LUTHER AND THE MEDIA

Gary North

On October 31, 1517, fired the initial shot of what has come to be known as the Protestant .

Few social transformations can be dated this precisely. Military invasions that launch a major war can be dated. Revolutions and assassinations can be dated. But large-scale social turning points can only rarely be dated. The Protestant Reformation is the great exception in the history of the West. It is the most comprehensive social movement whose origin can be accurately dated to the day.

Five centuries, in the little German town of Wittenberg, Luther sat at his desk. He had been thinking of this moment for weeks. He had organized his thoughts. He was ready to make his points, one by one. He began to write. He had no idea that what he was writing would radically change his life, and then change history.

To the Most Reverend Father in Christ and Most Illustrious Lord, Albrecht of Magdeburg and Mainz, Archbishop and Primate of the Church, Margrave of Brandenburg, etc., his own lord and pastor in Christ, worthy of reverence and fear, and most gracious.

Then he issued a personal challenge. His words did not allow any doubt about the importance of what he was about to say and do. This now-legendary master of confrontational rhetoric pulled no punches.

Spare me, Most Reverend Father in Christ and Most Illustrious Prince, that I, the dregs of humanity, have so much boldness that I have dared to think of a letter to the height of your Sublimity. The Lord Jesus is my witness that, conscious of my smallness and baseness, I have long deferred what I am now shameless enough to do, -- moved thereto most of all by the duty of fidelity which I acknowledge that I owe to your most Reverend Fatherhood in Christ. Meanwhile, therefore, may your Highness deign to cast an eye upon one speck of dust, and for the sake of your pontifical clemency to heed my prayer.

He was just getting warmed up. He spent the rest of his letter explaining why he thought the Church’s sale of indulgences that promised to let buyers escape purgatory was a bad idea. He ended his letter with the words that have come down through history.

If it please the Most Reverend Father he may see these my Disputations, and learn how doubtful a thing is the opinion of indulgences which those men spread as

1 though it were most certain.

You can read the entire letter here: http://bit.ly/Luther-Archbishop

He folded the letter, and placed it in a large envelope. Then he picked up a handwritten copy of his proposed 95 debate topics in Latin. He folded it, and inserted it into the envelope. He wrote an address on the outside of it. Then he walked over to the equivalent of the post office and mailed it.

The Western Church was torn apart within five years. Western Europe was torn apart within a decade.

But wait! What about the church door? What about the hammer and the nail?

Luther never mentioned any such event in repeated and published recollections of that day. He mentioned only having sent a letter to the Archbishop.

The first reference to the nailing of the 95 theses to the church door came in 1546 from his friend Peter Melanchthon. He wrote this in June in his introduction to the second volume of Luther’s Latin works. Luther had died the previous February.

The debate still goes on between those historians who think he nailed – or possibly glued – the 95 theses to the church door vs. those who do not. In 2015, a pair of historians took opposite sides in the Lutheran Quarterly. At the end, they said that it is unlikely that historians will discover definitively, one way or another. It is an “unresolvable question.” Read it here: http://bit.ly/PostingDebate

October 31 was “mailed, yes; nailed, maybe.”

In the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), the man who did not shoot the villain Liberty Valence, but who was a legend because people thought he had, wrote an article telling the truth. A newspaper editor decides not to print it.

Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?

Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

The legend of the nailing has became fact long, long ago. It is what most authors write, most pastors preach, and most documentaries portray.

2 WHY INDULGENCES?

In 1513, Leo X replaced Julius II as Pope. Julius II had begun a huge, expensive reconstruction of St. Peter’s Church in . He hired Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. Leo X wanted to complete the project, but he soon ran out of money.

To replenish the treasury, he authorized the sale of indulgences on March 15, 1517. ("Beware the Ides of March!") These indulgences promised remission of past sins. Buying one would enable the purchaser to escape purgatory. Indulgences had been authorized in the late 14th century. Julius II used them to finance St. Peter’s, beginning in 1510.

Luther believed that he could persuade the Archbishop to stop the sale of indulgences in his jurisdiction. He was wrong. To understand why he was wrong, you need background information that Luther did not have.

Popes had long sold high ecclesiastical offices to rich men who wanted income. The practice was called simony, in dishonor of Simon the magician, who sought to purchase from Peter the power to lay on hands: ordination of ministers (Acts 8:9–24). By purchasing an office, the buyer gained a legal claim on income from tithes, donations, deathbed bequests, and other revenue-generating sources. He owned the equivalent of a bond. He also gained power and prestige . . . and, if he so desired, feminine favors. This was a powerful combination: money, sex, and power. All this and the avoidance of hell, buyers believed.

