An Analysis of The Rest is History's Episodes on Martin Luther - Part One

In which I discuss episodes 1-3

Apr 01, 2024

When I first heard that The Rest is History podcast would be doing a series of episodes on Martin Luther, I was filled with a mix of excitement and trepidation.

On the one hand, I have been a fan of The Rest is History from the beginning, having listened to nearly every episode and joined the club for paid subscribers within days of its launch. Through my interactions with hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland on Twitter and later on the club’s Discord server, I developed what could at least be called an acquaintance if not an actual friendship with them. I have met them in person on two occasions, having attended live shows and a party for club members. Moreover, I have gotten to know the entire Rest is History team. Some friends and I have been able to chat with them all on multiple occasions over video connection. There have been birthday greetings exchanged in both directions, creative gifts, and a lot of general good feeling.

On the other hand, I have a keen interest in the history of the Reformation after first being introduced to Luther’s theology back in 2015. I have written about him and his books on many occasions and currently partner with an organization called 1517 that is dedicated to promoting his understanding of the gospel. Perhaps most importantly, I am the author of two forthcoming novels in which Luther, his colleague Philip Melanchthon, and their frenemy Erasmus of Rotterdam are the main characters.

I am therefore not a neutral observer when it comes to either The Rest is History or Martin Luther. Both have played significant roles in my life. Tom and Dom encouraged me at a time when I was contemplating walking away from writing. They helped me regain my love of history and the confidence to write my Reformation novels. But it is also true that Luther and other Reformation personalities are dear to my heart, having affected the way I see God and myself.

How wonderful then to know that the illustrious hosts of my favorite podcast would be tackling a subject I am passionate about! But at the same time, how fear inducing! I knew Tom Holland was not likely to share all my opinions about Luther. I could most certainly forgive him for that. What concerned me more is the fact that so many popular historians tend to get Luther wrong, failing to grasp the true nature of his beliefs or his role in history.

I do consider Tom a cut above most popular historians. I would never have spent so many hours listening to him if I did not respect him. It was not my lack of love for our illustrious host, but rather its abundance that was the source of my anxiety, much like when two people who are both friends with you but have never met each other finally come face-to-face. Will they like each other? Will they misunderstand one another?

Here then follows the first part of my reaction to the Martin Luther episodes on The Rest is History. I will cover episodes 1-3 today and episodes 4-5 next week.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODES ON SPOTIFY OR APPLE.

Episodes 1-2

These episodes focused on the factors that helped spark the Reformation, as well as Luther’s early life and familial background. Overall, I found them well researched, factually accurate, and engagingly presented. Tom did well to focus on some of the “macro factors” that led to the Reformation, such as the centralization of political power in Europe, the rise in literacy caused by Gutenberg’s printing press, and proto-reform movements led by John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. He also noted the unique political factors within the Holy Roman Empire, of which Luther’s Germany was a part. The threat of invasion by the Ottoman Turks played a key role in the unfolding drama, and Tom was right to highlight it.

Tom also looked at “micro factors”: the circumstances of Luther’s own personal life. Here he naturally spent significant time discussing Luther’s relationship with his father, Hans Ludher. (Yes, that was the original family name.) This has been much analyzed by Luther scholars. I agree with Tom that the role of Luther’s father was key, for Luther himself places his father at the center of the crucial events surrounding his entrance into monasticism.

However, I also think it is possible to put too much emphasis on the Hans/Martin relationship as a causal factor for a couple reasons. First, Luther did not understand his doctrinal revolution as some kind of response to his father’s tyranny, and while people can certainly deceive themselves, the man’s own opinion is worth something.

Second, Luther’s relationship with his father seems to have been better than modern scholars tend to suggest. Our primary source of information regarding the relationship is Luther’s own recollections. He mentions fights with Hans and even the occasional beating, yes, but this was not out of the ordinary for the time period. Luther’s letters to his father, such as the dedication to his work On Monastic Vows and a note sent around the time of his father’s death, reveal that he greatly respected and loved the man who sired him. If we take Luther’s word for it as to their antagonism, we should also take his word for it about the positive aspects of their relationship.

To boil Luther’s psychology down to “daddy issues” and nothing else is therefore overly simplistic, but there is undoubtedly something to the comparison between Luther’s earthly father and his heavenly Father. “How can I know I have the love and approval of my father?” is a question as old as time. Earthly fathers are not a perfect representation of God, but their rejection and hostility can certainly influence how their children see the divine. So, Tom was right to spend significant time here.

