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Luther vs. Pope Leo

A Conversation in Purgatory

Abingdon Press

Not as Expected

History did not turn out as Luther had expected. His "prince" — that is to say, one of the chief hereditary rulers in German-speaking regions who also belonged to the "electors" of the Holy Roman Empire — had procured for him safe passage to the imperial assembly (called a "diet") in the city of Worms. There his case would be heard before a civil court of his own people, the Germans. He would not be forced to appear in Rome, as the papal indictment charging him with heresy required, to face trial there before a hostile audience.

In Luther's mind, an audience in Rome could not help but be hostile. Chief among his alleged heresies was a challenge in principle to the sole authority of the bishop of Rome as pope to judge him. In the beginning, however, challenging the unquestionable authority of the bishop of Rome to judge had not been Luther's motive in critiquing the sale of indulgences. The sale of indulgences promising, as its salesmen claimed, deliverance from the flames of purgatory in exchange for a financial gift indeed claimed the name and authority of the pope. His emblem, with the graphic of the keys to the kingdom granted to Peter and his successors, accompanied the salesmen (witness the ubiquitous joke about Peter, gatekeeper with the keys, greeting the deceased at the Pearly Gates). But in the beginning, Luther argued to the contrary that the sale of indulgences subverted the true and pastoral authority of the Roman pontiff. His early opponents — not in Rome, but in Germany — had quickly switched the subject and made papal authority the central issue as they lost ground in the argument over indulgences. That being the case, Rome could not be an impartial judge, for Rome, or more precisely, the papal institution in Rome, had become party to the dispute. So Luther reasoned in any event.

Luther did not, however, think himself beyond error, as he expressly and repeatedly had asked to be shown his errors on the basis of Scripture and evident reason. To the extent that this posture of intellectual humility was sincere, he could at least wager on a more sympathetic hearing before peers at home, where for a variety of reasons resentment at the imperious ways and pecuniary appetite of the Roman papacy was widespread, if also inchoate. So Luther had traveled to Worms with a reasonable hope that whatever the diet decided about his Christian orthodoxy, he would be allowed time to reconsider all the questions involved while returning home safely to Wittenberg to await the outcome of events.

But it did not happen this way. His prince, Elector Frederick, who had arranged the safe passage for Luther, was enticed behind the scenes by overtures from the pope; he secretly agreed to betray Luther for immediate execution following a pro forma hearing before the imperial diet.

Frederick betrayed Luther in exchange for the prospect, at the pope's suggestion of his support, of being elected the new emperor. At this time, the Luther affair was not the first thing on the minds of the assembled electors and their entourages, but rather the succession to the imperial throne. Indeed, these chief princes were called "electors" because the position of emperor was not hereditary, even though the sitting Emperor Maximillian wanted his Habsburg grandson, Charles, who had recently been sent to Spain from the Netherlands, to succeed him. Maximillian was aged. The chief item on the minds of the assembled at Worms was the politics of succession.

Neither was the Luther affair the chief preoccupation of the pope. He had an enormous stake in the outcome of the diet as he struggled to procure the political independence of the papacy within Europe and therewith the unity of warring Christendom — reciprocating goals in his mind. His solution was to advocate a new Christian crusade against the encroachment from the east of the Muslim Turks, whose armies had entered Hungary and menaced Vienna. The pope's vision, the lineage of which can be traced back in history to the victory of Charles "The Hammer" Martel over the Arab Muslim attempt to advance from Spain into France eight centuries before, was one of Christian Europe united under the spiritual leadership of the pope against infidel Islam. In this connection, not least of Martin Luther's offenses in the pope's eyes was a politically provocative statement from his explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, which had ignited the affair several years before. Whoever resists the Turk resists God, for the Turk, Luther had written, is God's rod to punish us wicked Christians for our sins. If followed, such heretical counsel, so the pope thought, would portend the end of Christendom and the Islamization of Europe.

What was needed to save Christendom was to strengthen the papacy by preserving it from political interference in a free and independent Italy, so that it could be in a position to lead Christian nations to peace within and together to victory over external enemies. The danger to Christendom was "secularization," in the sense that the leading institution of the church could be captured by secular powers and so made a pawn in the hands of the competing political factions of this world. Giovanni de Medici, the first of the Medici popes from illustrious Florence, had inherited a papacy still wounded from the Great Schism of more than a century before, when rival popes were in sad fact pawns in the hands of the competing national-political powers. Like his immediate predecessor, "The Warrior" Pope Julian II, Leo invested his energies in a flurry of diplomatic and military efforts to secure the papacy's independence within Europe by surrounding Rome with a cordon of "papal states" stretching from Milan in the north of Italy to Naples in the south. Yet others among the emerging nation-states of Europe of his time also coveted these Italian possessions, chiefly, as the pope feared, Charles of Spain who could become even more powerful as emperor of the German lands.