At the age of 23, Albrecht of Maintz purchased the Archbishop’s office of Magdeburg. He was not a priest. He just wanted a high-return investment. That was in 1513. He wanted even more offices/investments. This was not allowed by the Church. Leo X allowed him to do this in 1514. He purchased the office of Archbishop of Maintz. Here is the Wikipedia entry.

To pay for the pallium of the see of Mainz and to discharge the other expenses of his elevation, Albert had borrowed 21,000 ducats from Jakob Fugger, and had obtained permission from to conduct the sale of indulgences in his diocese to obtain funds to repay this loan, as long as he forwarded half of the income to the Papacy. An agent of the Fuggers subsequently traveled in the Cardinal's retinue in charge of the cashbox. He procured the services of John Tetzel to sell the indulgences.

He invited Tetzel to be the salesman. He was not about to cut off support for Tetzel. He forwarded Luther’s letter to the Pope.

Years later, Luther said he had known nothing about the Archbishop’s use of the funds generated by Tetzel. Had he known, he probably would not have bothered to write his letter of complaint. If he had not sent it, how would he have formally opposed Tetzel? No one knows. That is why history is filled with might-have-beens.

3 THE 95 THESES

The number of people who have read them is minuscule, even among Lutherans. Few college graduates have read them. The phrase “the 95 theses” may be vaguely familiar to someone who has taken a college course in Western Civilization. These days, however, not even history majors are required to take it. The report is here: http://bit.ly/NoWesternCiv

People who have heard about them, but who have never read them, are amazed when they are told that Luther did not criticize the Church or the Pope. They are even more amazed that Luther believed that the Pope was ignorant of the sales pitch that Tetzel was using to sell the indulgences. He actually thought the Pope would take his side against indulgences.

5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.

26. The pope does well when he grants remission to souls [in purgatory], not by the power of the keys (which he does not possess), but by way of intercession.

38. Nevertheless, the remission and participation [in the blessings of the Church] which are granted by the pope are in no way to be despised, for they are, as I have said, the declaration of ivine remission.

50. Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter's church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.

53. They are enemies of Christ and of the pope, who bid the Word of God be altogether silent in some Churches, in order that pardons may be preached in others.

61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient.

73. The pope justly thunders against those who, by any art, contrive the injury of the traffic in pardons.

74. But much more does he intend to thunder against those who use the pretext of pardons to contrive the injury of holy love and truth.

In the summer of 1517, Luther was a cautious reformer who preached in a small church in a backwater town. He taught theology in a backwater university. In 1520, he was the titular head of a social movement that was beginning to sweep across Western Europe.

4 In October 1517, he praised the Pope. In his book, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), he wrote of the Popes: “But now they seek to deprive us of this consciousness of our liberty, and would have us believe that what they do is well done, and must not be censured or complained of as wrongdoing. Since they wolves, they want to look like shepherds. Since they are antichrists, they want to be honored as Christ.”

He never paid any attention to indulgences after 1518. The issue had come and gone in both his life and his theological concerns.

An obscure reformer had become the founder of a Reformation that split Western Christendom and stripped the of huge chunks of its territory. If there is a premier example of the operation of the law of unintended consequences, this is it.

WHY LUTHER?

Historians, journalists, and police investigators ask six questions: what, where, when, who, why, and how?

Here is what we know for sure. Where: Wittenburg, an obscure German town with a small, recently created university, and a single local printer. When: October 31, 1517. Who: Martin Luther, a professor, pastor, and monk. Why: his growing belief in what he later called “salvation by faith alone,” coupled with his intense hostility to the Church’s sale of indulgences on the basis of a promise: buyers will stay out of purgatory.

This leaves two unanswered questions. What: could the Reformation have taken place solely on the basis of his letter to the Archbishop? Was there also a nailing of the 95 theses on the church door? Historians are divided, perhaps permanently. A lesser question: were these printed or hand- written? Then there is how: could the Reformation have taken place without the printing press? Historians are divided, but not equally. Most historians say “no.” I am one of them.

The historian also asks: “Why did something happen when it did and where it did?” He looks for continuity. Then he looks for discontinuity. Then he tries to figure out why the discontinuity altered the continuity. No better case study exists in Western history than Luther and the Reformation. It began as a written appeal for mild Church reform. It produced an ecclesiastical, social, and political revolution. Luther lived to see it.

