Martin Luther: Ninety-five Theses

Impact

Luther himself expressed surprise at the firestorm the Ninety-five Theses set off. He once said, “I would never have thought that such a storm would rise from Rome over one simple scrap of paper” (About Martin Luther). Luther could not have known the far-reaching impact his scrap of paper would have, for it launched the Protestant Reformation, breaking the hold of the Catholic Church on Europe.

The impact on his life and on the Catholic Church was almost immediate. In response to the publication of the theses, Pope Leo X ordered a prominent Italian theologian, Sylvester Mazzolini of Prierio (also known as Prierias), to investigate the dispute. Mazzolini concluded that Luther's teachings were opposed to the church's doctrine on indulgences and branded Luther a heretic (that is, a dissenter from official teachings). The pope demanded that Luther submit to the pope's authority by recanting his heretical views. To that end he dispatched his representative to confront Luther at Augsburg, Germany, in October 1518. Over the next two years, the dispute grew more heated until the pope threatened to excommunicate Luther. In response, Luther burned the papal bull that contained the pope's warning. (A “bull” is an official papal letter, so called because it is sealed with a lead seal called a bulla.) On January 3, 1521, the pope issued a bull excommunicating Luther.

That same month, Charles V, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, convened the Diet of Worms, an assembly similar to a parliament and held in a small town on the Rhine River. Luther appeared before the diet. When he was asked whether he still believed his “errors,” he replied the next day (April 18, 1521):

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by plain reason (for I believe in neither the pope nor in councils alone, for it is well-known, not only that they have erred, but also have contradicted themselves) … my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant, for it is neither safe nor honest to violate one's conscience.

According to legend, he then said, “I can do no other. Here I take my stand” (qtd. in Estep, pp. 132–133).

On May 25, 1521, the Diet of Worms issued the Edict of Worms, declaring Luther a heretic and an outlaw. He took refuge in Eisenach, where he lived for the next year under the protection of a German prince, occupying his time by translating the New Testament of the Bible into simple German that ordinary people could understand—another step in his efforts to free the faithful from the grip of church authority. Groups from all over Europe sent him letters soliciting his comments on assorted matters of church doctrine or seeking his support for their own reform movements.

But the impact of the “scrap of paper” extended far beyond Luther's own life. By the early 1520s, like-minded people in Europe were already calling themselves “Lutherans,” although Luther did not regard himself as the creator of a new religion and even urged his followers to call themselves Christians, not Lutherans. They rejected his advice, and today there are some sixty-six million Lutherans in the world. His conflicts with the church helped spark the so-called Peasants' War of 1524–1525. At the time, Europe was in a state of upheaval. Since at least the fourteenth century, European peasants had been in rebellion against their landowning masters. They regarded Luther's challenge to the church as an attack as well on the social and economic system that oppressed them. Accordingly, they believed that if they rose up in revolt, they would gain the support of Protestant Reformers like Luther. Aiding the peasants were poor nobles who had no way to repay the debts they owed to the Catholic Church.

Initially, Luther supported the peasants, but he withdrew this support when the revolts turned bloody. Critics blamed Luther for the revolts, so he succumbed to increasing pressure to condemn the peasants, which he did, with characteristic vehemence, in 1525 in Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants—though part of his motivation was to lend his support to the German nobility who, like him, questioned the authority of the pope and who offered him protection. The revolt was put down in 1525, though henchmen continued to ransack churches, abduct church officials, and commit other atrocities.

The Peasants' War was only a harbinger of things to come. In the years and decades that followed, Catholicism and Protestantism formed the two sides in an ongoing battle that frequently erupted into warfare. Throughout the 1500s, tensions between Catholics and Protestants increased, erupting into violence in 1606 when Catholics and Protestants clashed in the German city of Donauwörth. Nations on the European continent, many of them—such as Spain and Italy—still Catholic, looked on the swelling influence of Protestant Germans with fear and distrust. In 1618 these tensions erupted into the Thirty Years' War, a series of conflicts that embroiled most of Europe and that led to the death of nearly a third of the German population before it ended with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

These kinds of religious conflicts continued. Protestant England was wracked with religious dissension that erupted into armed insurrection, which ended when the Catholic king, Charles I, was beheaded by Protestant revolutionaries in 1649. The monarchy was restored in 1660, but Catholic-Protestant animosity continued, and in 1688 the Catholic James II fled England into exile, to be replaced by King William and Queen Mary, both Protestants. For decades English Protestants feared that James's Catholic heirs would return to reclaim the throne. Until the nineteenth century, Catholics (and Jews) in England were not allowed to attend universities or hold public office. In the largely Protestant United States, similar anti-Catholic prejudice was commonplace throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Throughout the twentieth century, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland died in bloody bombings and assassinations.

The Protestant Reformation in Europe had as its by-products bloodshed, conflict, and discrimination. Nevertheless, historians agree that the Reformation Luther and others launched made an important contribution to the development of Europe. The Reformation freed the nations of Europe from the grip the Catholic Church had on most aspects of life: government, education, scientific research, publication of books, among others. The emphasis on personal belief rather than church authority sparked a renewed interest in learning. This interest, in turn, fueled the rapid artistic, intellectual, and social advancement of Europe.