The Myth of Martin Luther

Luther as a toy

Martin Luther is one figure who perennially stands out in both popular and scholarly accounts of modernity. In these narratives, Martin Luther is the quintessential modern hero, single-handedly bringing western civilization out of the “Dark Ages.” It was Luther, it is said, who triumphantly liberated Christianity from its servitude to medieval feudalism, along with its fearful obeisance to the papal church, and Luther who modernized Christianity. There are endless representations of him, in stone and in oil paint, a solitary figure, hands on the Protestant Bible, academic robes billowing in the wind, eyes lifted to heaven.

The story has enough drama to keep people reading his countless biographies, and it is so familiar that I need not recount it here. But the cherished account of the audacious Augustinian friar who launched the modern era is more drama than reality, more fiction than fact. That this is now well-established has not dissuaded Luther’s many biographers from rehashing the story of Luther as the “herald of freedom” who inaugurates the modern age with his 1520 treatise, “The Freedom of a Christian.” This fantasy persists because it underwrites the even more compelling one that modernity is synonymous with freedom, as if the enslavement and murder of millions of African men and women was not inextricable from, and foundational to, the history of modernity, or the disenfranchisement of their descendants, and as if Protestant nations were not primarily culpable for these crimes. If Luther’s celebrants insist on granting him the honors of modernity, they need to consider his implication in the full story of modernity, not a sanitized version of it.

The question that concerns me is how this story of Luther the Reformer gained such immense traction. Luther was one among many sixteenth-century Christian reformers, a group that included John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, St. Teresa of Avila, and Ignatius of Loyola. Admittedly Luther’s belief that only Christ’s gospel saves was historically original, yet even his effort to reform the theology and liturgical practices of late medieval Catholicism had historical precedents. There was, for example, the Franciscan William of Ockham, who already in the fourteenth century challenged the idea that only the pope could interpret scripture, and the theologian Johann Hus, who in the fifteenth century criticized the clerical practice of communing the laity only in one kind. Ockham fled to Bavaria to escape charges of heresy, and Hus was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415.

Luther as a statue in Washington DC. The sculptor is by Ernst Rietschel

This sensationalized portrait of Luther at the origins of modernity is actually the creation of a particular time and place. The early twentieth-century German Lutheran theologians Karl Holl, Rudolf Otto, Ernst Troeltsch, even Max Weber, were interested in Luther for a number of reasons having to do with the intellectual, political, and religious concerns of their own times. These scholars associated with the movement called the “Luther Renaissance” were interested in recovering Luther’s religious experience not only for its importance to his theology, but also in order to align it with new ways of understanding time and experience in the social and natural sciences. Karl Holl, church historian in Berlin and student of Adolf von Harnack, aimed to describe Luther’s experience of God in terms of a religion of conscience. Holl and other scholars of the Luther Renaissance claimed that Luther’s specifically religious experience was so dramatic and innovative that it inaugurated a new era. In this way, Luther became the reformer not of medieval Catholicism, but of religion itself.

These theologians and church historians believed that the field of theology needed fundamental revision in order to participate in the discussions taking place in German universities at the time. The early twentieth century saw the emergence of the social sciences, particularly anthropology, sociology, and economics. Another growing area of academic interest was the historicist study of religion. Biblical scholars had already been approaching the Bible in historical terms since Spinoza had challenged the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch in the early seventeenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, scholars were interested in the history of religion, particularly at the University of Göttingen, in which myth and the Hebrew prophets were subjects of historical inquiry, and at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums founded in Berlin in 1872, in which Judaism was treated in historical terms.

Academic work takes place in a political context. The Wilhelmine monarchy, or Kaiserreich, was a time of fascinating change, as contemporary German historian Hedwig Richter has recently shown. Germany was self-conscious about its status vis-à-vis the other modern nation states of England and France. Bismarck had unified the German territories under the Prussia-dominated German empire in 1871 and then sought to institute a social welfare state, with universal health insurance, protections for workers, and child labor laws. His politics provoked conflict between Protestants and Catholics, known as the Kulturkampf in the 1870s, since they privileged Protestant control in the Second Reich. After the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, convened by Bismarck, Germany, like the other European powers, was assigned colonies in Africa. During the period of its jurisdiction over South West Africa, now Namibia, from 1904-1908, the German colonizers instigated the first genocide of indigenous populations of the twentieth century.

Luther amidst the ruins of the Dresden Frauenkirche

The scholarly recovery of Luther as modern Protestant aligned with Bismarck’s nationalist and colonial program. Here was the cultural progenitor of German unity. Luther had, after all, translated the Bible from its original languages of Hebrew and Greek into German. He had rejected the official Latin canon, defied the papal rule forbidding translation into the vernacular, and agreed with the humanist idea that everyone has access to the literal sense of the text through grammatical interpretation. The language he gave the Germans was his own Saxon dialect, peppered with thousands of idiomatic sayings and a wide emotional range. Luther’s antipapal polemic was grist for the Kulturkampf’s mill. His anti-Judaism, likewise, resonated with the rising antisemitism in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. Luther’s insistence on German economic independence from Rome in his battle against papal indulgences was coopted by nationalists after Germany’s “humiliation” at the Treaty of Versailles after the loss of World War I. Luther as the father of modernity was captured in the iconic photo of his statue in the “here I stand” posture, with the Frauenkirche in rubble behind him after the Allied destruction of Dresden’s historic city center in February 1945. Under the cloak of “the reformer,” Luther was summoned forth to battle against those now declared to be Germany’s enemies, within the nation-state and abroad in the world.

Luther as meme.

My recent book How Luther Became the Reformer tells the history of how a particular story of Luther—the one who stands atop pedestals in marketplaces in Germany—came to be central to the story of modern Germany at the end of the Wilhelmine era and during the fragile Weimar democracy. This “German” Luther continues to be recycled in contemporary biographies. He is a favorite of the Christian nationalist far right. What we can learn from the bad company Luther is keeping once again is that the reception of significant religious figures like Martin Luther is always caught up in political, cultural, religious, and academic crises. The myth of modern freedom, with Luther at its origins, was pressed so deeply into German bodies as to offer consolation and inspiration even in the trenches of disastrous military conflict. And the myth continues to resonate with those who insist, against all evidence, that the key words of modernity are freedom, self-determination, personal rights, under God. Today, as in 1919-1933, contemporary modern society once again shows the real face of modernity, disclosing its propensity to authoritarianism, its resistance to curtailing individual freedom on behalf of common good, and an insidious antisemitism and anti-Black racism. To persist today in the delusion of the modern as it appears in the Luther myth is a form of intellectual, academic, and religious malfeasance.

Christine Helmer is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities, Professor of German and Religious Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki’s theology faculty. She is the editor and author of numerous volumes in the areas of Luther studies, Schleiermacher studies, biblical theology, systematic theology, and philosophical theology, most recently How Luther Became the Reformer (Westminster John Knox Press 2019); the edited volume The Medieval Luther (Mohr Siebeck 2020), and the forthcoming edited collection Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance (Lexington/Fortress Academic 2021).