By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Numerous attempts were made to revive the conciliar movement or to make internal reforms of the Church, but they were ineffectual. It was in the climate of renewed and unbridled papal power that Martin Luther attacked the foundations of that power and challenged his fellow theologians to a public debate on the sources of authority in Christendom.
Martin Luther
As Martin Luther put it in the 90th of his Ninety-Five Theses: “These questions are serious matters of conscience to the laity. To suppress them by force alone [e.g., through the Inquisition or excommunication], and not to refute them by giving reasons, is to expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make the Christian people unhappy.”
Emboldened by the support he received, and undaunted by his excommunication, Luther published his treatise ‘On the Freedom of a Christian’ in 1520, in which he argued that “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” In other words, the body of the Church was made up of equals, who served equally and who constituted a “priesthood of all believers”.
And yet, rather surprisingly, Luther appears to have been oblivious to the wider political and social implications of his teachings. While he translated and published a German Bible for the laity, he courted the favor of German princes and grew increasingly conservative and reactionary in his beliefs.
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‘Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia’
In 1525, in the midst of the German Peasants’ War, the citizens of the free city of Memmingen adopted an extraordinary document known as the ‘Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia’, which Luther roundly condemned, even though it was based on his own teachings. Written down by a lay preacher called Sebastian Lotzer, it began as follows:
First of all, we humbly ask and beg—and we all agree on this—that henceforth we ought to have the authority and power for the whole community to elect and appoint its own pastor. We also want authority to depose a pastor who behaves improperly. This elected pastor should preach to us the holy gospel pure and clearly, without human additions or human doctrines or precepts. … Third, it has until now been the custom for lords to own us as their property. This is deplorable, for Christ redeemed and bought us all with his precious blood, the lowliest shepherd as well as the greatest lord, with no exceptions. Thus, the Bible proves that we are free.
This extraordinary document explicitly links the social, political, and economic grievances of the working classes with the evangelical message, which Luther had been spreading—and yet Luther himself denounced its demands because they were far too radical for his tastes.
‘The Spiritual Exercises’
If Luther was hostile to a more populist interpretation of his message, the response of the Church was to reiterate, in the strongest terms and legislation, the supremacy of the papacy and the impossibility of human salvation beyond the Roman Catholic Church as it was reconstituted by the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563.
These precepts are articulated most clearly in the influential ‘The Spiritual Exercises’, a tract written by the Basque mercenary-turned-theologian Ignatius of Loyola, founder of a new religious order known as the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits).
In contrast to Luther’s teaching of spiritual (if not political and social) equality, and to the Swabian peasants’ declaration of their right to shared governance and to the election of a pastor who truly represented them, Saint Ignatius insisted that there was no room for lay participation or representation in the Church.
Saint Ignatius
Ignatius wrote, “Putting aside all private judgment, we should keep our minds prepared and ready to obey promptly and in all things the true spouse of Christ our Lord, our Holy Mother, the hierarchical Church.”
Ignatius went on to argue: “We should approve and praise the decrees and regulations of those in authority, and their conduct as well; for although some of these things did not in the past deserve approval, more grumbling and scandal than profit would be aroused by speaking against them … In that way, people become hostile toward authority, either temporal or spiritual.”
Just as contemporary apologists of absolute monarchy would argue that even an evil king could not be deposed, Ignatius averred that only evil could come by questioning or diluting the powers that be.
In the course of the 16th century, then, medieval institutions of representative governance were increasingly running up against the demands of early modern rulers and could have become an entirely lost legal legacy. Instead, the ideas and practices of political representation and collective rights that had emerged in the preceding centuries would continually resurface, in various forms.
Common Questions about Sources of Authority in Christendom
Martin Luther published his treatise ‘On the Freedom of a Christian’ in 1520.
In contrast to Luther’s teaching of spiritual (if not political and social) equality, and to the Swabian peasants’ declaration of their right to shared governance and to the election of a pastor who truly represented them, Saint Ignatius insisted that there was no room for lay participation or representation in the Church.
In the ‘Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia’, the citizens asked for: the authority and power for the whole community to elect and appoint its own pastor; the authority to depose a pastor who behaved improperly; and not be owned as property by the lords.