The German lands were loosely united in the Holy Roman Empire. Here, going back to Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel, pope crowned emperor as heir to a "new," — that is, "holy" — Roman empire. It was the original alliance of "throne and altar," though in reality this model had deep precedent in the Christianization of Europe during the so-called Dark Ages. The tribes of Europe were Christianized in a complex symbiosis of nation-building and political centralization. Political sovereignty arose in tandem with Christian sacralization. The result was emergent Christendom. Peter Brown gives a crisp account of the Christian theological problem involved in muted but unmistakable terms:

A small body of clergymen (notably Alcuin ...) were challenged by [Charlemagne's] brusqueness to restate, more forcibly than even before, a view of Christian missions which emphasized preaching and persuasion. But, in fact, when it came to Charlemagne's treatment of the Saxons, most later writers took no notice of Alcuin's reservations. They accepted the fact that, as befitted a strong king, Charlemagne was entitled to preach to the Saxons "with a tongue of iron"— as a later Saxon writer put it without a hint of blame. Force was what was needed on a dangerous frontier. Education began, rather, at home. In the reigns of Charlemagne and his successors, a substantially new Church was allied with a new political system, both of which were committed, to a quite unprecedented degree, to the "correction" and education of their subjects.

After eight centuries, however, the Christendom model had become wobbly. Other powerful political actors were now appearing on the European scene: the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain and the discovery of the new world had catapulted Spain to a leading position alongside traditional powerhouse France. Henry VIII reigned over the emerging naval power of England. All these chief actors, and a host of minor ones, vied for gain and glory in a confusing welter of claims with intersecting temporal and spiritual pretensions.

It was in this contestation, unbeknown to Luther, that Leo X, desperate to fend off the election of Charles of Spain whom he thought to have ambitions for Naples, had won Frederick to his cause. The pope secretly intimated support for Frederick's election to the imperial throne (while double-dealing the same intimations to King Francis of France) on the condition that he quash the Luther movement, which had ignited on and was spreading from his territory of Saxon Germany.

As a result, like Jan Hus before him at the Council of Constance, Luther was betrayed at the diet of Worms and burned at the stake for his heresies. The unity of Christendom was thus preserved and the Muslim advance halted, when as an immediate result imperial winner Frederick and loser Francis of France united to defeat the Turkish armies in Hungary. Yet the secularization of the papal church into a pawn of imperial and/or national-political interests in the process was not checked. By the very mechanism of these machinations, the papacy had been reduced in fact to little more than a minor actor among the rising nation-states of Europe, its claim to spiritual leadership falsified by Leo's transparently political calculations. History did not turn out as expected also for Leo X.

For upon his election to succeed Maximillian, the "wise" (as he was called) Frederick not only quashed the Lutheran movement but also turned his wrath on the papal party throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In politics, turnabout is fair play, and having witnessed the pope's calculation and double-dealing, Frederick felt few compunctions. The one element of Luther's message that had convinced him was the nationalist argument about Germany being fleeced by Rome by exploiting the superstitions of the population. Chief among the fleeced, Frederick came to realize, was he himself who had spent treasure upon treasures collecting alleged relics of Mary and the saints. Delivered from this "superstition," it was only just, he now reasoned, to return church properties to the ownership of the secular state from which they had been stolen by playing on the superstitious fears of the people. In this way, Luther's "unintended reformation" survived his own betrayal.

Frederick reconciled Francis by giving him a leading position in the crusade against Islam, and he in turn emulated Frederick's policy of subordinating religion to interests of state. Frederick aligned the empire with Henry VIII of England against Spain several years later, since Spain remained nominally subordinate to the papacy, even though Charles, unbeknown to him, had been cheated out of the throne of emperor. In the process, the church in England and in Germany became respectively the churches of England and of Germany, "people's churches." The papacy fared no better in attempts to ally with Spain. Charles in Spain consoled his loss of the empire by freeing himself utterly of Catholic moral restraints in a policy of total colonization of the newly discovered world across the Atlantic Ocean.

Yet Leo X did not live to see any of this. He, too, died before the consequences of unintended "counter-reformation" became visible. Enjoying his favorite pastime in the marshy lowlands outside of Rome hunting wild boar, Leo received word by messenger of Luther's execution. So elated was the weak-eyed Leo at the news that he dismounted and took up the spear to finish off a cornered boar. But his stroke missed the target, and the portly pope fell forward into the tusk of the boar. It was not a pretty sight.