Theologically, there were precursors to Luther. John Wycliff in England trained laymen to preach in the vernacular to the common people in the streets. He believed in salvation by faith. He denied transubstantiation. Like Luther, he was a university professor. He died in 1384. His work was extended by preachers called the Lollards. The Czech priest Jan Hus was one of them. He was a lot like Luther. He was a scholar, holding a doctorate. He taught at the leading Czech university. Hus argued for the Bible’s authority over the Church’s authority. He argued against

5 the sale of indulgences. He was burned at the stake in 1415. Luther admitted that he agreed with much of Hus’ theology in 1520. He wrote: “I have taught and held all the teachings of Jan Hus, but thus far did I not know it . . . In short, we are all Hussites and did not know it.”

There was no Reformation until 1521. Continuity prevailed.

The printing press had already revolutionized book production and distribution by 1517. It had been in operation for 70 years by the time Luther sent his letter. The biggest user of printing was the Church: at least 40% of everything printed. It used printers to print indulgences. Fat theological treatises in Latin were a staple of the printing industry. They would take a year to print 300 copies of one. The Church paid in advance. It was a high-risk proposition to print large books in Latin for retail sales.

There was no Reformation. Continuity prevailed.

But there was a build-up of discontent. Like compound growth, at some point escalating discontent becomes exponential.

There was a growing loss of faith. That had begun during the Black Death of 1348–50, when a third of Europe died, and up to half in cities, where Church leaders and intellectuals lived: the elite. There was a reaction against the Church. God had failed them, they believed. Priests had fled the cities to escape the plague, leaving few to perform the last rites. The Church never reclaimed the respect it had enjoyed before the plague. The plague had helped Wycliffe. He preached in the immediate aftermath of the plague. He and his lay ministers found ready listeners.

After 1350, humanism began to spread. It was in full flower in 1517. It was partly rational and partly occult. It mimicked Greece and Rome, which were partly rational and partly occult. Most humanists stayed in the Church. They did not want to deal with the Inquisition. But they were not convinced of either the divine authority of Church tradition or the divine authority of the Bible. They were becoming skeptical. They did not object to a weaker Church.

There was no Reformation. Continuity prevailed.

In Hus’s day, there was no syphilis. There was in Luther’s day. Columbus’s crew brought it back from the Caribbean. (http://bit.ly/ColumbusPlague) By 1510, almost everyone who was literate knew exactly how it was transmitted. But the family structure among the Renaissance elite was broken. Adultery was widespread. The disease spread like the plague it was. Men’s confidence was under assault from unseen forces.

The time was ripe in 1520.

6 LUTHER AND PRICE COMPETITION

Luther directed an ecclesiastical revolution. His ideas produced a political revolution. He personally produced a communications revolution. The whole world took part in the aftermath of his communications revolution.

The communications revolution, meaning discontinuity, was not the product of technology. The technology was two generations old in 1517. The difference was marketing.

The law of demand in economic theory is this: “When the price falls, more is demanded.” This law is at the core of economic theory. If this is not true, then incentives do not work. That would destroy both economic predictability and economic theory.

An implication of this law is this: “If you want to penetrate a new market, lower the selling price.” The more you lower it below the competition, the faster you will penetrate it. There are two representative models of this marketing strategy in the history of the West: Luther and Henry Ford. But Luther is the better model.

He had a technology at hand: the printing press. This technology had been changing the West, beginning in the 1440s. It lowered the cost of producing materials to read. But there was another factor at work: demand. This demand required the ability to read. This skill had not been worth the time and trouble to master for most of man’s history. That was because the cost of buying books was so high.

Printing was dominated by church and state. There were legal restrictions on what could be printed. But far more important was the fact church and state paid in advance. The printers took fewer risks because of this. They were less entrepreneurial than the became in the . That change was due to Luther, and no one else.

Before Luther, printers had printed indulgences and Papal bulls. They printed fat, expensive theology books in Latin. One of these books could take almost a year to produce, and sales might be at best 300. The buyers were scattered all over Europe. Few were local.

All this changed, beginning in March 1518. That was because Luther decided to write in German. He believed that he must persuade common people, not just theologians. He targeted the man in the street. The man in the street need not be literate. Someone could read to him. But this would be limited to pamphlets. Two large sheets printed on both sides and folded could produce an 16- page book of 1,500 words. It could be read aloud in less than 15 minutes.

A printer could typeset the text and print an edition of several hundred copies in four days. He could sell all of them locally in a week. This changed the economics of printing. It became possible for a printer to take the risk of printing. He did not have to get paid in advance. There were immediate buyers.

7 He paid nothing for written copy. There were no copyright laws. He could take a pamphlet or book by Luther, copy it word for word, and sell it. It was instant money. All he had to do was keep the price low.

