther required, in addition to heresy, some element of sedition before civil force was brought to bear. Later, Luther seemed at times to tacitly support Melanchthon’s broader approach to punishing open heresy.18 But whenever Luther himself addressed the question of punishing the Anabaptists, he nearly always raised the charges of their sedition and desire to destroy the civil order.19
The difference between the two Reformers on this question seems to be more than merely a question of style. While Luther did define sedition with a certain liberal breadth—including communal living and rejection of the magisterial role for Christians—he never seemed to fully embrace Melanchthon’s broad willingness to execute unrepentant heretics. Toward the end of his life he distinguished again between the “heretic” and the “seditious heretic.” The former could be banished, but only the latter could be executed.
Here is part of the reason for the Lutheran princes’ apparent blindness at the Diet of Speyer toward religious freedom for the Anabaptists. They followed Luther in his view of the Anabaptist beliefs, acts, and tendencies as being genuinely seditious, and not merely heretical spiritually. But even Luther’s category of seditious heresy soon became increasingly broad so as to make it virtually indistinguishable from heresy generally. This story involves some of the differences in emphasis and even theology between Luther and Melanchthon, and Luther’s move over time toward Melanchthon’s view.
Resistance Theory
The difference in treatment of heretics between the two Reformers, Luther and Melanchthon, cannot be explained by their manner and style. On the contrary, Luther was known for his intemperate outbursts and aggressive posturing, whereas Melanchthon was the milder and gentler of the two. If one were to choose a persecutor by nature, Luther was a far more likely candidate.
The difference between the two was substantive, and seems to relate in part to Melanchthon’s embrace of the third use of the law and the ongoing role of the magistrate in enforcing both tables of the law upon the citizenry. The first use of the law was to cause a person to outwardly obey for fear of punishment. The second use was to let the sinner know his need of Christ for salvation. Both these Luther accepted and taught. The “third” use of the law was the educational use of the law to continue to instruct and guide the righteous even after their conversion.20 Luther never articulated or expressed an acceptance of this use.
It was the third use that seems to serve as a base for Melanchthon’s active role of the magistrate as guardian and enforcer of both tables of the law.21 He most clearly articulated this position in a final edition of his Loci communes, nearly 10 years after Luther died. It set out a role for the magistrate in spiritual matters far beyond anything Luther had ever envisioned, or that Melanchthon had articulated while Luther was alive.22 This divide on the third use of the law and the role of the magistrate also explains some of the differences between Luther and the development of Reformed thought—as well illustrated in the story of Calvin and Geneva.
Something that may have prevented Luther from actively opposing Melanchthon’s trend toward accepting a spiritual jurisdiction for the magistrate were political developments that caused him to revisit his opposition to resistance theory. At the Diet of Augsburg, it had become apparent that Lutheranism would not be tolerated within the Empire. The only open question was when the emperor would have the time and necessary force to run it to ground.23 Under these circumstances, the Lutheran princes and theologians refocused on the question of resistance to authority that Luther had earlier rejected.
It was asked whether inferior magistrates might not have the right to resist superior magistrates who went beyond their civil jurisdictions and became tyrannical. Luther became persuaded that duly constituted inferior magistrates were also God-appointed authorities. They thus had the right and responsibility of defending their prerogatives as Christian princes and those of their subjects in obeying the gospel. Thus in 1531, Luther endorsed the formation of the Schmalkaldic League—a defense alliance of Protestant territories against the emperor and any forced recatholicization.24
Once civil rulers were granted the right of resistance in matters of religion, to resist the tyrannical imposition of spiritual matters from above, they became at some level guardians of the people’s religion. They thus had some role in determining what religious beliefs justified resistance to the emperor. It was a small step from there to deciding what beliefs were acceptable within the princes’ own territory. While Luther did not initially take this further step himself, he was sufficiently far down the path of magisterial authority to not protest when Melanchthon and others began to take it.25
In the mid-to-late 1530s, Luther himself began writing of the magistrate’s role in promoting and supporting true religion. But even with this change, he still emphasized the alternate roles of the civil magistrate and the bishop. He still thought it was the devil who tried to lure the secular ruler into being “Christ’s masters and teach[ing] Him how He should run His church and spiritual government.”26 While being compelled by circumstances to support magisterial Protestantism, there still lurked within Luther the ideal of the two separate and distinct kingdoms of his earlier teachings.
