The Early Defender of Conscience
It is instructive to see how Luther, once his power was secure, turned from tolerance of opposing views to fixed dogma. One of the charges in Pope Leo X's bull of excommunication was that Luther held that "burning heretics is against the will of the Spirit." In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) he made all Christians priests, so that each had the right to interpret Scripture by his own judgment, and in the same work proposed that heretics be refuted "not with fire but with books." A little later, in On Temporal Authority (1522), he wrote:
God allows no one but himself to rule over souls. I want to make this so plain that all will accept it, and that our nobles, princes and bishops will see what a mistake they make in forcing a particular belief on people. Since faith and unbelief are private matters of conscience, the rulers of this world should mind their own business, force no one into any belief, and leave people free to accept whatever belief suits them; for faith cannot be forced on anyone. Faith and unbelief, when attacked without God's leave, grow stronger.
In a letter of April 21, 1524, he asked Frederick to deal gently with Müntzer and his other opponents: do not forbid them to speak; the rise of different parties and a struggle over God's word are unavoidable; let us leave the free clash of opinions to God. In 1528, when some wanted the Anabaptists executed, Luther proposed that as long as they stirred up no riot or disorder they be merely banished. In 1530 he also advised that the penalty for blasphemers be reduced from death to exile. It is true that in those years Luther himself talked as if he expected God or his followers to destroy all "papists," but this war of words should not be taken seriously. In January 1521 he wrote, "I shall never defend the Gospel with force and slaughter," and in June of that year he denounced the Erfurt students who were attacking priests. Even so, he did not object to threatening priests to make them soften their doctrines a little. In May 1529 he condemned using force to impose Protestantism on Catholics, and in late 1531 declared, "It is neither possible nor proper for us to force religion on people." But for a devout and stubborn man like Luther, it was hard to tolerate opponents once his own position was fairly secure. A man who saw himself as defender of God's word could not give room to opinions that, to his mind, contradicted it.
The Jews
Luther's quarrel with the Jews came first. Until 1537 he argued that Jews should not be blamed for keeping their faith, "because the foolish, stupid and trifling men we call popes, bishops, sophists and monks have treated the Jews in such a way that any Christian would sooner have become a Jew. If I had been a Jew and seen these crude men speaking of Christianity, I would have wished I were a hog rather than a Christian. I beg you all to treat the Jews kindly and teach them Scripture, for only so will they turn to us." Luther seems to have understood that Protestantism, by abolishing monasticism and clerical celibacy, honoring the Old Testament, "the books of the prophets" and the Psalms of David, and adopting stricter limits on sex than Catholicism's (Luther himself is the exception), brought certain features of Judaism back into Christianity. But the Jews' refusal to turn to Protestantism, and his dislike of usury, made him hostile first to Jewish moneylenders and then to all Jews. When Frederick (the book's name; the ruler who expelled them was the elector of Saxony) drove the Jews out of Saxony (1537), Luther would not intercede for them. In the Table Talk he called "Jews and papists" godless wretches. In his last years, his hostility to the Semitic race reached its height; he abused the Jews as a stubborn, faithless, arrogant, criminal and hateful people, and proposed that all their schools and synagogues be burned, their houses razed, their prayer books, Talmuds and even Bibles taken from them, their rabbis forbidden to teach on pain of death, the roads closed to them, their money and silver seized, and, if these measures failed, that they be driven like dogs out of German lands. (The book quotes his words at length, in language of extreme violence; they are summarized here.) One wishes Luther had not lived to old age.
From Toleration to Dogma
In 1522, when he had become more imperious than the pope, he wrote: "I do not allow anyone, not even angels, to judge my teaching. He who does not accept my teaching cannot be saved." In 1529 he drew fine distinctions: no one should be forced to profess faith, but no one should be allowed to disturb others' faith. Let our opponents state their objections and hear the answers. If they are not persuaded thereby and do not believe, let them hold their tongues and believe what they like. But to avoid disorder, as far as possible we should not have to suffer opposing teachings in one country. Even unbelievers should be made to accept the Ten Commandments, attend church assemblies and conform outwardly to others.