Luther discovered this in April 1518 with the publication of his 1,500-word pamphlet, Sermon on Indulgences and Grace. By the end of the year, it had sold 14 reprints with print runs of at least 1,000 copies. Nothing like this had ever happened. If you were a printer, this was a license to print money.

Luther kept writing new materials. By the end of 1520, he had written 45 books and pamphlets on a wide range of topics. This was unique in history. There was seemingly insatiable demand for his materials, and he met this demand.

It helped that his first book was on a pocketbook issue: the sale of indulgences. Religion and money were fused in one pamphlet: “Save money. Live better eternally.” That was a potent combination, or witches’ brew if you were the Pope. There was also the fact that he had become a scandal all over Europe by the spring of 1518. There is nothing better than a scandal to sell books. That was a moment of truth in the publishing world. Printers learned this lesson early.

Local ministers began reading these books. It is a well-known fact that many ministers are ready and willing to preach sermons written by someone else. They began to preach their own versions of Luther’s sermons. But there was a catch. Once you start doing this, you need a constant supply of new sermons. Even Luther could not keep up the pace. So, priests began writing their own sermons. When they quoted Luther, their parishioners went out and bought the pamphlet if they could read. This increased demand.

In 1521, he was condemned at the Diet of Worms. There was a possibility that Leo X and Charles V would imitate the Pope who gave Hus safe passage to appear to present his case at the Council of Constance. The Emperor had him arrested as soon as he arrived, and then burned him at the stake. As Luther returned to Wittenberg, he was taken by the agents of the Elector of Saxony to Frederick’s nearly empty Wartburg castle. This looked like a kidnapping. He stayed for ten months.

There, Luther translated the New Testament into German. He used Erasmus’ Greek New Testament. It took him 11 weeks. It was published in 1522. This became the first best-seller in history. It sold 5,000 copies in the first two months. It literally shaped the . It created a national language. No longer would regional dialects separate . He wrote in the way Germans spoke—the vernacular. Here is one assessment.

It was the first time a mass medium had ever penetrated everyday life. Everyone read Luther's new Bible or listened to it being read. Its phrasing became the people's phrasing, its speech patterns their speech patterns. So universal was its appeal, and so thoroughly did it embrace the entire range of the German tongue,

8 that it formed a linguistic rallying point for the formation of the modern German language. It helped formally restructure German literature and the German performing arts. (http://bit.ly/LutherLanguage)

Catholic theologians did not match him for either style or output. They still wrote in Latin. They did not understand the new market. They wrote long refutations of his ideas. He wrote 16-page rebuttals.

In 1520, 275 editions of Luther’s works were in print. In 1523, it was 390. Prof. Mark Edwards, a Luther scholar, says that the number of printed copies of Protestant books in the early 1520's was six million copies. (http://bit.ly/EdwardsBooks) Germany had about 8 million people. The number of households in Germany was lower. This many books was a huge market penetration. This mass market for books did not exist in 1517. This indicates widespread literacy. The printing press had done this, 1440–1517. When the price falls, more is demanded. The falling price of printed materials drove up the economic return on literacy.

The Church could not control the press in Northern Europe. The volume of Protestant materials kept growing rapidly. The Church could not put the genie back in the bottle.

The best book on Luther and the printing press is by Andrew Pettegree: Brand Luther (2015). There is an excellent interview with him here: http://bit.ly/PettegreeInterview

CONCLUSION

The Reformation came out of almost nowhere: Wittenberg. One man was the source: Luther. In 1517, he was a faithful Catholic reformer. By the following spring, he was openly moving towards heresy. By 1519, he had made the break mentally. By 1521, the Reformation had begun.

Here is the problem: identifying what Lenin called the transmission belt. It was not the letter to the Archbishop that led to vast public support. It was not the posting of the 95 theses on the church’s door. That may not have happened. Luther sent copies to friends. The document was not translated into German and printed in Germany until early 1518. This delay turned out to be irrelevant. With the publication of his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace in April 1518, which he wrote in German, the second phase of the Reformation began. It moved from reform to revolution after 1521.

Luther reached the masses. No one had ever done this before. No private citizen would ever again have this degree of monopoly influence over the mass media. The Economist reports:

Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6m–7m pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the

9 Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther's.

http://bit.ly/LutherBooks1526

Luther blindsided the ’s hierarchy in April 1518. The theologians did not see the threat until it was too late. The disciplinary bureaucracy also waited too long. They did not understand the mass-market power of the printing press. Neither did Luther in 1517. By April of the following year, he did. He never looked back.

When the price falls, more is demanded.

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