Luther, Calvin, and Ecclesiology
A further reason that Lutheranism basically followed Melanchthon and Calvin down the road of magisterial religions was that Luther had not constructed a sufficiently detailed and independent ecclesiology to allow it to function well apart from the state. Luther had been extremely aware ecclesiologically, but largely in a negative sense. His Address to the German Princes of 1520 had trumpeted the blasts that he hoped would overturn the three walls protecting the papal hierarchy. But he had not offered much to replace it, except for the community of the faithful ministered to by pastors who were no more or less priests than the baptized congregants.27
Luther thus initially taught that the congregation should be able to choose and oversee its own pastors.28 But given that all members of a community should be baptized at birth, it was unclear how the congregation itself, which consisted in large part, as Luther soon discovered, of unregenerate persons, have the spiritual wisdom and maturity to choose appropriate pastors or otherwise regulate the affairs of the church. At the least, there would have to be an interim period of oversight and education until the community matured under the influences of the true gospel. Thus, Luther accepted a role of the magistrate to play in church administration and oversight.29 In 1527, during a particularly unruly time for the church in Saxony, Luther worked with Elector Johann to undertake a series of religious visitations to assess and bring greater order to the church.30
But he did not view this oversight by the civil rule as ideal or desirable. He viewed the arrangement as irregular, and called a prince acting this way an “emergency bishop,” doing his “duty not as a ruler but as an ordinary Christian in the absence of competent church authorities.”31 But what Luther viewed as an exception, an irregular act provoked by exigent circumstances, others embraced as the long-term solution to the Lutheran ecclesiological weakness. Indeed, there is evidence in the 1530s that Luther himself had accepted, if not embraced, the reality of the cuius regio, eius religio and all it implied for the civil magistrate in overseeing religion.32 Certainly, those who followed Melanchthon and Calvin on the third use of the law and the role of the magistrate over the two tables had the theological justification to accept Luther’s emergency measure as a permanent rule.
The irony is that Calvin, for other reasons, engineered a far more thorough and independent ecclesiology than did Luther. His consistory of elders and network of congregations created a flexible and resilient church structure that could have functioned, and where necessary did function, independently from the state.33 For other reasons, including a preference for emphasizing “duty” over “liberty” in the Christian life, a deemphasis on the priesthood of believers, and an embrace of the third use of the law,34 he chose ecclesiastical cooperation with the magistrate.
Even for Calvin, the magistrate had no general role in actually making decisions about spiritual matters. Rather, the civil ruler should enforce those decisions pertaining to spiritual standards and matters made by the church.35 So though Calvin had a genuine separation between civil and spiritual authorities, he also taught a very robust cooperation between those two authorities. The two entities were basically “conjoined,” with the civil ruler wielding the sword on behalf of the spiritual leaders.36 While later reformed churches incorporated more democratic elements in their structure, including the direct election of pastors by their congregations, this church/state cooperation continued to be a reformed hallmark, at least where politically practicable.37
A Doctrine Divided
There is an irony in Luther’s support of the persecution of the Anabaptists. It was the Anabaptists, rather than later Lutheranism or the Reformed movement, who were much closer to Luther’s earliest stated ideals on the relation of the civil magistrate to religious beliefs. Had they been able to set aside their differences, Luther and the Anabaptists could have formed a powerful, complementary alliance of ideas.
But there were two profound differences that neither side could surmount. First, was Luther’s deep suspicion of rebaptizing and the insistence on adult baptism of the Anabaptists. The further irony here is that it was precisely infant baptism that was probably the foremost factor in preventing Luther’s church/state arrangement from working. Under Luther’s scheme of church membership, almost the entirety of any Lutheran community, whether converted or unconverted, was part of the church. The Anabaptists, on the other hand, had gathered-out communities that had a far higher percentage of deeply committed, if not converted, persons. Such a community would be far more self-regulable than would Luther’s, with its much higher chaff-to-wheat ratio.
The second difference was the Anabaptists’ rejection of the legitimate role of the Christian magistrate. The question of whether a Christian could serve as a magistrate was no peripheral issue for Luther. Indeed, his attack on the first wall of papal privilege was almost entirely based on the view that the civil ruler held a spiritual office. As fellow Christians, civil magistrates were equal to the ecclesiastical rulers, and could have authority over them in civil and secular matters. It seems that his argument of civil and ecclesiastical equality would not apply in Muslim lands. He stated that rulers should apply the law to ecclesiastical persons “without let or hindrance everywhere in Christian countries….”38 Thus, in Luther’s eyes, the rejection of a legitimate role for the Christian magistrate had the twofold effect of undermining his critique of the Papacy’s legal immunities, as well as undermining respect for authorities, who, by the Anabaptists’ definition, could not be truly Christian.
If Luther had been willing to accept infant baptism, and the Anabaptists had accepted the possibility of Christian magistrates, the subsequent history of the Reformation may have been very different. As it was, the Anabaptists carried on and perpetuated views on religious liberty that were very similar to those of early Luther. The extent of the direct influence of Luther’s thought on the Anabaptists would be an area of valuable study, but it is known that their leaders did read and even cite Luther in support of some of their positions.39 Given the wide circulation of Luther’s writings in the early 1520s, Anabaptist leaders must have been familiar with his main works on church and state, including the Address to the Princes and Secular Authority.