Tom did not generally address the debates within medieval theology and philosophy that directly impacted the Reformation. You could make the argument (and some have) that the divide between the camp of Thomas Aquinas, who taught a realist understanding of metaphysics, and William of Ockham, who taught a nominalist understanding, inevitably led to the Reformation and helped to define its course. Luther came into contact with a certain strand of the nominalist school during his time at the University of Erfurt, and it was this that he reacted against in the early years of the Reformation. Discussion of metaphysics is not ideal for a podcast aimed at a general audience, so I am not surprised that Tom skipped it. Nevertheless, you cannot properly understand the Reformation without doing a deep dive into the medieval scholastic movement.

Overall, two great episodes with few things worth quibbling over.

Episode 3

This was the episode that really began to dissect Luther’s Reformation theology. It was also where I began to notice bigger issues in how Tom was presenting the material. I believe this is due to two factors which I will mention here.

First, there is the eternal debate: Was Luther the last medieval man or the first modern man? Tom seemed to go for the latter answer, portraying the Reformation as a clean break from the past in which individual conscience and personal freedom were central. There is certainly truth in this portrayal. Luther’s statement at the Diet of Worms that it is dangerous to go against conscience is rightly seen as an important point in the development of the modern Western person’s sense of self. Luther did employ the tools of the new humanist movement and excel at using novel technologies. He was in many ways a modern man.

But Luther was also a profoundly medieval man, a fact that is often forgotten. His university education was not in the new humanist vein but proceeded according to standard late medieval methods. He often used scholastic tools, particularly in the first years of the Reformation. His worldview and sense of his place in the cosmos was also very medieval. By contrast, his later opponent Erasmus of Rotterdam, an older man, was more modern in his outlook. I believe Tom mostly misses Luther’s connection to the medieval world in which he was born and trained.

Second, there is the eternal issue of “in group” versus “out group” accounts. In the field of Luther studies, there is an in group of scholars who are often trained at seminaries and share many of Luther’s doctrinal opinions. They spend most of their time reading Luther’s theological treatises and sermons rather than straining over the details of his life events. They also see Luther as a hero because they agree with him on the major issues.

Then there is the “out group” of scholars who do not agree with Luther’s theology and are not even primarily interested in it. They engage most with the biographical details and attempt to establish Luther’s place in the context of his historical moment. They are not simply interested in how he influenced theological development, but how he changed the secular sphere.

Tom seems to have relied mostly on “out group” books for his research. This is not surprising, as he often goes to the “out group” when dealing with religious subjects to maintain a sense of balance and fairness. I do not mean to imply that he never reads anything from the “in group,” but I did not catch him mentioning any works by, say, Robert Kolb or Timothy Wengert here in the U.S., or any of the fine Lutheran scholars in Europe. The sources Tom mentioned were not bad at all: they simply did not focus as much on the finer details of Luther’s theology. I believe this is the reason for some of the errors we will see.

Here now follows a breakdown of my comments with time marks and quotations to help you pair with the episode. (Note that if you watch the videos of these episodes on YouTube, the time markings may not coincide.)

7 minutes

Dom: “Is he [Luther] thinking he’s getting back to the early Christians?”
Tom: “Yes.”
Dom: “Like the Acts of the Apostles kind of Christians?”
Tom: “Yeah, and so he’s starting to construct an understanding of Christian history which is radically opposed to the traditional one. So he is essentially saying that you have the early church, and then it all goes wrong.”

Actually, Luther did not want to restore the earliest decades of the Church: that was the opinion of radical Reformers like the Anabaptists. Luther saw an important role for historic theology and tradition in church life. He was passionate about the catholicity (universal nature) of the church and never sought to divide it. The split was, for him, an unhappy result of attempting to defend what he felt was the historic, orthodox view of salvation taught by Saint Augustine of Hippo.

While Luther did hold to sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”), this concept is often misunderstood. It does not mean there is no role for tradition or the opinions of theologians throughout the centuries, nor does it mean you throw everything out and start over like the early, primitive church. It simply means that Scripture is the only perfect revelation of God and thus the ultimate norming norm for Christians. Church councils can err, but the Word of God never will. Again, that does not mean that councils have no value. In fact, Luther maintained the importance of the ecumenical creeds and even revered many medieval theologians as helpful guides in the faith.

