Why Was The Reform Appealing?

Why did this movement for religious reform succeed where others had failed? In assessing the popularity of this “evangelical movement,” we have to bear in mind that people heard what they wanted or needed to hear…and what people wanted to hear was not always the same as the message Luther and the other reformers thought they were conveying.

A. The Appeal to Intellectuals and Clergy

Initially, the new teachings gained an influential following among intellectuals, most of them church people.  Luther was a Catholic priest, and so were nearly all of his followers, at first.  In its initial phases, the Reformation was a movement by, of, and for clerics. Dozens of talented, intelligent, and successful priests and scholars embraced Luther’s ideas very quickly: never before had so many members of the Catholic clergy defected from orthodoxy, and that fact marked the Reformation off from all of its predecessors.

Why? It is difficult to specify any single reason;

• No doubt, some intellectuals were drawn to reform for the same reasons that Luther himself had been: Luther had been tormented about sin and the burden of penance; it is also clear that he found his doctrine of faith totally liberating.
• Mystics may have been drawn by Luther’s irrationalism: religious teachings that emphasized a mystical relationship between God and human beings were quite popular in northern Europe in the fifteenth century;
• Many humanists may have been attracted by the fact that Luther and Zwingli used the critical tools of humanist scholarship to analyze the Bible and the writings of the early Church theologians.
• Many intellectuals may have been attracted by the promise of “normalization”: the reformers advocated the notion that priests should marry and become part of the their communities.
• There was a generational element, too: many intellectuals who joined the movement were as young or even younger than Luther and Zwingli, an internationally connected intellectual elite who thought of themselves as a group with common goals and common enemies.

Whatever the reason, Luther’s appeal to an ecclesiastical audience provided him with a kind of international “fifth column,” at least during the brief period before papal condemnation in 1520; as Luther himself put it in 1522,

I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s word; otherwise I did nothing.  And while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my…the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses on it.  I did nothing; the Word did everything.  Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany…but what would it have been? Mere fool’s play.  I did nothing; I  let the Word do its work.

B. The Appeal to Urban Audiences: Reformation and 'Sacral Community'
By comparison to intellectuals, lay people—even educated ones—were slower to take up the new teachings; thus the poet Ulrich von Hutten initially regarded the ‘Luther Affair’ as row among theologians and nothing more. Still, one thing that stands out about the Reformation is that it was an urban event—a movement that took place first and foremost in the cities of northern Europe, among city folk. Why?

• Perhaps part of the answer is that cities possessed the concentration of people, the literary awareness, and the political sophistication to transform the ideas of preachers into a mass movement. It was simply easier for urban tradesmen (for example) to learn about Reformation, become enthusiastic about it, and then press reform measures on the city fathers—who after all only lived a few blocks away.

1) The cities of Germany, especially, had a tradition of secular civic involvement in the regulation of religious life that made them unusually receptive to the ideas of Reformation: cities had long been perceived as sacred communities—communities that were not simply political but were thought to have an important role to play in religious life, too.

• For them, preserving the political rights and freedoms of their cities was a matter of considerable religious importance.

• Either way, city folk perceived a threat to their freedoms and to their “sacred communities”: these fears resonated especially with the urban “middle classes”—especially artisans—who proved particularly receptive to the Protestant message.

• On balance, then, the Reformation did well in the cities because certain reformers reaffirmed the values of “sacred community,” especially the idea that cities should have authority over religious matters and play a role in building the Kingdom of God on earth.

C. The Appeal to Rural Folk: A "Revolution of the Common Man"?
What about the great mass of the population—the 90% who lived in the countryside of Europe, in villages and hamlets, and who made ends meet from agriculture? Did the Reformation appeal to them? It is here, perhaps, that we must be especially cautious: rural people, just like city folk, often heard what they wanted to hear, and what they wanted to hear was not always the same thing as what Luther, Zwingli, and the other reformers intended.

At the beginning of the term, we saw that late medieval people had what one historian called “an immense appetite for the divine”; what made this religiosity so vibrant was that Christianity was essentially about local community.

• People thought about “sin” primarily in social terms; the “deadly” sins—especially pride, envy, anger—were all about human interaction in community; the were the worst sins because they destroyed community.
• Sin and salvation were not individualistic: If you sinned against someone else, you also sinned against that persons kin and relatives; to make up for the sin—penance—meant restoring relations between one kin-group and another.

This sense of community extended beyond death to link the living and the dead: Sin, salvation, the main rituals of religious practice were collective affairs.

1) Before the Reformation, the religious activism of rural people took a variety of practical forms: one expression was the pious fraternity, which I have mentioned before; pious fraternities could be found everywhere, from the biggest towns to the smallest village.

• Another practical form of this activism was a widespread but diffuse movement of rural people to take control of their own parishes: Increasingly, people demanded the right to elect their own priests; increasingly, villages were prepared to “put their money where their mouth was,” so to speak, by paying the salaries of parish priests and chaplains in return for the right to hire and fire.

• In some parts of Germany and Switzerland, perhaps as many as one third of the rural priesthood was being paid out of local funds by 1500;
• This movement was aimed directly at many of the abuses that had been criticized during the “Age of Councils,” such as pluralism--the fact that one cleric could be priest in several parishes at once--and absenteeism--the fact that priests were so often absent from the posts, and hired poorly educated substitutes to do their work for them; and so on.

• Sometimes religious and political assertiveness united—as in the year 1476, when a popular, unauthorized pilgrimage to the village of Niklashausen transformed in to a popular uprising against the Church and its abuses.
• This political movement was aimed at a series of perceived social and political abuses—the introduction of Roman Law, for example, was perceived to threaten local custom.
• But the greatest complaint was against serfdom—the idea that a lord could actually own the body of another human being.

• The new teachings seemed to be saying that the Bible supported them in their grievances against the corruption of the church.
• The new teachings seemed to be saying that all believers should have an equal say in religious affairs;
• The new teachings seemed to be saying that all believers were equal in the sight of God, and that no man could therefore own another; and so on.

• This was a change of revolutionary dimensions: the Reformation—as rural people perceived it—had created a language of social protest that anyone could speak.
• The Peasants’ War of 1525 was arguably the greatest social upheaval in European history prior to the French Revolution in 1789.

• But in general, the reformers rejected peasant movement and its demands; Luther, in particular, condemned the rebels in the harshest terms, and even encouraged princes to slaughter them without mercy.
• On balance, then, the alliance (if there ever was one) between rural communes and the Reformation never took hold, soon turned to hostility.
• Some have argued that this explains the absence of rural people from the reform “coalition”: the experience of 1525 was one of betrayal, and as a result, the attractions of Reformation receded almost as quickly as it had emerged.