Luther had now come to agree with the Catholic Church about the need for firm foundations of belief and definite dogmas that Christians live for and die for. Just as the weakening division of Christianity into sects in the early centuries drove the Church to define its creed and expel the holders of conflicting beliefs, so the strife of the new sects, born of belief in freedom of thought and conscience among Protestants, drove Luther step by step from tolerance toward dogma. He expressed his dismay at the splintering of Protestants: "Everyone now dares to pick at the Gospel. Fools and stupid sophists have all become theologians." Shocked by the Catholic Church's accusation that he was the author of moral and doctrinal chaos, he took the Church's side and, to preserve social order, called for an end to debate and for a single authority as "the pillar of faith." Asked what that authority might be, Catholics named the Church and said only so living an organization could reconcile itself and Scripture with unavoidable change; but Luther said the one and final authority was Scripture, because all admit that Scripture is God's word.
In the thirteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, which he believed free of error, Luther found words he took as God's command to kill unbelievers and heretics: if your brother, your son or daughter, or the wife of your bosom entices you to other gods, your eye shall not pity him, you shall surely put him to death. On the strength of this terrible command the thirteenth-century Church had crushed the Albigensians and the Inquisition had burned heretics and infidels. Luther, despite his violence and sharp tongue, never treated opponents as severely as the Catholic Church, and as far as he could tried to quiet them peacefully. In 1525 he helped bring in censorship in Saxony and Brandenburg to remove the "destructive beliefs" of the Anabaptists and Zwinglians. In his commentary on Psalm 82 (1530), he told the authorities to destroy all heretics who incite sedition and the abolition of private property, and also "those whose beliefs contradict the articles of faith, including those who deny Christ's divinity." Religious pressure in Lutheran lands went so far that Sebastian Franck said there was more freedom of thought and speech among the Ottoman Turks than in Luther's territories, and Leo Jud, a follower of Zwingli, like Karlstadt, called Luther the new pope. In fairness, at the end of his life, as in his first years, Luther was tolerant toward opponents. In his last sermon he warned his followers against force to uproot opposing beliefs and urged them to bear with Catholics and Anabaptists until the last judgment, when God himself would judge them.
Harder Hearts
Other reformers were harsher than Luther toward dissenters. Bucer of Strasbourg urged Protestant authorities to destroy the spreaders of "false" religions and not even spare their wives, children or livestock. He called them worse than murderers. Melanchthon, who was gentler than the others, praised the imprisonment and killing of German Anabaptists by the Inquisition's machinery and said, "Why should we pity them more than God does?" For he firmly believed God would cast the Anabaptists into hell. He advised that those who deny infant baptism, original sin and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist deserve death. He also asked the death penalty for a group of dissenters who believed pagans could be saved, and for another sect who doubted that faith in Christ could clear a born sinner of sin. Melanchthon, as we shall see, was pleased by Servetus's execution, and he asked the state to make regular attendance at Protestant services compulsory for all. He asked that all books opposed to Luther's beliefs be banned, with the result that Zwingli's writings and those of his followers were forbidden in Wittenberg. Unlike Luther, who wanted Catholics expelled from lands of Protestant princes, Melanchthon asked bodily punishment for them. But both agreed that spreading and guarding "divine law," that is, Lutheranism, was the duty of civil law. Luther also held that where two different religious bodies exist in one state, the minority must yield to the majority. In other words, he thought Catholics should leave Protestant states and Protestants leave Catholic ones, and be severely dealt with if they refused.
Protestant authorities, imitating Catholics, sought to make the religious beliefs of the people in their lands uniform. The Augsburg council banned Catholic worship and ordered Catholics who would not accept the new faith to leave the city within eight days (January 18, 1537). When the time was up, soldiers seized church and monastery property, destroyed altars and images in Catholic churches, and drove out priests, monks and nuns. Frankfurt followed Augsburg, and soon confiscation of Catholic church property and abolition of Catholic rites became the rule in all Protestant territories. Press censorship, already used in Catholic states, was applied in Protestant ones too. John, elector of Saxony, at the request of Luther and Melanchthon, forbade the printing, sale and reading of the writings of Zwinglians and Anabaptists and the teaching and spreading of their beliefs (1528), and declared that anyone who met violators, native or foreign, must report them to local authorities so they could be seized and punished, and that those who knew of violators and did not report them would have their property confiscated or be put to death.
Protestants also learned excommunication of opponents from the Catholics, as they had learned press censorship. The Augsburg Confession (1530) allowed the Lutheran church to expel anyone who denied one of its basic doctrines. Luther himself justified excommunication this way: though popes have abused it shamefully and made it a tyranny over people, we should use it properly, as Christ commanded.