Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  For Southern Baptists, the “starting point” of everything related to their churches is each individual’s “personal faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord of their lives.” Under the related doctrine of “soul competency,” the Baptists affirm “the accountability of each person before God.” “Your family cannot save you. Neither can your church. It comes down to you and God.” This is a plainspoken version of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone.

  Finally, the Southern Baptists explicitly embrace “the priesthood of all believers,” asserting that “laypersons have the same right as ordained ministers to communicate with God, interpret Scripture, and minister in God’s name.” This, of course, goes back directly to Luther.

  Needless to say, there are some significant differences between the beliefs of the Baptists and those of Luther. The former, for instance, practice adult baptism, and they consider the Lord’s Supper a symbolic rite—positions that Luther vehemently rejected. On many key points, however, the Baptists’ statements of belief parallel those of Luther, despite the fact that his name nowhere appears in them.

  Billy Graham offers another example. From the fall of 1949, when he led a crusade in Los Angeles that first brought him to national attention, until the 1980s, Graham was the face of evangelical Christianity in America. Invoking the Bible as his sole authority, he offered a simple message centered on Christ’s atoning death on the cross for mankind’s sins and his resurrection from the dead for its salvation. “No matter who we are or what we have done,” Graham observed in Just As I Am, his autobiography, “we are saved only because of what Christ has done for us. I will not go to Heaven because I have preached to great crowds. I will go to heaven for one reason: Jesus Christ died for me, and I am trusting Him alone for my salvation.”

  This intense focus on the Bible and on salvation through faith in Christ apart from works reflects the impact Luther had on Graham. In his autobiography, Graham describes a visit he made to Wittenberg in 1982, during which he preached from the pulpit at the town church, using as his text Romans 1:17 (“the just shall live by faith”), which was so central for Luther. Afterward, Graham went to the Castle Church to see Luther’s grave. The next day, in Dresden, he told a Saxon synod about his trip to Wittenberg and about how much Luther’s life and thought had influenced him. The leading evangelical figure in America in the postwar era, then, preached a message drawn largely from Luther.

  Luther’s impact on American life is most apparent in the place of the Bible in it. According to surveys, nearly nine of ten American households own a Bible, with each owning an average of three Bibles. Nearly half of all adult Americans say that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. The American Bible Association distributes up to five million Bibles a year and (together with the international United Bible Societies) has sponsored the translation of the Bible into 1,800 languages. Bible study groups have become fixtures in schools, workplaces, locker rooms, and halls of government, including the White House under Democratic and Republican presidents. In late 2017, a massive $500 million Museum of the Bible opened in Washington just south of the Mall; offering thousands of biblical artifacts, it is the creation of Steven Green, the chief executive of the Hobby Lobby craft-store chain and a member of a prominent evangelical family. All of this can be traced back to Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura.

  Such connections are seldom made, however. Even in history books about American religion, Luther is rarely mentioned. Calvin instead gets all the attention. Most historians are wed to a “Puritan” interpretation of America’s religious origins, stressing the dominant influence of Calvinist New England and its enduring impact on American society. New England Calvinism certainly did leave a lasting mark; it can be seen, for instance, in the belief in American exceptionalism and the periodic campaigns to purify society morally. But Luther’s ideas have been no less influential. They were especially critical in inspiring the Second Great Awakening of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when American evangelicalism was born.

  In a book on the Reformation, it’s not possible to offer a detailed account of how that happened. It is possible, though, to suggest a new path of inquiry. Its starting point would be the career of the man who served as the main conduit of Luther’s ideas from Europe to America: John Wesley. Like so many other inspirational Christian figures, this Anglican priest was tormented by his inability to make his behavior conform to his will. In 1735, when he was in his early thirties, Wesley accepted an invitation to serve as a minister in the colony of Georgia. On the voyage over, he became close to a group of Moravian Brethren—the same enthusiasts who had gathered on Count Zinzendorf’s estate in Saxony. Wesley was impressed by their humble piety and by the unshakable calm they showed in the face of a terrible storm at sea. During his two years in America, however, he was unable to measure up. His efforts to convert Native Americans foundered, and he fell in love with a woman who—tired of waiting for him to declare himself—married someone else. Incensed, Wesley refused to administer Communion to her, touching off a scandal that eventually forced him to return to England.

  On May 24, 1738, a despondent Wesley reluctantly accepted an invitation from some Moravians to attend a religious meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. It featured a reading of Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. “About a quarter before nine,” Wesley later recalled, while the reader “was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” Wesley thus had a conversion experience similar to the one described by Luther in his 1545 preface, and Luther’s teachings about salvation by faith and grace would become the foundation for Wesley’s own theology. In August of 1738, he went to Herrnhut and for two weeks absorbed the intimate spirituality of German Pietism, with its roots in Luther’s ideas of sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers.