For more information along this line, I encourage you to read the works of Heiko Oberman (The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Luther: Man between God and the Devil) and the recent volume The Reformation as Renewal by Matthew Barrett.

15 minutes

Tom: (On scholars changing their names to Greek or Latin forms) “This is very much the kind of jape that professors at Wittenberg like to get up to.”

To be fair, it was the kind of thing humanists everywhere liked to get up to. The practice was in no way unique to the University of Wittenberg, nor was it a simple attempt at haughty self-promotion. Scholars of various sects all changed their names to Greek and Latin forms because they were enthusiastic about the ancient Greeks and Romans, not unlike Tom Holland himself! (Or should I say Thomas Hollandicus?)

18 minutes

Tom: “As opposed to the idea that reason, as mediated through Aristotle, enables you to understand God, Luther says that reason is actually a whore. He says that philosophy is a delusion.”

Luther’s opposition to the use of human reason is commonly overstated. He never opposed the utility or value of reason as such. He simply did not believe that human reason alone, unaided by the grace of God, could grasp the higher truths of God. A miracle of God’s Spirit was needed to regenerate a person, allowing them to see with eyes of faith what reason alone could not grasp. Luther taught that reason could, even without God’s special help, grasp things that are “below” a man: earthly and even lesser spiritual truths. But reason cannot grasp that which is “above” a man: the deep things of God. Luther was not even opposed to the teaching of Aristotle at the University of Wittenberg, but only to the incorporation of Aristotle into the theological curriculum given that Aristotle was not a Christian.

It would be helpful here to read Luther’s Theses for the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, where Luther outlines the difference between a theologian of glory (who relies on the perfection of his own reason) and a theologian of the cross.[1]

23 minutes

Tom: (On Luther’s evangelical breakthrough reading in Romans 1:17, “The righteous man shall live by faith.”) “Luther says this to mean the faith specifically that God loves you, and that it doesn’t matter if you’re lost in sin. Everyone is lost to sin. Humanity is so sinful that they can’t through their own agency obtain the forgiveness of God. But it doesn’t matter, because if God loves you, then you exist in a state of grace, and the state of grace is the feeling that you have that Christ is present in you, in your secret most heart. And the certainty of that grace in turn gives you what Luther calls the peace of conscience.”

This is the crucial point in Luther’s theology and thus a matter of great importance. Unfortunately, Tom’s explanation is closer to the understanding of a contemporary, generically evangelical Christian than it is to Luther’s explication of the gospel of Jesus Christ. When speaking of this breakthrough moment later in life, Luther did not attribute it to some discovery about the love of God, but to a new understanding of the righteousness of God.

“These words ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness of God’ struck my conscience as flashes of lightning, frightening me each time I heard them: if God is righteous, he punishes. But by the grace of God, as I once meditated upon these words in the tower: ‘The righteous shall live by faith’ and ‘the righteousness of God,’ there suddenly came into my mind the thought that if we as righteous are to live by faith, and if the righteousness of faith is to be for salvation to everyone who believes, then it is not our merit, but the mercy of God. Thus my soul was refreshed, for it was the righteousness of God by which we are justified and saved through Christ. These words became more pleasant to me. Through this word the Holy Spirit enlightened me in the tower.”[2]

Luther’s evangelical breakthrough was not simply the discovery that God loved him, which everyone in the Roman church would have acknowledged, but the realization that man is justified (counted righteous and thus approved of) by God based on the righteousness of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Justification is thus not a gradual, lifelong process, but a single decisive action by which God declares a sinner righteous for Christ’s sake. As the Augsburg Confession, an official statement of Lutheran doctrine, puts it, “[Lutherans] teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ’s sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ’s sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight.”[3]

Tom’s explanation was not wholly wrong. Luther’s belief that he was justified before God did make him feel that God loved him. Likewise, Luther did conclude that all persons are steeped in sin, incapable of saving themselves. But Tom did not explain Luther’s belief that salvation comes to a person from the outside, by a miracle of God through which the person is justified.

The righteousness of God which justifies a person is not merely a feeling. Luther never based certainty of salvation on feelings. God’s righteousness is real and objective such that it can be credited to a person’s spiritual account. It is not a shifting state of being, but an eternal status. This is the gospel: the good news for which Luther was prepared to sacrifice his life and split from Rome.

