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Martin Luther as inventor of freedom

Martin Luther as inventor of freedom

Last updated on: April 7, 2017 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Martin Luther as inventor of freedom 2017-04-06T21:06:32-04:00 Gene Veith

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Lutherans aren’t the only ones celebrating the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the 95 theses. Nor are Protestants or other Christians. Luther had a monumental impact on Western Civilization, so even the secularists are taking the opportunity to study Luther’s cultural contributions, from his impact on universal education to his pioneering use of information technology (the printing press).

Time Magazine has published an article reprinted from History Today by scholar Frank Furedi entitled How Martin Luther Helped Invent Individual Freedom.

Furedi argues that when Luther stood up against Pope and Emperor at the Diet of Wurms, making his stand on his individual conscience, he, in effect, invented personal freedom. His rejection of temporal and ecclesiastical authority would lead, Furedi says, to the undermining of all authority. Including, eventually, to the authority of God.

Read Furedi’s argument, quoted and linked after the jump. After which, I will explain what is wrong with what he says, while acknowledging that Luther did play an important role in the rise of freedom.

From Frank Furedi, Martin Luther Anniversary and the Idea of Individual Freedom | Time.com:

Did Luther really hurl the legendary words — “Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other” — at his accusers? In a sense it does not matter. Luther did not merely assert the authority of individual conscience to justify his own actions; he advanced a compelling case for the value of people being able to act in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. In so doing, his argument implicitly called into question the right of external authority to exercise power over the inner life of people.

The distinction that Luther drew about the nature of authority represented an important step in the conceptualization of a new limit on its exercise. His Treatise on Good Works (1520) asserted that “the power of the temporal authority, whether it does right or wrong, cannot harm the soul.” This idealization of the soul and its protected status from external authority encouraged European culture to devote greater interest in individual conscience and eventually to endow the self with moral authority.

In helping to free the inner person from the power of external authority, Luther’s theology contributed to the weakening of the very concept of external authority, including that of divine authority. The freeing of the inner person from the power of external authority restricted the exercise of absolute authority in all its forms.

Luther’s protection of the soul from secular imposition led to the paradox of inner freedom with external domination. Nevertheless, the coexistence of apparently contradictory relations to authority could not indefinitely survive without one giving way to another. The recognition of a sphere where political rule could not legitimately coerce the individual ultimately undermined the status of absolutist authority in all spheres of life. It soon became clear that once individuals are granted inner freedom they find it difficult to unquestioningly obey any form of authority.

When Luther suggested that he could not but obey his individual conscience, he provided the basis for an argument that was soon perceived as subversive. The very suggestion that individual conscience could oppose external authority would, in the years to come, crystallize into the affirmation of the ideal of individual freedom.

[Keep reading. . .]

First of all, Luther did not take his “stand” on personal conscience. In his Diet of Wurms speech, he said, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” He was not rejecting authority, but rather obeying a higher authority that the Pope was neglecting: the authority of the Bible. That is, the authority of God, whose will and whose actions are revealed in His Word.

Luther not only insisted that the Word of God should be the highest authority for the Church. By translating it into the vernacular and then opening schools to teach all Christians–women as well as men, peasants as well as Lords–to read it, he did strike a blow for freedom. Now ordinary citizens had access to a higher authority than their rulers. Thus, they had a basis for criticizing their superiors, their governments, and their cultures when they were in violation of God’s moral law.

Luther did not believe that human beings had freedom in the humanist sense. His debate with Erasmus over the issue resulted in some of Luther’s most profound theological writings: The Bondage of the Will. Luther didn’t deny that we have a will. Rather, he argued that the will is in bondage to sin. We will not freely choose God on our own. Rather, we will choose to sin. But sin enslaves us.

Today we tend to think of freedom in terms of our ability to do whatever we want, including the freedom to sin. But sin is not liberating. Sin brings bondage. Addicts to drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, violence, and other compulsions are not free. Neither are thieves, liars, adulterers, abusers, or other overt sinners. Our very personalities are bound up in our vices, and we cannot change them by ourselves any more than we can change who we are.

But Christ sets us free. In Luther’s other great theological work, The Freedom of the Christian, he explains the freedom that comes from the Gospel, from being justified not by our works or our choices but by faith in the saving work of Christ on the Cross. When we are justified by Christ, we are liberated from sin, from the Law, from Satan, from death, from fear.

But even here is a paradox. “A Christian is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” Freed by the Gospel, Christians freely take on a new bondage to the love and service, in vocation, of their neighbors.

That a Christian is “the most free lord of all, and subject to none” is indeed revolutionary. Think of the impact that statement would have, say, on a peasant, reading it in a time of rigorous social hierarchy. Indeed, some peasants did seize on such concepts, to the point of killing their masters and burning their estates. Luther condemned their uprising and urged the princes to squelch it, which they did. Furedi says that Luther upheld inner freedom, while still upholding outward obedience to external authorities, somewhat criticizing Luther for that. But he surely had a point. And the peasants would have done well to read the second part of the paradox.

But Luther was an insightful commenter on the nature of freedom. Not freedom in our sense of being unconstrained from authority. Far from it. Yet Luther’s notion of freedom–issuing from the Gospel–was certainly influential and formative. And it is a view of freedom that we need to recover today.

Painting of Luther at the Diet of Wurms by Anton von Werner [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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