“Peasants are no better than straw. They will not hear the word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whiz of bullets and it is only what they deserve.”
“To kill a peasant is not murder; it is helping to extinguish the conflagration. Let there be no half measures! Crush them! Cut their throats! Transfix them. Leave no stone unturned! To kill a peasant is to destroy a mad dog! If they say that I am very hard and merciless, mercy be damned. Let whoever can stab, strangle, and kill them like mad dogs.”
“I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain all the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead. All their blood is upon my head. But I put it all on our Lord God: for he commanded me to speak thus.”
What caused Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, to become so bitter and violent-minded in the later years of his life?
Luther came to believe rebellious peasants should be tortured, have their throats slit, and suffer beheading. He also believed all Jews should be brutally persecuted, exiled en masse, and that all their property should be destroyed. Luther also believed Anabaptists, who were largely peace-loving and Spirit-embracing, should nonetheless be executed along with all other heretics.
Why? This seems so shockingly un-Christlike for a man who say many admire as a paragon of faith. We do know that this violent vitriol appeared to surface more and more during his later years.
Again, why?
Here is my proposal. Luther's hardened heart may have come from a hardened hermeneutic. When he was young, Luther read the Old Testament as largely non-literal, entirely Christological, and necessarily allegorical. Early on, Luther had positive and vibrant connections with the Anabaptists and others. He employed a similar hermeneutic to the Anapaptists, know as Pneumatic Exegesis (spiritual reading).
Listen to Luther's entire focus on the Holy Spirit as the sole interpretive and translating agent for accurately reading Scripture.
"If God does not open and explain Holy Writ, none else can understand it; it will remain a closed book, enveloped in darkness." M. Luther, Works, ed. J. Pelikan, XIII, p. 17.
"Therefore the first duty is to begin with a prayer of such a nature that God in His great mercy may grant you the true understanding of His words." Werke, Weimer Auflage , XIII, p. 57.
"The Bible cannot be mastered by study or talent, you must rely solely on the influx of the Spirit." Dr. Martin Luthers Briefwechsel, eds. E. L. Enders and G. Kawerau, I, p. 141.
"No-one can understand God or His Word who has not received such understanding directly from the Holy Ghost." Werke, Weimer Auflage, VII, p. 546.
"For nobody understands His precepts unless it be given him from above.... You understand them, however, because the Holy Spirit teaches you.... Therefore those most sadly err who presume to understand the Holy Scriptures and the law of God by taking hold of them with their own understanding and study." Werke, Weimer Auflage, LVII, p. 185; cf. XV, p. 565.
Luther started early with a huge eye for Chritological/allegorical Bible reading. And this, in my opinion, was what positioned him for spiritual greatness. Later, however, in order to justify his belligerence toward those who were attacking him, he went literal, became "wrath-minded," and went on the attack. He went on to become fiercely and violently anti-Semitic, anti-Anabaptist, anti-peasant, and anti-heretic with his hyper-literal hermeneutic, and in the process rejected all past connection to the peace-loving, Spirit-embracing Anabaptists.
"Experience of the Spirit, Anabaptists said, would enable believers to interpret Scripture reliably and faithfully. Martin Luther, in his early years, ascribed a significant rule to the Spirit in reading the text. The Bible 'cannot he mastered by study or talent,' he said; 'you must rely solely on the influx of the Spirit.' Luther later reacted against those within his own camp and elsewhere with whom he disagreed. Increasingly he stressed the letter of Scripture, and said only those who were qualified and accredited should undertake interpretation." IRCC, http:/ /www.brainerd. net/~wjc/IRCC/ Sunday_192.htm
Luther went from pneumatic exegesis (Spiritual Reading) to the hyper-literal killing letter. Luther STARTED here with tender and open heart:
"In the schools of theologians it is a well-known rule that Scripture is to be understood in four ways, literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical.... The literal meaning speaks of acts, the allegorical of what you believe, the moral of what you do, the anagogical of what you hope." Farrar, op. cit., p. 327; Luther Today, p. 62.
"I was an adept in allegory. I allegorized everything." W.A., I, p. 136.
“When one often reads [in the Bible] that great numbers of people were slain–for example, eighty thousand–I believe that hardly one thousand were actually killed. What is meant is the whole people.” Luther’s Works, Vol. 54, p. 452.
Luther uses an allegory in his Introduction to the Old Testament where he states the following:
"Here you will find the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies. Simple and small are the swaddling clothes, but dear is the treasure, Christ, that lies in them." H.E., VI, p. 368.
"Take Christ out of the Scriptures and what will you find remaining in them? In the whole Scripture there is nothing but Christ, either in plain words or involved words....The whole Scripture is about Christ alone everywhere, if we LOOK TO ITS INNER MEANING, though SUPERFICIALLY IT MAY SOUND DIFFERENT. Christ is the sun and truth in Scripture. He is the geometrical centre of the Bible. He is the point from which the whole circle is drawn.... [Scripture contains] nothing but Christ and the Christian faith... for it is beyond question that all the Scriptures point to Christ alone. The entire Old Testament refers to Christ and agrees with Him." Bondage, p. 26; W.A., XI, p. 223; M. Luther, Römerbrief, ed. J. Ficker, p. 240; W.A., III, p. 643; W.A., Tr. II, 439; E.E., XLVI, p. 338; W.A., VIII, p. 236.
