In 2000, A&E listed the 100 most influential people of the millennium placing Martin Luther third behind Johannes Gutenberg and Sir Isaac Newton. He came in ahead of Alfred Einstein, George Washington, William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Thomas Edison, Adam Smith and many other familiar names. 1,000 years is a lot of time to come up with candidates, so why place the Protestant Reformation’s founder so high? Luther did much more than start a new religion. His restatement of natural law shaped the development of society, culture and politics throughout the Western Hemisphere with significant implications for us today.

The Beginnings of the Protestant Reformation

In the early 16th Century, Pope Leo X needed money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Fundraisers fanned out across Europe seeking donations in exchange for forgiveness of sins in the form of indulgences. In 1517, one papal agent, Johann Tetzel, travelled to Germany with a lively sales pitch: “as soon as the gold in the casket rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs.” An obscure monk named Martin Luther took offense and posted 95 Theses on door of Wittenberg Church protesting the use of indulgences.

The Catholic Church began pressuring Luther to recant. He refused and instead broadened his critiques. What began as a protest over indulgences erupted into a full-scale debate on the role of the Catholic Church in spiritual and secular Europe. After several unheeded warnings, Leo ex-communicated the German monk. Luther was putting his life in jeopardy. In 1415, the Church burned Jan Hus at the stake for raising similar issues. A century later though, the climate in Europe was different. Festering dissatisfaction over corrupt Church practices came to the fore as Luther grew in popularity graduating from local annoyance to serious threat.

Luther Challenges the Catholic Church’s Spiritual and Secular Authority

Luther made several criticisms that became the basis of future Protestant denominations. First, he challenged the Catholic Church’s claim over individual souls. The Church had long maintained its prerogative as the sole interpreter of the Bible. To determine the Word of God was to define the path to salvation and entry into Heaven. With this monopoly, the Church asserted dominion over every person, high and low. This power extended beyond differentiation between righteousness, sin and the heretical. The Church claimed authority to forgive sins through the sacrament of confession and issuance of indulgences.

Luther dissented holding that every person should read the Bible and come to their own conclusions about salvation: “Only faith in the word of Christ . . . makes one worthy and prepares one. Anything else is an exercise in presumption or despair.” Attaining salvation lay in faith and what was in one’s heart. The Church had no power to judge or forgive sin, that power lay with God alone. In essence, Luther denied the Catholic Church could serve as intermediary between God and humanity.

Next took aim at the pope’s secular authority. He boldly called on princes to “free [their] country from [the pope’s] unbearable taxes and robberies’ and to give them back their ‘liberty, authority, wealth, honour, body, and soul.” If the Church did not have power over the individual, it had no dominion over secular law or government either. Since the end of the Roman Empire, the Church had proclaimed its primacy in both the spiritual and secular worlds. Some worldly leaders had challenged this doctrine with limited success but few religious leaders prevailed. Luther gave several regents the intellectual ammunition they needed to push back against papal incursions into secular matters.

Natural Law and Natural Rights in Luther’s Assertions

Luther invoked natural law to support his views: “[i]f the Ten Commandments are to be regarded as Moses’ law, then Moses came too late, . . . Moses agrees exactly with nature.” According to Luther, Moses had not written new laws, only identified those God had created and infused into the natural world. Natural law did not begin with Luther, he read philosophers such as Aristotle, the Apostle Paul, and Augustine. By employing reason and conscience (one’s internal sense of right and wrong) to observe Nature, an individual could discover divinely created universal laws. Providence endowed every person with a conscience. Therefore it was essential to understanding God’s Will so following one’s conscience was the first natural right. Luther refined the concept of conscience by applying Humanist standards (the primacy of the individual) and creating specific rights that flowed out of keeping one’s conscience.

These arguments had powerful long-term implications from education to religious and political participation. Every person had to be literate to interpret the Bible and must have the freedom to think and speak as they pleased on these issues. Thus, the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to select one’s own religion joined the sanctity of conscience as essential natural rights. These rights came directly from God. Thus, they were absolute and could not be suspended, superseded or abridged by any human institution.

Natural law was not just a source of rights, it was a two sided coin. On one side, God granted every person inalienable rights, but on the reverse side, God required all to act in a righteous manner towards others: “a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” In other words, Christians were free to follow their conscience but were obligated to ensure the same right for everyone else. Here, Luther established a revolutionary concept: all Christians were equal in the eyes of God.

The Protestant Reformation Comes to America

Just as Luther developed his ideas from previous philosophers, American founders built on Luther’s beliefs (and other philosophers and thinkers) expanding the right of religious self-determination to the political sphere. We recognize all of these principles in American political philosophy which took form in the Constitution. Essentially, the Constitution is a contract between the people and the government where the people surrender some of their liberty granting powers to the government to promote and protect individual rights.

Calling for the elevation of secular law to equal status with ecclesiastic law began a movement in Europe loosening ties between church and state that evolved into a more formal separation in America. The Founders applied religious rights of speech, assembly, and conscience and to politics. Thomas Jefferson summarized a uniquely American philosophy based on natural law and rights when he wrote “all men are created equal.” Jefferson’s words were an aspiration in his time (even in Jefferson’s home state, Virginia, only propertied white males enjoyed the right to vote), but as Luther’s 95 Theses set a course, so too did Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The evolution of America’s civil rights came through a gradually growing respect for the dual nature of natural rights. The rights created in the Constitution established duties that have not always been fulfilled. Over time, Americans have realized that slavery and denial of civil rights to African Americans, minorities and women were unconscionable violations of those sacred duties. Nevertheless, a recognition of the dual nature of natural rights and duties has generated significant movement toward a more egalitarian society.

Summary

The Protestant Reformation was not a starting point for the development of Western concepts of individual liberty, but it was an important moment. Events and philosophers before 1517 played a role as did those that followed. Martin Luther injected an expanded view of natural law into the religious and political debates in Europe which brought about a new Humanist egalitarianism between all Christians that evolved into political rights enshrined in the US Constitution. Given the historical implications of Luther’s arguments, I think we can conclude third was actually too low.

To see how the Protestant Reformation and natural law has continued to affect American political philosophy, please check out the follow up article I wrote: Another Martin Luther (King) and Natural Law in America

Sources:

Anonymous, “Introduction to Classical and Medieval Sources Of Natural Law.” http://www.nlnrac.org/classical

Charles, J. Daryl, “The Protestant Reformers and The Natural Law Tradition,” http://www.nlnrac.org/classical/protestant-reformer

Heal, Bridget, Martin Luther and the German Reformation,” History Today, Vol. 67, Issue 3 (Mar., 2017). http://www.historytoday.com/bridget-heal/martin-luther-and-german-reformation

Luther, Martin “How Christians Should Regard Moses,” Excerpted 1525. http://www.nlnrac.org/classical/protestant-reformers/primary-source-documents

Luther, Martin “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” Excerpted 1523. http://www.nlnrac.org/classical/protestant-reformers/primary-source-documents

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