Luther as a model of intolerance in social debate

Martin Luther, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1529

The debate over important issues in many communities these days are wracked by vicious personal attacks arising from a bitter intolerance of the opposition, and evident in an unwillingness to even listen to the views of others, let alone engage with the arguments offered.

This is has happened before during times when world views were at odds. One discussion of what it means for those trying to understand the world but have "hard faces to their right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on their left" leads to the comparison of the argumentative styles of the violently out-spoken Luther and quietly rebellious Erasmus. The writers' examination gives rise to a question that is at the heart of any study of the spirit of public debate: Would church history as well as world history have been different if there had been more tolerance shown?

Luther's temperament and ingrained behaviour made it impossible for there to be calm reasoning over the contentious practices and beliefs that Luther attacked.  Erasmus was Luther's precursor in attacking the evils in church life of the time - the late 1400s and early 1500s.  After a considerable time ignoring the insistence that he weigh in against Luther, Erasmus produced a work, A Discourse on Free Will,  that provided a critique of Luther's central belief about predestination, where Luther denied the human capacity to exercise free will.

Already Luther had such an intolerant view of Europe's foremost scholar that "mention of the name Erasmus sent Luther into a paroxysm of loathing" (Richard Marius, Martin Luther, Belknap Press 1999), and Luther's treatise written in reply "is insulting, vehement, monstrously unfair, and utterly uncompromising - which is to say it shows Luther reacting in accordance with the character that temperament and experience had stamped upon him by 1525" (Marius, p456).

Of all his Catholic foes, only Erasmus sought to approach Luther gently. Luther responded with a blast that echoes with the cannonades and associated horrors of the coming religious wars (p456).

To make explicit how Luther's violence in his texts and in his speech debased the public debate on the church and the person's relationship with God, I want to quote at length from Marius:

Erasmus, c.1530, maybe by Hans Holbein Snr

To Erasmus's plea for peace, Luther replied that tumult is a sign of the gospel. It is a familiar theme of his but in this context a striking observation, given the smoke still rising from battlefields where peasants were being slaughtered in Germany. In Luther's flexible all-purpose theology, the tumult and fury of the times were part of the wrath of God, and in writing against the peasants he could deplore their rebellion [against land owners and princes] as satanic and at the same time see the gospel as an agent that provoked at once satanic opposition and God's visible anger against Satan. Here, too, was Luther's growing conviction that God had raised him up as a prophet. He was God's tool, and he mocked Erasmus for his desire for peace and an easy life. Luther believed he himself had been the tortured instrument whereby God had revealed the gospel after a long night, and to him his suffering and hardship became the seal of his divine calling as evangelist. Adolf von Harnack said he would concede to Catholic critics of Luther a self-estimation that might appear to be "an insane" pride (p458).

Luther's ongoing attacks on Erasmus the man and Erasmus's understanding of Christian life led to Erasmus's complaint of having been the victim, at the hand of Luther, of "so many wounds worse than fatal". However, the Catholic Erasmus was not the only target. Among many others who ventured further into the morass that the Luther's reform had become, Luther considered radical reformers Andreas Karlstadt and Ulrich Zwingli "blasphemers pure and simple" - "Luther's rhetoric against them was fierce and extreme"; when "Zwingli tried to answer him with mild language, Luther responded with unmitigated rage and railing"(p474).

Similarly, on on the wider scale, Luther's temperament destroyed the spiritual richness of the life of ordinary people of Europe. His reforms gutted the church of its rituals and beliefs that had warmed the hearts and minds of the people over centuries. The "contempt" which Luther had toward the "common people" drew a response where the Wittenbergers who accepted his gospel ignored his teachings and displayed moral standards that dismayed him.  His further view that the masses must "bow to control solely by princes" ensured his "doctrines never attracted a majority of the German people" (p424); The fact was that "people and pastors were alienated from each other" and:

When the Enlightenment came, with its impersonal religiosity devoted to order and obedience, it found the way prepared by Lutheran churches. The ruling class coldly professed their faith; the lower classes did not bother (p473).

It is true that this posting presents an onslaught against Martin Luther, but only as the model "enlightened" reformer. My theme has been that Luther shows that one individual, principally by means of their ugly temperament and their lack of a generous spirit of public debate, though with the support others, is able to destroy, to fragment, to debase what had been established by God's will and human insight and effort over centuries, notwithstanding whatever courage or eloquence they may have.

I repeat the question asked at the top: Would church history as well as world history have been different if there had been more tolerance shown in the religious debate? My answer is that with calmness and tolerance, the widespread rebellion within the Catholic culture of the time could have produced fruit by way of reforms to ecclesiastical abuses decades earlier than those that started to appear late in the century. Also, social reforms in society would likely have occurred earlier.