This is part 2 of a critique of Richard Wackrow’s book, A Beginner’s Guide to Blasphemy.
History is often much harder and more complicated than many want to give it credit for. In the opening to chapter 2, Wackrow is not immune to this. The historical inaccuracies he portrays though are forgivable as they are common legends.
Being a historian, I really wanted to tackle some of these and give them the attention they deserve.
Starting off, Wackrow makes the common mistake of placing Martin Luther as the father of the Protestant Reformation, or the person who orchestrated it. As is often the case, it’s much more complicated.
Looking back, as historians, there is a need to place a date on the beginning of movements. For the Reformation, it is generally placed on October 31, 1517, with Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Legend has it that he nailed them to the door of a church.
More likely, Luther may have pasted his work to the door, as was common at that time, or, as he never mentions it, it may just be a story fabricated decades later. However, the story gives historians a clear date to begin with, but it gets much more complicated.
Luther, himself, was building upon the work of many who came before him. While he may have officially, and unintentionally, kicked off the German Reformation, other reformers were working throughout Europe. John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli both led reformation movements that were distinct from the work Luther was doing. All of these reformers were standing on the shoulders of people like John Wycliffe, who was working nearly two centuries beforehand.
What Luther really succeeded in doing was codifying a major issue many had with the church. And he did this largely by the use of the printing press. He was at the right place and the right time. But contrary to what Wackrow states, Luther wasn’t attempting to dismantle major tenets or practices of the Roman Catholic Church.
Instead, Luther really set his sights on one thing, the selling of indulgences. This becomes clearer when we consider the other title of his work, the Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences. The work itself was set up as propositions to be debated, and as Luther said, didn’t necessarily represent his views. He would later on clarify his view in the Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences.
Luther would claim that his view accorded with that of the Pope. For Luther, the Theses did not signify a divergence with the Catholic Church. That breaking would come later, after things began heating up.
Now, a point must be clarified. While Luther had an issue with the sale of indulgences, the matter of indulgences wasn’t something he was opposed to. His issue was the abuse that occurred within that system. Of particular concern to Luther were the teachings of Johann Tetzel, an indulgence preacher.
Luther’s own parishioners, after purchasing indulgences from Tetzel, would inform Luther that they no longer needed to repent and change their lives in order to be forgiven. For Luther, this was unacceptable, and morally unsound. Repentance was important for Luther, and he believed that an indulgence was worthless unless the receiver was already repentant.
For his part, Luther did not intend to set off a reformation or anything of the like. Luther’s intent was to hold a debate on the work, as he was privileged to do, holding a doctorate and being a professor of moral theology. In the heading of his work, he invited interested scholars to participate in the discourse.
Luther had no idea what he was setting off and said that if he had known where it would have led, he might not have begun the work. It wouldn’t be until he received a summons to Rome and sat down to write his Explanations that he realized the implications of his former work.
It was the controversy that later formed, in part through a pamphlet war with Tetzel, that propelled Luther into the leadership position he would ultimately hold. But it was never his intention to create the controversy in the first place. He just happened to be a spark in a tinder box.
Moving on to the second point, Luther did translate the Bible into German. However, he wasn’t the first one to do so. The Bible had a long history of being translated into the German language. The first known translation into a Germanic version was a fourth-century Gothic translation by Wulfila. This would prove to be an influential version, translated primarily from Greek, as it helped establish much of the Germanic Christian vocabulary used even today.
Before Luther was even born, the printed Bible in the German language would also be produced. One of the earliest was the Mentel Bible, by Johannes Mentelin, which would be reprinted at least 13 times. By the time of Luther’s Bible, 18 complete German translations would exist, along with over 100 other partial translations.
What made Luther’s Bible special, and the most influential of these translations, was that it was translated primarily from the Hebrew and Greek, and not from the Latin Vulgate. This translation would have a massive impact on the development of the German language.
While Luther’s version would have a large influence later on, many other Bible translations had already made the work accessible to those who could read, which still was a small portion of society. What really made a big difference was the printing press, which brought the cost of a book down to the point that it became affordable to a larger audience.
The final historic fact of Luther that Wackrow misses is about Luther’s marriage. Luther would marry a nun he helped free, Katharina von Bora. The claim Wackrow makes is that this marriage “set the stage for the marriage of the Protestant clergy in general.” However, the marriage of the clergy has a very long tradition.
Up until the 10th century, priests were often married, as were Bishops. It wasn’t until the Second Lateran Council, in 1139, that the Catholic Church made marriages by priests invalid.
On June 13, 1525, after he was excommunicated, Luther married Katharina, but he wouldn’t be the first German Protestant to do so. Justus Jonas, for example, was among those priests and former members of a religious order who married.
Luther’s marriage would be taken as a sign of approval for clergy marrying, but this was only so among those who made up the Lutheran tradition. In other places, such as England, Anglican priests weren’t able to marry until the passage of the Clergy Marriage Act of 1548.
None of this is meant to downplay the importance of Luther, but rather to put him in context. He played a major role in the German Reformation, but there were other branches of the Reformation that were also in play.
It isn’t just with Reformation history that Wackrow gets the history wrong though. Closing up his first section of chapter 2, he briefly delves into the Enlightenment and really describes it in terms of secularism, when people rejected religion and tradition for logic and reason. This is a common misconception about the Enlightenment period.
Individuals often look to the 18th-century Enlightenment almost in a mystical fashion. Part of the issue is that we do so from a narrow Western perspective. For the most part, we are looking at just Europe, and within Europe, the dating of the Enlightenment greatly changes, with a start date ranging from 1637 to 1715.
It is true, that in many regards, there was a radical shift in fields such as politics, science, and philosophy. But this shift also occurred within religion, and each field affected the others. There was a breakaway from the system of organized religion that once was, with a push towards the separation of church and state. However, such a push was for the benefit of both.
While there was a push towards reason, this didn’t necessarily lead to secularism. Within religious scholarship, a more critical approach emerged, but it also led to major pushback with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the early 20th century.
But this brings us to one of the major contentions: was the Enlightenment part of our path towards progress, or is the idea of progress, as if it were our natural state, simply wrong? Wackrow seems to imply that the Enlightenment was progress forward towards secularism.
This is one of the core beliefs of the Enlightenment mythology that has arisen. Yet when we look at history, we see a society, a civilization that is overtly religious, that gave rise to the Scientific Revolution, to the Age of Reason, to the Industrial Revolution. The implication that religion holds us back simply doesn’t line up with historical reality.
If the Enlightenment was a march towards reason, then we have to acknowledge that religion, and in particular Christianity, was a sustainer of this march. We must accept that it wasn’t a straightforward march towards reason. While David Hume would produce some great work, he also questioned whether our knowledge could even be rationally justified, if we could truly know anything in the first place, in direct contradiction of human reason.
The history in these cases is much more complicated than Wackrow presents.