26 minutes

Tom: “But of course, it [Luther’ s understanding of the gospel] kind of turns on its head the notion that everyone in Christendom is a Christian, because what Luther is saying basically is that you have to have this feeling that God loves you, that you’ve been born again, that you’ve entered the gates of paradise, or you’re not really a Christian.”
Dom: “Yeah.”
Tom: “So the implication in turn of that is that only a tiny elect really are going to be saved.”

Again, this seems closer to the belief of a modern evangelical person heavily influenced by pietism and the American Great Awakenings. Luther did not obsess over how a person felt. He preached that Christians would often feel wretched as they battled against the world, the flesh, and the devil. When Luther’s congregants told him they were doubting their election, he had some standard questions for them: “Are you baptized? Do you confess the creeds of the church?” Never would he ask them, “Do you feel like you are elect? Have you had a conversion experience?”

Luther didn’t set much store by conversion experiences. He did not even view his own evangelical breakthrough as a conversion to some kind of “true Christianity,” but as a realization of what he had possessed all along. Luther believed in baptismal regeneration, meaning that when a person is baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, their sins are really forgiven and they are really united to Christ. So, when the devil would torment Luther with thoughts of despair, he would simply say, “I’m baptized!”

In baptism, Luther held that God claims a person body and soul. It is no human work, but the work of God to bring a dead person to life. And if you have been brought to life in baptism, you are a Christian. Only if a person were to boldly reject the core principles of Christianity might Luther start to question if they were truly a Christian. He did not view those who remained in communion with Rome as hopelessly lost to hell, because while he did believe Rome was denying the gospel, he thought the grace of God could reach people even when the church was obscuring it.

See Luther’s explanation of Holy Baptism in his larger catechism, particularly starting in section 44.[4]

28 minutes

Tom: (Speaking of Luther’s new concept of the Christian life) “You can’t just coast. You have to work out what you believe. The job of believing becomes something that is personal to you. You can’t just leave it to the professional Christians.”
Dom: “Yeah. It’s about your truth, right? It’s about living your truth.”
Tom: “Yes, living your truth. This is where the idea of living your truth comes from. And of course, the reason why this breeds in the long run atheism and unbelief as well as belief in God is that you may just feel the strain is too great. You try to believe and you don’t.”

Whether or not Luther’s teachings lead in a straight historical line to modern atheism is a hotly debated topic. In reality, historical progressions are rarely that simple. History is a sequence of seemingly chaotic events on which we tend to impose order through these progressive arcs. This is not to say that no real progress occurs, but it is often two steps forward and one back, with every point on the trail presenting humanity with different possibilities.

When life presents a choice, do we branch this way of the other? Such decisions rarely have an inevitable result. There are always contingencies. One could argue (and some have) that it is medieval theologians who are fault for atheism, and Luther was attempting to correct their errors. One could also argue that material causes lie behind it all: the rise of modern nation-states, the futility of religious warfare that led to support for pluralism, the increase in literacy and public education, etc.

More to the point, the imperative to “live your truth” typically means something very different in our culture than what was taught by Luther. He had a thoroughly objective notion of truth based upon infallible divine revelation. When he said at the Diet of Worms “my conscience is captive to the Word of God,” he was not simply “speaking his truth.” He understood conscience differently than we do. (Read excerpts of Luther’s speech at the diet here.)

However, what Luther’s revolution did do, intentionally or unintentionally, was create more “live options” for people: paths they might conceivably take. For a great outline of this concept, see Charles Taylor’s seminal work, A Secular Age.

29 minutes

Dom: “The word I would use is individualism. You’re basically saying, are you not, that pre-Luther the idea of religious belief was collective? That you really ought to believe, and most people—what they personally thought didn’t occur to them, most people, because they just assumed you would go along with what everybody else said.”
Tom: “To most, yeah.”
Dom: “And it’s Luther who invents the idea or popularizes the idea that your relationship with the world of religion must be a personal one. So when people say, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I believe in God, but I have a personal spirituality or whatever,’ that’s Lutheran, because before him no one would have ever thought to say that. Is that right?”
Tom: “Yeah.”

No, I’m afraid that is not really Lutheran. Lutheranism is centered around the Word of God and the revelation of God, which all people must believe for salvation. It is not about each individual standing up for their own personally selected beliefs.

Christianity has always had individual and communal aspects. But Luther was by no means asserting the right of the individual to subscribe to novel beliefs. He absolutely thought he was recovering the original orthodox doctrine in line with God’s revelation. He believed it was the Roman church that had stepped into novelty, not himself.