  There was one aspect of Luther’s teachings that Wesley could not accept, however: predestination. A restless man of action, he rejected the idea that God had foreordained all who would be saved and that no one could do anything about it. Wesley was instead drawn to the writings of Arminius—the Dutch theologian who had challenged the Calvinists in Holland by asserting a place for human agency. While Wesley continued to accept the Lutheran (and Calvinist) belief in human depravity and the need for divine grace, he rejected the idea that salvation is available only to a predetermined few. Instead, he stressed the cooperative part that an individual, drawing on his free will, can play in seeking God’s favor. Going further, he maintained that a Christian, after being born again, can through an exercise of will move toward a state of “sanctification,” in which the heart is filled with love for both God and one’s neighbor and in which the individual achieves victory over sin. Wesley was thus modifying—and modernizing—Luther’s theology, stripping it of the fatalism that had repelled so many.

  Eager to spread his new vision, Wesley began traveling around England, preaching in churches when they opened their doors to him and in public squares and fields when they did not. The response was electric. The doctrine of justification by faith, modified to accommodate free will, proved popular with weavers, miners, and other working people, especially in economically struggling regions neglected by the Church of England. Wesley organized them into small Pietist-like groups that met for Bible study and prayer. Their systematic approach to devotion gave the movement its name: Methodism. Like the Lutheran Church in Germany, the Church of England disapproved of the fervor of these upstarts, and Wesley himself was frequently attacked in sermons and in print, but Methodism quickly spread, introducing into England an evangelical enthusiasm it had previously lacked.

  Wesley was no revolutionary, however; in his sermons, he supported the existing order, and he made sure that the emotions unleashed by his movement were kept in ch
eck. Not until 1795, four years after his death, did the Methodists formally separate from the Church of England, and even then they continued to show submission to authority and respect for tradition.

  Not so in America. With its open spaces, contending denominations, and restless population, the New World would prove far more open than the Old to Luther’s doctrines as amended by Wesley. In 1769, the first Methodist preachers commissioned by him arrived from England. They were quickly organized into a system of circuit riders, each of whom was assigned to a particular territory. Mostly single, poor, and self-educated, these itinerant preachers had to endure loneliness, bad weather, and poor roads; half would die before the age of thirty. They were sustained, however, by the outbursts of emotion they inspired. Preaching in cabins, courthouses, and clearings, they rallied crowds of farmers and laborers with the cry “No creed but the Bible” and a simple message of salvation through faith and sanctification through the performance of good works.

  That message was especially suited to people on the frontier. Living in isolated cabins, enduring the hardships of daily life, these backwoodsmen were an independent and bellicose lot, given to profanity, drinking, gambling, and fighting. On August 6, 1801, in one of the most extraordinary spectacles in American religious history, twenty thousand men and women gathered in a clearing around a meetinghouse in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, to pray and hear sermons. They were urged to take their salvation into their own hands through acts of faith and repentance. Some, overwhelmed and transported, fell to the ground and lay there motionless for hours; others burst out in spasms of jerking and barking, dancing and singing, in what were taken as signs of the Holy Spirit. For six or seven days such displays continued, with thousands declaring themselves for Christ. Such camp meetings quickly became a fixture of the frontier. With their egalitarian spirit, they fitted the temper of the new republic by inviting individuals to change themselves.

  Toward the end of the eighteenth century, as the new American republic was taking shape, these impassioned bouts suddenly erupted, setting off the four-decade convulsion that would become known as the Second Great Awakening. (The First Great Awakening, flaring in the mid-1730s, had died out within a decade.) It was a popular uprising against the religious establishment, inviting ordinary people to take charge of their spiritual lives and make a personal commitment to Christ.

  Lasting into the 1840s, the Second Great Awakening represented the greatest surge in religious fervor in the West since the early days of the Reformation and was in a sense a continuation of it. At a time when European churches were losing touch with the people, American churches were attracting them with a version of Luther’s radically individualist creed. Unlike Europe, America had no popes, princes, or established churches to crack down on them. In a union where “we the people” ruled, the popular priesthood took root and spread. These new believers called themselves evangelicals, reviving the term Luther himself had used. Wesley’s experience of being born again—inspired by Luther—became the spiritual model.

  The Second Great Awakening would leave a permanent mark on American society. Rejecting all authority but that of the individual, it accelerated the advent of a social order characterized by competition and self-expression, entrepreneurship and free enterprise. Evangelical leaders proudly insisted on their lay orientation, creating an environment in which the non-credentialed and unaccredited could thrive. The Awakening, in short, gave rise to the expansive Christian populism that would become such a prominent feature of American society—a populism rooted in the Lutheran-Wesleyan creed that everyone can read the Bible on his or her own and that each individual is personally accountable before God.

