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Martin Luther TEXT: An Empires Special NARRATOR: All Hallows’ Eve, 1517. The Castle Church, Wittenberg, northern Germany. Martin Luther has nailed one document to its door: The Ninety-Five Theses, 95 stinging attacks on the mighty Catholic Church and its head, the pope. Luther has no idea that with this one gesture, he has unleashed a hurricane, a storm of violence that will rage across Europe, change the face of Western civilization forever, and sweep him towards an epic confrontation with the greatest powers of the day. TEXT: Martin Luther The Reluctant Revolutionary Germany, February 1546 Martin Luther, now an old man, nears the end of his final journey… MARTIN LUTHER: [reading] God knows, I never thought of going so far as I did. I would never have thought that such a storm would rise from Rome over one simple scrap of paper. NARRATOR: Luther had never intended for his Ninety-Five Theses to create the tumult they did. But in Rome, the headquarters of the Catholic Church, they caused outrage and horror, not just because they criticized the pope, but also because they were massively popular. MARK EDWARDS, President Emeritus, St. Olaf College: The Theses touch a nerve for several reasons. Issues of moment to a large number of people of the time, about the Church and its relationship in the economy, what is salvation, what do people have to do to be saved – and it’s that combination, at a time when people were really resenting the way in which the Church was taking advantage of that desire to be saved, all that came together and made these something that people talked about. NARRATOR: But the Church had a name for works like this: they were heresy. And heresy called for a swift response. The first victims were Luther’s books, and the next would be Luther himself. EUAN CAMERON, Union Theological Seminary, New York: The ultimate punishment for a heretic was that they could be cut off from the Church and handed over to lay justice, which would sentence them to death in a rather hypocritical phrase that they used, without the shedding of blood, which usually meant burning or drowning.


NARRATOR: Only a hundred years before, a man named Hus had criticized the Church for much the same reasons as Luther. Hus was promised a safe hearing, only to then be roasted alive. [4:30] MICHAEL A. MULLETT, University of Lancaster, UK: The papacy can crush [inaudible], there’s no two ways about it. It’s an amazingly efficient machine for detection of error, through the Inquisition for example, and through the elimination of individuals. We have to say that Luther has entered an arena of extremely high gladiatorial risk, with a strong possibility of execution. NARRATOR: For Martin Luther, the mounting fury of the Catholic Church would inspire not doubt and fear, but an extraordinary courage that would only grow stronger with every attack he faced. ALISTER MCGRATH, Oxford University: There’s no doubt that Luther is frightened by some of the threats that are made against him. But alongside this is this very strong idea that if the Christian life is being lived authentically, then you must expect to suffer. Luther sees the criticism of him almost as a confirmation of his vocation as a reformer. SUSAN KARANT-NUNN, University of Arizona: Martin Luther continues right on because he’s a man of both high idealism, resolve, and naiveté. One has to admire that kind of single-minded pursuit of an ideal. NARRATOR: Luther squared up to the Church with a style of opposition it had never encountered before. He was utterly dismissive of its threats. The pope demanded that Luther disown The Ninety-Five Theses. Luther refused. The pope sent a cardinal to interrogate him. Luther was unimpressed. MARTIN LUTHER: [reading] He is no more fitted to handle the case than an ass to play on a harp. NARRATOR: And then Luther was charged with heresy. He remained defiant. MARTIN LUTHER: [reading] I demand they show me – absolutely, not respectively, distinctly and not confusedly, certainly and not probably – just what is heretical. ALISTER MCGRATH: I think the difficulty the Church faced was this: the more it tried to silence Luther, the greater Luther became convinced that he had a vocation which needed to be seen through.


MARTIN LUTHER: [reading] I desired to believe freely and to be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university, or pope. And I was bound not only to assert the truth, but to defend it, with my blood and death. [8:00] NARRATOR: In Rome, Luther’s writings were causing mounting fury. Pope Leo X now turned to the mightiest weapon in his arsenal: excommunication. With this, Leo could condemn Luther to an eternity of hell in the next world, and to make him an outcast in this. SUSAN KARANT-NUNN: To the average Christian, papal excommunication meant that if you died without being reconciled to the Church, you spent eternity in hellish torment. NARRATOR: The document was drafted at Leo’s magnificent hunting lodge outside Rome, and the text reflected the pontiff’s favored leisure pursuit: the stalking of wild boar. POPE LEO X: [reading] Arise, O Lord, protect yourself, for a wild boar of the forest is seeking to destroy your vineyard. We must proceed against this Martin Luther to his condemnation and damnation as one whose faith is notoriously suspect, and is in fact a true heretic. NARRATOR: Sealed with the great papal emblem of the crossed keys of St. Peter, this document should have sealed Luther’s fate, not least because it could place him open to arrest by any secular or Church authority. But as Leo was raising the stakes in Rome, Luther was discovering that he had a new and powerful weapon on his side. ALISTER MCGRATH: For movements to spread, their ideas need to spread. And for Luther it was providential that a means of disseminating these ideas had suddenly become available through the printing press. I think in our own day and age, we’re very much aware of how things have been changed by the Internet. What the Internet is to our day, printing was to Luther’s day. It meant the ideas could travel; they could not be stopped. NARRATOR: Luther had watched as the printers had spread his Ninety-Five Theses across Germany, and he had realized that their presses could offer him a vast new audience. SUSAN KARANT-NUNN: Martin Luther is said to have been the first propagandist, the first person to really exploit this new medium. He perceived that he could gain an audience that was far larger than he could have done without it.


NARRATOR: Luther penned a new text, an address to the Christian nobility of the German nation. With this little pamphlet, Luther would strike a devastating blow at both pope and Church. His master stroke was to direct it not at the clerics and clergy, but at the secular rulers of Germany. [11:35] SUSAN KARANT-NUNN: This address to the German nobility suggests that Luther is beginning to see political reality. He has understood that if he’s to purify the Church, he really has to have the cooperation of those who were in power. NARRATOR: In Luther’s time, Germany was a patchwork of tiny provinces. Each province was governed by its own local ruler. But they were also held under the overall dominion of the Holy Roman Empire, and individually, these fragmented states did not have the strength to stand up to Rome’s ever-increasing financial demands. SUSAN KARANT-NUNN: There was growing resentment inside Germany, and this treatise really sets out to say to those in power in Germany, look, this has got to stop. NARRATOR: Luther painted a vivid picture of the financial drain that was Rome. MARTIN LUTHER: [reading] German money, in violation of nature, flies over the Alps. SUSAN KARANT-NUNN: He talks about the self-indulgence of the papacy, the numbers of secretaries – thousands of secretaries – that the pope has, the way in which the pope rides around the city with a veritable train of attendants. And all of this is to suggest that that is what German money is being used for. NARRATOR: Luther, in no uncertain terms, was now arguing that the powers of Germany should stand up to Rome and the pope. MARTIN LUTHER: [reading] It seems to me that the only remedy remaining is for the emperor, the kings, and princes to gird themselves with force of arms to attack these pests of the world and fight them, not with words, but with steel. NARRATOR: It was a truly radical agenda. Luther was arguing that not just the clergy, but every German had a stake in their church.


ALISTER MCGRATH: One of the great themes of this appeal to German nobility is that it is ordinary people, ordinary Christians – not the priests – ordinary Christians who have a God-given role to play in the running of the church. If we are to use modern ways of speaking, we’re talking here about the democratization of religion. [14:25]

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