Due to their small numbers and generally outlawed status, however, the Anabaptists themselves had very little direct influence on European political or social affairs, at least until the time of the Dutch Revolt in the late sixteenth century. In the Netherlands, for the first time in Western Europe, a combination of ideas of conscience and the right of private religious judgment held by the Anabaptists, a political milieu that needed a respite from religious wars, and a business community that desired the prosperity of a peaceful toleration, formed the first national, nearly comprehensive exercise in religious toleration and freedom.40
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The Netherlands were an anomaly for at least a hundred years, at least until the religious toleration of the British glorious revolution—although even that was a stingier toleration than that achieved by the Dutch—and the freedom of some of the more radical American colonies, such as Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Heirs of the radical reformation, including Baptists and Quakers, were directly involved in these later events, especially those in America. Despite Luther’s persecution of them, the Anabaptists and their heirs can be seen at least as part of a link between early Lutheran thought on the priesthood of believers and the separate jurisdiction of the two kingdoms and modern political thought. The Anabaptists grasped and embodied, as it were, parts two and three of the three-walls-of-privilege argument, placing Scripture as the ultimate authority for every believer, both within society and within the church.
The other half, or third, of Luther’s argument—the equality of civil and ecclesiastical rulers, the inherent equality of all Christians and citizens, and the representative role of leaders—eventually found greater expression in the reformed churches. Over time, their polity became increasingly representative, and congregations were involved in choosing their pastors.
The reformed churches had far more political and social impact than the Anabaptists. The increasingly democratic natures of their congregations became a model for their political thought. In Europe, reformed churches were flexible enough to adjust to basically whatever church/state arrangement they found themselves under, as outside Geneva, they were usually in the minority. But it was in America where they had the most influence at the ground level over the structure of civil governments. Here, the Puritan-founded New England colonies were decades, in some cases a century or more, ahead of the other colonies in the representative nature of their assemblies and governmental structures.
It is as though Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of believers and its two kingdoms church/state model was divided in half shortly after the Reformation began. The part relating to the right of individual conscience in relation to Scripture was highlighted and championed by the Anabaptists and their allies. The part relating to the equality of believers and citizens, the complementary roles of church and state, and the essentially representative nature of leadership took root and began developing and evolving with the reformed churches.
Of course this is to drastically oversimplify things, but merely to highlight rather than mislead. Other influences were, of course, at work—humanist, Enlightenment, Catholic, Jewish, and Deist. The evolution of reformed polity was a lengthy and multibranched process, one that included forays into theocratic hierarchies, that is far too complex to examine here. The Anabaptists, even in America, were never significant in either numbers or direct influence. (Although they and/or their ideas did affect those who were of greater influence.)
The thread of the story is not so indistinct and vague, not so speculative and fanciful, to prevent one from saying, with a meaningful basis in history, that when the American Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted, it represented in some way a reuniting and political flowering of the secular implications of the priesthood of believers Luther had expressed in the 1520s. Those ideas, which became divided and submerged, now reemerged modified, even transformed, but still recognizable, and contributed to the formation of a representative form of republican government, and in the rights of conscience protected by the Bill of Rights from infringement by the majority.
To end where we started, these threads allow us to view those princes at Speyer, with all their prejudice and blindness to the Anabaptists, as truly asserting a foundational principle—Protestantism, the idea that in matters of conscience, the majority shall have no say—that, through many tortured pathways, false turns, blind alleys reconsidered, eventually formed part of the basis of our form of limited republican government. Not a government Luther envisioned, certainly, but one in which he would recognize the principles of religious liberty that he early championed.
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Nicholas Miller is an attorney and director of the Institute on Religious Freedom, Berrien Springs, Michigan.
1 MacCulloch, The Reformation, p. 151.
2 Dillenberger, Martin Luther, p. 388.
3 Ibid., p. 398.
4 MacCulloch, The Reformation, p.155.
5 Martin Luther, “Friendly Admonition to Peace Concerning the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants” (1525), reprinted in Hilderbrand, The Protestant Reformation, pp. 67-87.
6 Ibid., p. 71.
7 MacCulloch, The Reformation, p.157.
8 Ibid., p. 156.
9 Ibid., p. 159.
10 Ibid.
11 John S. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers Against Anabaptists
(The Hague: Baptist Standard Bearer, 2000), p. 116.
12 Ibid., p. 116.
13 Ibid., p. 122.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 128.
16 Ibid., p. 126.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 138.
20 Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 80, 81.
21 Ibid., pp. 82, 83.
22 Mark Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 174, 175.
23 Mark Greengrass, The Longman Companion to the European Reformation, c.1500-1618 (London and New York: Longman Publishing Group, 1998), pp. 61, 62.
24 Ibid., p. 62.
25 James M. Estes, “The Role of the Godly Magistrates in the Church: Melanchthon as Luther’s Interpreter and Collaborator,” Church History 67 (September 1998), pp. 463-483.
26 Ibid., p. 479.
27 Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, p. 170.
28 MacCulloch, The Reformation, p. 160.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., p.161.
31 Ibid.
32 Estes, “The Godly Magistrate,” pp. 478, 479.
33 Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 283-285.
34 Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 35.
35 Ibid., pp. 123-124, 196-197.
36 Benedict, Christ’s Churches, p. 89.
37 Ibid., pp. 71, 72.
38 Dillenberger, Martin Luther, p. 410.
39 For instance, it is known that Luther was annoyed by Balthasar Hübmaier’s citation of Luther’s writings in support of Hübmaier’s arguments on infant baptism. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers Against Anabaptists, p. 118.
40 Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555-1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 218-228.
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