Against the Bishops
When a number of bishops demanded that Luther and his followers be silenced, he answered with a pamphlet that came near to a declaration of revolution. In the tract Against the Falsely Called Spiritual Estate of the Pope and Bishops (July 1522), he first called the clergy "the greatest wolves" and urged all honest Germans to remove them from their offices by force. He wrote that it would be better for all bishops to be put down and all foundations and monasteries overturned than for one soul to be lost; that the idolatry and nonsense of the bishops lead everyone astray; and that there is no need for those who live in pleasure on the sweat of others to survive. If they would heed God and set about reforming themselves, God would be with them. But if they defy God's command and resort to excommunication, burning and killing people and other shameful deeds, do they deserve anything less than to be swept from the earth by a general uprising? Such an outcome would please him, and those who risked life, goods and reputation to destroy the bishops would be God's dear children and true Christians. (The book quotes the passage in stronger terms; here it is condensed.)
Temporal Authority and Its Limits
Luther was now fighting the state as he had fought the Church. Angered by the banning of his New Testament in the lands of zealous rulers, in the autumn of 1522 he published a treatise on the power of secular rulers and the limits of obedience to them. In it he endorsed Paul's view that Christians must obey political authorities and that these powers come from the will of God.
This did not fit easily with his earlier teaching on the complete freedom of the Christian. He argued that although Christians need no law and would not use force or law against one another, they should obey the law in order to be an example to the non-Christian majority of the world, since without law man's unruly and sinful nature would tear apart the fabric of society. Yet where the soul of man is concerned, the power of the state ends. Who are these rulers who think they have the right to decide what books people may read and what they must believe?
It must not be forgotten, he wrote, that a wise prince has always been rare in the world, and a devout and godly one rarer still. Most are fools or the greatest knaves on earth. Rulers and princes are God's jailers and executioners, whom the Creator has appointed to punish the wicked and keep outward peace. He quotes the psalm that says God pours contempt on princes (the book cites a Psalm number that appears garbled), and swears to them that if through their neglect and wrongdoing this word comes true, though they be as bold and strong as the Turks, they will perish and their idle talk will not change their fate. Much of it had already come true, he said, because the people were thinking, and disgust at the acts of rulers had prepared them for a general uprising. People neither could nor would endure any more of the princes' insolence and tyranny. "Dear princes and lords, be wise. God will not overlook your sins any longer. The days when you hunted and bridled the people like beasts are over."
A Bavarian minister called Luther's declaration a treasonous summons to revolution. Duke George asked Elector Frederick to stop the circulation of this shameful tract, but Frederick kept his usual calm and composure to the end of the uproar. How would the German princes have reacted had they read the letter Luther wrote to Wenceslaus Link on March 19, 1522? We have overcome the tyranny of the pope, who held kings and princes in his grip; can we then not put down the princes themselves? Or if they had seen how he described the Church: there is only one universal Christian Church in the world, the communion of saints, and in this community all things are held in common, and each person's possessions belong to all and not to him alone.
A Conservative Mind
These words of Luther, born of a passing impulse, should not be taken too seriously, the book warns, since in politics and religion he was a conservative, even a reactionary, who wanted to revive the methods and beliefs of the early Middle Ages. He regarded himself not as an innovator but as a restorer of past tradition. He would have been satisfied to keep the rural society he had known from childhood, with a small reform for the benefit of its people. He approved the medieval Church's condemnation of usury and thought interest the devil's invention. He opposed foreign trade, called commerce an "evil occupation," and denounced those who lived by buying goods cheap and selling dear. He accused monopolists, who joined together to raise prices, of "open theft," and held that the authorities had the right to confiscate their property and drive them out of the country. Thinking it time to "put a bridle on the neck of the Fuggers," he wrote in 1524, in his tract On Trading and Usury, in a threatening tone:
Kings and princes are bound to oversee this matter and to make strict rules to stop it. But I have heard that they themselves profit from it, and so Isaiah's prophecy has come true: "Your princes are companions of thieves." Our rulers hang a man for stealing half a gulden, yet trade with those who rob the whole world. The big thieves hang the little thieves; and as the Roman senator Cato said, little thieves lie in prison while great thieves walk openly in gold and silver. What will God do with them in the end? He will do as Ezekiel says: princes and merchants are partners in theft, and God will melt them like lead and bronze, as a city is melted in a furnace, and there will be neither prince nor merchant left. I fear that day is very near.
And that day came soon.