Abstract
Nathan Montover, Luther’s Revolution: The Political Dimensions of Martin Luther’s Universal Priesthood, James Clarke: Cambridge, 2012; 164 pp.: 9780227680148, £15.25 (pbk)
‘The purpose of this work is to call into question the assumption that Luther was not a political visionary’ (p. 149). Montover sees a silence created by mainstream biographers and scholars with regard to Martin Luther’s political dimension and attempts with his dissertation to uncover this in Luther scholarship’s until now overlooked strand. He sets out to do so by way of a case-study: Luther’s 1520 treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation and, more precisely, his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers contained in it, serve as ‘an example of how Luther engaged in a very real and robust attempt to reshape both the ecclesiastical and temporal structures of his day’ (p. 3).
After an introductory chapter on methodology, Montover seeks to affirm his thesis that Luther scholarship has been negligent of the political dimensions of the universal priesthood by means of an overview of different scholarly biographies and Luther theologies. Nine different authors are briefly weighed and found wanting – with the exception of E. G. Schwiebert from 1950. Curiously missing is any deeper engagement with current Luther scholarship of the past decade.
The third part, ‘Luther’s Revolution’, moves on to place the topic of universal priesthood within Luther’s body of work. From looking at different works from 1515 to 1544, Montover gathers that ‘the notion of the universal priesthood is commonly used as a direct attack on the authority of the pope’ (p. 64).
In the fourth chapter, Montover outlines the social and political context of papal claims of temporal authority by discussing two documents in particular: the ‘donation of Constantine’ and the papal bull Unam Sanctam, both serving to solidify papal power (pp. 72–83). He then sets Luther’s discontentment with the power abuse of the papacy in the context of the gravamina, grievances voiced by German representatives already in the fifteenth century.
The gravamina voiced by Luther are examined in more detail in the fifth chapter, by means of the three walls that the Roman Catholic Church had built to protect herself: (1) papal authority overriding temporal power; and (2) and (3) the sole right of the pope both to interpret Scripture and to call a council.
Montover’s conclusions of his (all-too) brief study are contained in the sixth and final chapter. He rightly critiques a misreading of Lutheran theology as ‘quietistic and uninterested in temporal ethical thought and action’ (p. 144). Montover could have found in the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer a helpful ally in liberating Luther’s concept of the ‘Two Realms’ from such a misapprehension. Yet Montover’s contention that ‘Luther’s theology was at times used by the Reformer for the task of creating a better world’ (p. 137) is prone to confusing the starting point with the result. Luther was a theologian whose theology had political consequences: he was not a politician whose agenda had theological implications.