The Protestant Reformation

Luther's ninety-five theses of 1517 were an academic protest about a specific abuse. A campaign was selling indulgences in Germany, remitting the temporal penalty of sin, with the proceeds divided between the rebuilding of St Peter's and the repayment of a debt incurred by an archbishop to secure his own appointment. Luther's objections were initially pastoral: that the practice gave people false assurance and that a pope who could empty purgatory should do it out of love rather than for money. Whether he nailed the theses to the church door in Wittenberg is itself uncertain and disputed by historians.

The argument escalated because of what it exposed. Pressed in debate at Leipzig in 1519, Luther conceded that popes and councils could err, which moved the dispute from indulgences to authority. By 1520 he was publishing on the priesthood of all believers, on the sacraments, and against the papacy, and the answer to the question of what should decide a religious controversy had become scripture rather than the teaching office.

Justification by faith, worked out in these years, is the theological core: that a person is accepted by God as a gift received in faith rather than through any merit accumulated. Everything contested afterwards, the number of sacraments, the mass, the monastic life, the invocation of saints, follows from where that answer is placed.

Reformers before Luther had said comparable things and had been contained. Wycliffe was condemned and Hus was burned. Explaining why 1517 did not end the same way requires more than theology.

Printing is the usual first answer and it is a good one. Luther's German pamphlets were short, vivid and cheap, and they sold in numbers no earlier controversialist could have reached. He is among the first authors in European history whose output can be described as a publishing phenomenon, and the woodcut allowed the argument to reach people who could not read.

Political interest is the second. German princes had long-standing grievances about money leaving for Rome and about the appointment of bishops, and a reformer who denied papal jurisdiction was useful. Frederick of Saxony protected Luther without ever clearly endorsing him. Later, monastic property became available to rulers who adopted the new order, which is not a cynical observation but a documented one.

Existing grievance is the third. Anticlerical complaint, demands for reform, and devotional movements seeking a more personal religion were widespread before Luther and were not created by him.

Historians weight these differently, and the weighting is genuinely contested. What is not contested is that the Reformation produced many churches rather than one, and that the magisterial reformers persecuted the Anabaptists on the radical wing as vigorously as any Catholic authority did.