The above quote below by Luther mandates that he employed a non-literal hermeneutic with regard to the Old Testament. Luther had to have read Old Testament Scripture Christologically and allegorically. Why? Because Christ is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament. Implicitly, but of course, he is everywhere, but He is not there on a "plain surface meaning" level. Only through pervasive use of allegory can Old Testament symbolism be reinterpreted into Christological manna. This fact is all too clearly emphasized by Jewish interpretations which see Jesus nowhere on the surface of their texts.
BUT, sadly, Luther in order to better justify attacks on his opponents progressively changed his hermeneutic from the "sensus plenior" (spiritual sense) to the "sensus literalis" (literal sense)here:
"The literal sense of Scripture alone is the whole essence of faith and Christian theology." Quoted in F. W. Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 327.
"If we wish to handle Scripture aright, our sole effort will be to obtain the one, simple, seminal and certain literal sense." Ibid.
"It was very difficult for me to break away from my habitual zeal for allegory. And yet I was aware that allegories were empty speculations and the froth, as it were, of the Holy Scriptures. It is the historical sense alone which supplies the true and sound doctrine." W.A., XLII, p. 173.
"The Holy Spirit is the plainest writer and speaker in heaven and earth and therefore His words cannot have more than one, and that the very simplest sense, which we call the literal, ordinary, natural sense." H.E., III, p. 350.
"Luther fearlessly advanced the literal sense in the face of his opponents. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his controversy with Jerome Emser, Secretary to Duke George of Saxony and a Court Chaplain. (Luther addresses him unceremoniously as the Leipzig Goat - a dual allusion both to his escutcheon and his belligerency - and tells him that he must not defile the Holy Scriptures with his snout.) As Steimle has noted, 'Luther goes straight to the fundamental difference between them, the sole authority of Scripture in matters of faith and the right exposition of Scripture according to its grammatical sense. Over against Emser's position, that he would fight with the sword - i.e. the Word of truth - but that he would not permit it to remain in the scabbard of the word sense, but use the naked blade of the spiritual sense, Luther, in the most important section of his answer, under the subtitle 'The Letter and the Spirit utters the foundation principles of Protestant exegesis.'" Luther's Principles of Biblical Interpretation, A. Skevington Wood [1916–1993], Ph.D., F.R. Hist.S.
Luther ended here, the natural and tragic place a dead letter hermeneutic leaves you. The letter kills, and makes us willing to know kill. Consider the violence revealed in his later-in-life quotes below. (Adapted from the blog article "The Shocking Beliefs of Martin Luther," by Frank Viola).
In his On the Jews and their Lies, Luther stated,
“Let their houses also be shattered and destroyed . . . Let their prayer books and Talmuds be taken from them, and their whole Bible too; let their rabbis be forbidden, on pain of death, to teach henceforth any more. Let the streets and highways be closed against them. Let them be forbidden to practice usury, and let all their money, and all their treasures of silver and gold be taken from them and put away in safety. And if all this be not enough, let them be driven like mad dogs out of the land.”
“In sum, they are the Devil’s children, damned to hell.”
In his treatise Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, he urged the princes with these words,
“Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.”
"Like the mules who will not move unless you perpetually whip them with rods, so the civil powers must drive the common people, whip, choke, hang, burn, behead and torture them, that they may learn to fear the powers that be.”
“Peasants are no better than straw. They will not hear the word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whiz of bullets and it is only what they deserve.”
“To kill a peasant is not murder; it is helping to extinguish the conflagration. Let there be no half measures! Crush them! Cut their throats! Transfix them. Leave no stone unturned! To kill a peasant is to destroy a mad dog! If they say that I am very hard and merciless, mercy be damned. Let whoever can stab, strangle, and kill them like mad dogs.”
“I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain all the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead. All their blood is upon my head. But I put it all on our Lord God: for he commanded me to speak thus.”
Luther came to believe that blasphemy, heresy, and false teaching was punishable by death. In 1536, Luther famously signed his approval a drafted memorandum by Melanchthon demanding death for all Anabaptists and Luther signed it. Christian History, Issue 39.
So, here is the cautionary end of the matter in alliterative prose. Hard hermeneutics harvest hostile hearts.
The letter of Scripture kills, and wants to kill, but the Spirit of Scripture gives curative life, and wants to give life. 2 Corinthians 3. How much deeper the roots of the Reformation might have gone if the reformers had chosen a softer and more spiritual hermeneutic.
I came across that quotation in red in a book I was reading. I was puzzled that the book did not give a source for the quote as just about every other statement from Luther was given a quote. so I looked it up on the internet to see if I could find a source. I came across an article written by James Swann, an anti-Catholic. As a Catholic I had to accept that what Mr Swann writes is possibly correct.
https://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/2010/09/luther-peasants-are-no-better-than.html
Incidentally I note that this article gives no source for rhe quotation in red.
Posted by: MIkeR | August 10, 2021 at 04:06 AM