It’s simply too extreme to imply that Luther invented individual belief. Luther had no concept of Christianity apart from the Church and the historic tradition, and as for human individuals, they had always had some sense of their own agency. They were not to a person viewing themselves as mere cogs in a machine. More to the point, we 21st century humans are not as free thinking as we like to believe: we too tend to gravitate toward the most societally acceptable options.

Certainly, the communal aspects of human existence were more important to people in Luther’s day than they are to us. They were not as individualistic by a long shot. But again, there are strongly communal aspects to Luther’s thought as well as the individualistic ones. That his actions helped pave the way for pluralism and extreme individualism was an undesired consequence from his point of view.

31 minutes

Tom places Luther’s evangelical breakthrough, when he comes to his new conclusions about the method of salvation, in early 1518, accepting the argument of historian Richard Rex. I personally believe this date is too early. If we look at Luther’s theses for the Heidelberg Disputation that year, they do not show Luther’s fully mature argument regarding the imputed righteousness of Christ. Luther says his tower experience (or toilet experience) occurred in 1519, and I see no reason to doubt him. It may have occurred shortly after the Leipzig Debate, at which Luther still seemed to be coming to grips with his new Reformation theology.

For an excellent argument in this regard which sifts through all the evidence, see Lowell C. Green’s book How Melanchthon Helped Luther Discover the Gospel.

44 minutes

Tom calls the famed debater Johann Eck “a former colleague” of Luther. I fact, the two men never worked at the same institution. At the time of their debate, Eck was based at the University of Ingolstadt and Luther at the University of Wittenberg. Perhaps Tom was confusing Eck with Andreas Karlstadt, who was indeed a colleague of Luther.

44 minutes

Tom makes a very common error in stating that Eck challenged Luther to a debate. In fact, it was Karlstadt whom Eck challenged, as Karlstadt had been making many public statements against Roman theology. However, in the lead-up to the debate, there was mutual criticism between Eck and Luther, leading to the eventual ruling that Luther could join the debate because his views were a chief source of the controversy. Luther only participated in the final portion of said debate.

44 minutes

Tom states that, “Luther accepts the invitation to come to Leipzig, but this turns out to be a bad mistake.” It is actually quite debatable whether Luther’s participation was a mistake. Eck was judged to be the winner by the universities of Leipzig and Paris, both conservative institutions ideologically opposed to Luther. Luther did acknowledge seemingly heretical beliefs at Leipzig, admitting that some of the views for which Jan Hus was condemned were biblically correct.

However, the debate served to push Luther in his Reformation direction, which in the long run he certainly viewed as a good thing. And as Tom notes, it was still a kind of propaganda victory for Luther regardless of the official result. Whether it was a mistake is therefore not a straightforward matter.

I know I have made several criticisms of this episode, but there were still some good points. The emphasis on Luther as a defender of the Germans against the snobbish Italians to the south was an important element in his rise to fame. There is definitely a kind of proto-nationalism at work among the Germans of the time, even though Germany was not a nation-state.

Unlike some listeners, I also appreciated the modern comparisons with people like Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson. Sure, these analogies are never perfect, but they help people to see how relevant the Reformation is to our world today. There are so many similarities with our own cultural moment, and I felt Tom (and Dom) captured this well with comments about Luther’s embrace of technology and subsequent disillusionment with the runaway radicalism of his early followers.

One final point: I would have liked to hear some mention of Erasmus throughout these episodes, since he was highly influential and presents a useful contrast to Luther. As I mentioned, Luther was not a fully committed humanist. He still had much of the medieval about him. Erasmus was a fully signed up modern man, and today’s secular humanists are as much the product of Erasmus’ work as Luther’s. In fact, I would argue that modern Progressivism owes much of its existence to Erasmus.

Come back next week for my analysis of episodes four and five, including Luther’s appearance at the Diet of Worms and the chaos of the Peasants’ War.

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[1] https://bookofconcord.org/other-resources/sources-and-context/heidelberg-disputation/

[2] Saarnivaara, Uuras. Luther Discovers the Gospel: New Light upon Luther’s Way from Medieval Catholicism to Evangelical Faith (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 2005), 37.

[3] www.bookofconcord.org/augsburg-confession/of-justification

[4] https://bookofconcord.org/large-catechism