  Over time, that populism would undergo many mutations and assume many different forms, from the revival meetings of Dwight Moody and the fundamentalist testimonies of William Jennings Bryan to the motivational sermons of Joel Osteen and the purpose-driven appeals of Rick Warren. While there is much in this populism that Luther would surely find objectionable—the universal American presumption that one can attain salvation through one’s own actions runs directly counter to Luther’s rejection of works as a pathway to heaven—America’s evangelical population seems animated by the same type of faith-based individualism he championed. The message from the pulpits in evangelical America is overwhelmingly one of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and getting one’s relationship right with God and Christ. Change is to be sought not without, in one’s circumstances, but within, in the heart. Underlying all is the principle that a layperson has the same right as a minister or theologian to read the Bible and interpret God’s Word. America, in short, is the true home of the priesthood of all believers.

  In deciding to undertake this project, I was motivated in part by my sense of the pervasive impact that Luther’s ideas have had on America (and of the impact that Erasmus’s ideas have had on Europe). As I reach the end, I remain struck by how alive the Reformation seems in America and by how the pathway that Luther forged out of his own spiritual crisis on the borderland of civilization in sixteenth-century Saxony continues to provide a lifeline to many millions of Americans.

  Origins and Acknowledgments

  This book arose out of periodic visits I began making to Rome in the 1990s. Like so many before me, I was overwhelmed by the city’s beauty, vitality, and layers of history. A key moment came one afternoon when, while walking along the Via dei Fori Imperiali near the Colosseum, I saw a set of marble maps that, hanging on the wall of an ancient basilica, showed the Roman Empire at four different points. In the first, keyed to the eighth century B.C.E., Rome was a dot. In the second, at the end of the Punic Wars, in 146 B.C.E., it included the entire Italian peninsula, half of Iberia, the eastern Adriatic coast, and most of the Balkan Peninsula. In the third, at the time of Augustus’s death, in 14 C.E., the empire encompassed most of Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube, plus much of Asia Minor, the Levant, and northern Africa. In the fourth, during the reign of Trajan in the early second century, it stretched unbroken from Britain to Mesopotamia. This last map, showing the Roman Empire at its height, was all the more striking in light of the imperial ruins that lay around me. How Rome went from that dot to ruler of the Western world to today’s tourist magnet eluded me.

  I was no less struck by the city’s churches—especially St. Peter’s. As I walked around the basilica’s vast interior, with its giant marble pilasters, grandiose papal tombs, and splendid works of art, I felt I was in one of the great strongholds of Western culture, yet I had no idea how the Catholic Church had gained such wealth and power. Raised in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, I had dutifully attended Hebrew school, read the Torah, and learned the history of the Jewish people. About Christianity, I had learned nothing. Most American Jews resist exposing their children to the Christian tradition for fear that they will be sucked up into it. As a result, I had never read the New Testament, could not distinguish Peter from Paul, knew little about the birth of Christianity. On my visits to Rome, the question nagged: How did a small underground sect that had splintered off from Judaism and been so fiercely persecuted by Rome manage, in the course of four centuries, to conquer the empire and replace it as Europe’s organizing force?

  Seeking the answer, I began my own personal tutorial. At Labyrinth Books (now Book Culture) near Columbia University, I sought out volumes on Rome and early Christianity. The story of Rome’s fall and the Church’s rise proved so absorbing that, on reaching 476, when the empire collapsed and the Church set out to absorb the heathen masses, I decided to keep reading. Guided by such texts as Norman Cantor’s The Civilization of the Middle Ages, I worked my way through the next millennium. Reaching the Renaissance, I felt on more familiar ground; everyone knows about Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael and the artistic and cultural renewal they helped spark.

  But then I discovered the Northern Renaissance and the great intellectual, moral, and religious debates taking place north of the Alps. In the center of it all wa
s Erasmus. Reading of his long and lonely effort to learn Greek so that he could revise the Latin Vulgate as part of a broad campaign to reform Christian Europe, I was captivated. Discovering how celebrated Erasmus was in his own day, I became curious as to why he is so little known today. As I read on, the source of his obscurity became clear: Martin Luther. In the three-plus years between his posting of the Ninety-Five Theses and his appearance at the Diet of Worms, Luther became Europe’s most famous citizen, and the more support he gained for his platform of radical reform, the more Erasmus’s moderate program faded. As I read about their rivalry, I felt that I had stumbled upon a remarkable story that foreshadowed many of the conflicts and tensions gripping our world today.

  Thinking that that story had the makings of a book, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to think through my ideas at the Medway Plantation in South Carolina, generously hosted by Bokara Legendre. Early on, Tim Duggan at HarperCollins saw the potential in my project, and as I struggled to make the transition from practicing journalism to writing history, he offered many valuable pointers, such as don’t start so many sections with a date and avoid quoting too much from other books. Feeling my way through the unfamiliar terrain of the Reformation, I benefited from conversations with three experts whose books had influenced me: Steven Ozment of Harvard (The Age of Reform, 1250–1550), Euan Cameron of the Union Theological Seminary (The European Reformation), and Anthony Grafton of Princeton (The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559, with Eugene F. Rice, Jr.).