Martin Luther and the Reformation in Historical Thought, 1517–2017

Abstract

404 Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Martin Luther and the Reformation in Historical Thought, 1517–2017 C Scott Dixon On 10 November 1837, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Berlin, gave a talk entitled ‘Proof, that Dr Martin Luther never existed’. As a specialist in medieval German sagas, von der Hagen used all of his considerable learning to convince his audience that there were too many historico-mythical topoi in Luther’s life to take him seriously as a real historical figure. Like a Sun God or an Emperor of the Moon, he claimed, Luther belonged to the realm of myth. To make his point, von der Hagen reviewed Luther’s life as if he were deconstructing a medieval saga. A few examples will give something of the sense. Von der Hagen explained how Luther’s early youth was spent in the town of Eisleben, which, by combining ice (Eis in German), the symbol of death, with the condition of life (Leben), recalls the Nordic myth of creation, wherein the river of life flows out of the ice of ages melted by heat and light. Just like the great Germanic hero Siegfried, Luther was a dragon slayer, overcoming his enemies, the Pope and the Catholic Emperor, at Worms. Indeed, he even married a virgin, Katharina von Bora, whose name was derived from the word Katharener, that is, ‘the pure Cathars’, which reveals that his bride was in fact no other person than the Gnostic Maria once worshipped by the heretical sect of the same name. Von der Hagen continued in this key until he wrapped up his talk with the claim that Luther was just as unlikely to have died as he was to have been born. He is merely an idea and an idol, a myth and a fairytale used to lend credence to the faith.1 In truth, von der Hagen’s paper was just an ‘occasional joke’, staged for the Luther-Schiller Festmahl, a warm-up for the evening meal. For the purposes of this paper, however, I would like to take it seriously, for, however far-fetched, it has lessons for the study of the historical Luther and of the Reformation. For von der Hagen was not far from the truth in suggesting that the writing of Reformation history has often been an exercise in mythology, even if it has not been imagined in such extreme terms. From the very C Scott Dixon Studies • volume 106 • number 424 405 beginning of the writing of its history, the Reformation has been subject to the hopes, dreams and distortions of its historians. The contexts in which these historians operated have changed, just as the resultant histories of the Reformation have changed, but there has been a consistent belief from day one that Luther’s posting of the ninety-five theses and the subsequent process of religious reformation transformed the world radically from what it had been ‘once upon a time’. In what follows I would like to offer a brief survey of these changing histories, beginning with the age of Reformation itself and continuing up to the present day. My purpose is to shed some light on how different people at different times have perceived the same historical event (or process) and spoke about it in different ways. The earliest histories The first histories of Martin Luther and the Reformation, those written during theconfessionalage(1517–1648),belongtothegenreofsacralorconfessional history. Their purpose was not to capture or uncover objective truths about the past, but to explain, and ultimately to legitimate, the reasons for the break from Rome. They were studies in theological rather than historical truth. In the main, two approaches predominated. The first was devised by Luther’s Wittenberg colleague Philipp Melanchthon, who integrated the history of the early Reformation into the broader providential framework of the Christian past. He did this by adopting the fourfold Danielic scheme of universal history (in which history progresses through four empires: Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman) and combining it with the threefold scheme for church history associated with the prophet Elias (in which history is ordered before the Law, under the Law, after the Law). Melanchthon then...