Eternity did not turn out as either Luther or Leo had expected.

Mercifully the smoke had asphyxiated Luther before the terrible pains of death by burning could deliver further cruelties upon his body, already seething with pain as the torturers had sought to procure from the condemned man a last-minute retraction of his heresies. But Luther had not recanted, firm in his belief that he would pass instantaneously into the company of the white-robed martyrs above. But as Luther awoke from death's sleep, he seemed alone on his bed in a plain, gray, windowless room. He wondered at his whereabouts.

Purgatory, too, was not quite as he imagined it. Truth be told, he had come in the course of the controversy to doubt that a postmortem purgatory even existed; already from the beginning he was demythologizing purgatory and giving it an existential interpretation. "Since we believe that peace, joy and confidence reign in heaven in the light of God," he had explained, "we also believe that in hell despair, grief and terrible flight rage." Between these two, purgatory, Luther continued, "is nearer hell than heaven, for in purgatory there is a despair, a longing to escape, dread, and grief." He quickly qualified, however, "near despair, for that type of despair finally comes to an end ... [though] it does not feel capable of hope. The Spirit alone helps them in their weakness." In tandem with such existential interpretation of purgatory as the Spirit's work in a refining furnace, Luther had long doubted those lurid pictures of its cruel torments that his opponent, the Dominican friar John Tetzel, merchant of papal indulgences, had conjured up to frighten gullible people into rescuing their loved ones by means of a financial donation.

In principle Luther argued against a purely penal purgatory supposedly satisfying divine justice with pain in compensation for crime for the sake of a true and spiritual purgation of the Christian penitent. Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, which had gotten him into all this trouble, seemed already at the time to be making an argument against a purely postmortem purgatory in favor of a present, real-time purification of desire. The message announced in its first thesis, "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Do penance,' he meant for the entire life of the believer to be one of repentance," was intended as, and taken to mean, something like, "Purgatory without delay! Purgatory now!"

So Luther awoke, proven half-right right that purgatory was not a cruel place of penal satisfaction for crimes. But only half-right. He had sought to put Tetzel's preaching of purgatory on the horns of a dilemma. As salvation is not deliverance from sin's punishment, but deliverance from sinful desire, any true Christian delivered from sin by the conversion of the heart's desire welcomes sin's "punishment" as spiritual exercises in the mortification of the old Adam, as the divine Holy Spirit's own "crucifixion" of the flesh. Luther's gospel had not been that God spares from punishment, but that the God who spared not His own Son leads those united with His Son through death with Him into newness of life. The good news is that the sinner gets to die with Christ and so arise in Christ to a life of battle, into a world in which sin is still present and afflicting but now no longer reigns free and unfettered in the baptized. Thus the entire life of the Christian on earth is an earnest battle, a living and present purgatory!

If purgatory is real, then, true Christians welcome it rather than flee from it in terror, as the very fulfillment of their new, Spirit-given desire for purification. For unless evil desire is healed, it is impossible to enter heaven. But if, instead, purgatory satisfies divine justice by inflicting punishment on sins as the indulgence preachers maintain, and if the pope has at his disposal a vast treasury of surplus merit from Jesus, holy Mother Mary, and all the saints that he can credit to the deficit accounts of needy sinners suffering dire punishment to satisfy justice, Luther asked, why doesn't the pope in Christian love just give it all away? Set the prisoners free with free pardon? If he is able to do this but instead sells the credit, he is a spiritual usurer, making a profit from work not his own. What a blow to the reputation of the pope's pastoral office, Luther slyly noted, as smart laypeople are beginning to question!

More deeply, Luther had argued, the root idea of surplus merit at the disposition of the pope betrays the true treasure of the church: "For Christ is the Ransom and Redeemer of the world, and thereby most truly and solely the only treasury of the church." It is true that good works are necessary for salvation even though they are not in the power of weak humans captivated by sinful desire. But the one good work that suffices for all was the obedience of Jesus Christ to death, even death on a cross, for those disabled by their captivation to self-seeking in all things. That is why He is called the "ransom." By this His work of love seeking others and not Himself, He has gained the salvation of all who abandon their own self-seeking efforts at self-salvation and instead surrender to His searching love. This treasure is the good news of the generosity of God in giving salvation in Christ, so costly to God, yet freely given to those not deserving. It is the gift, then, which in its human reception does what it says in transforming human desire just as the Apostle Paul had once written that he now wanted to "be found in him. In Christ I have a righteousness that is not my own and that does not come from the Law but rather from the faithfulness of Christ. It is the righteousness of God that is based on faith" (Phil 3:9).

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Excerpted from Luther vs. Pope Leo by Paul R. Hinlicky. Copyright © 2017 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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