2. “Here I Stand”: Religious Revolution In Germany
It was a Wednesday, October 31, 1517,” writes Tom Browning, “not really all that different from the thousands of other Wednesdays that had come before. It was fall, of course, and the air had cooled down and the leaves were putting on a wonderful show of color on the hillside along the River Elbe. It was a nice time to be a German. It was a nice time to live in rural Germany.”
The day was All Hallows’ Eve, a day of commemoration of Catholic saints. We wonder what eighteen-year-old Katharina von Bora might have been doing that morning. Was she working in the convent garden, digging potatoes and turnips for winter storage in the cellar? Was she meditating on saints of long ago, unaware of what a motley crew they were—from desert hermits to violent crusaders and everything in between, including Saint Mary of Egypt, a one-time sex addict?
Wittenberg was a two-day journey away. There on that day, Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theses to the Castle Church door. Today this courageous act is the first thing many people think of in regard to the Protestant Reformation. However, that scholarly endeavor was not even the opening salvo, and it didn’t generate a public response for several weeks. Only a historical perspective highlights the event. Contemporaries might have easily shrugged it off.
“There is properly no history,” observed Ralph Waldo Emerson, “only biography.” That has been my motto as a historian. I simply do not understand how historians can write and readers can enjoy history that does not have biography as its focus. The story of the Protestant Reformation in Germany is a case in point. It is one of the most captivating narratives in all of history. The cast of characters is made for a bestseller or an Academy Award–winning screenplay. And the lead characters—a monk with all the flair and flaws a writer could dream up and a cloistered nun escaping to freedom in the dark of night aboard a merchant’s wagon—an audacious kidnapping and capital crime. There is romance (though not with each other) and marriage (though not the couples’ first choice) and fumbling, lopsided sex (witnessed by curious onlookers) on the wedding night. And then what do they do but settle into housekeeping at the Black Cloister—the one-time home of black-robed monks. It just doesn’t get any better than this.
But some of the stuff of this screenplay would need to be set aside. Even the least prudish among us today easily squirm when confronted with Martin Luther’s crude remarks about the human body and his adolescent bathroom humor. It’s the kind of trash talk found in movies that attract childish boys of all ages, who howl with laughter. Even most R-rated films leave such gratuitous juvenile humor on the cutting room floor.
Part of the appeal of the story is that Luther is an ordained minister—the very first Lutheran minister in history. He attacked his opponents with all the venom he could muster. His nickname for Pope Paul III was “His Hellishness,” and when asked if the pope and those surrounding him were members of the body of Christ, he responded: “Yes, as much as spit, snot, pus, feces, urine, stench, scab, smallpox, ulcers, and syphilis are members of the human body.” Other sixteenth-century Reformers simply did not use such language. Nor did their anti-Semitism spill out in disgusting diatribes.
But like Luther, fellow Reformers certainly did inflame the passions of their followers to persecute fellow Christians. Luther’s reform (along with that of Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich and John Calvin in Geneva) is viewed as part of the Magisterial Reformation that held high the concept of the state church. As such, many of the horrific Inquisition-type tactics of the Catholic Church would be left in place by the Reformers. Indeed, the “cruelest joke” of the Reformation was the drowning of Anabaptists (who affirmed believers’ baptism and denied the efficacy of infant baptism). If they insist on rebaptism, so the joke went, we will do it for them. Many such believers in Zurich were executed in this manner, drowned in the River Limmat.
It would be left to Anabaptists to demand religious toleration and pave the way for the free-church movement that is characteristic of most evangelical churches today. In Strasbourg, however, Katherine Zell was holding forth for religious toleration, with scathing indictments against those responsible for burning at the stake the “poor Servetus” in John Calvin’s Geneva. And she decried the persecution of Anabaptists, who were hunted as wild boars. But few other leaders among the Magisterial Reformers stood strong for religious toleration.
There are many things about Martin Luther we revere, but his manner and methods of reform were surely a mixed bag, making his bawdy jokes pale in comparison. His support of state-sponsored persecution, whether aimed at peasants or Jews or fellow Christians, was appalling, particularly in light of his understanding of Jesus and Paul. Referring to the execution of criminals (some who were “religious” criminals), Luther proclaimed, “The hand that wields the sword and strangles is . . . God’s hand, and not the man but God hangs, breaks on the wheel, beheads, strangles, and makes war.” Harsh words. Yet this is the great father of the Protestant movement and in many respects the founder of “born again” evangelicalism. By 1519, he could affirm without reservation that righteousness is a “gift of God”—a gift received by faith: “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”
This is also the man to whom Katie would pledge her troth, for better and for worse. But before she showed up on the scene in Wittenberg, who was this man and what was this ongoing revolution that would transform her life? Unlike her, he was a commoner, his father a miner. The oldest of seven children born to Margarethe and Hans Luther, young Martin, like Katie, grew up quickly. At the age of five (the age when she would one day be dropped off at a convent), he was entering a nearby Latin school, and at fourteen (the age when she was preparing to take vows), he began studies at a boarding school operated by a monastic community known as the Brethren of the Common Life.
At eighteen, he enrolled at the University of Erfurt, where he excelled in his studies and dreamed of becoming a distinguished professor. But as the story goes, just two months after graduation, a thunderstorm stopped him dead in his tracks. When lightning struck nearby, he was certain the flash was a signal directed at him: Become a monk or die. So in this moment of terror, he promised Saint Anne (alleged mother of the Virgin and patron saint of miners) that he would become a monk. It was the kind of vow anyone at death’s door might make—and break. But Martin turned his back on his scholarly aspirations, and in 1505, he entered the nearby Augustinian Black Cloister in Erfurt known for unusually strict discipline. His father was furious. His friends were shocked and confused, but they joined him for a farewell dinner on July 17, 1505. After walking to the monastery door, he parted from them with somber words: “This day you see me, and then, not ever again.”
One year earlier, five-year-old little Katie—with no friends, no farewell dinner—had also entered a cloister. Martin entered by choice with his eyes wide open. Katie was confused and abandoned, like any kindergartner would be in such circumstances. In 1507, Martin was ordained a priest. For Katie, the next big event would be her transfer from the Benedictine cloister in Brehna to Marienthron, a Cistercian monastery in Nimbschen. They were on parallel tracks in ministry, separated by some sixteen years in age and by more than one hundred miles’ distance. Both possessed a budding sense of confidence. The future held opportunities for them to make their mark. He would one day become a noted monastic leader; she perhaps like her aunt would end her years as an abbess. For both of them, the decade that followed involved loyal ministry in the Catholic Church.
Then at the very moment Martin Luther began his revolution in Wittenberg in the autumn of 1515, Katie von Bora, having completed her year of probation, was reciting her marriage vows to Jesus, promising to be true, until death do them part. Let this be one more amusing—albeit less than resolutely factual—helping of lore dished up by historians. Indeed, historians have challenged the veracity of the story of young Luther promising Saint Anne he would become a monk at the very moment he was struck down by lightning. So also that he actually grabbed the closest hammer and nailed a long parchment list of ninety-five theses to the Castle Church door. And who knows, there may have been a cosmic moment in time on a certain lovely autumn day in 1515 when commitments to and from the church intersected. Like other examples of Luther lore, this tale does contain more than a kernel of truth.
On October 8, 1515, Katharina was “married” to Christ, consecrated as a nun. At the same time, some fifty-two miles away in Wittenberg, Martin was presenting far-reaching insights on the book of Romans. These lectures launched a biblical upheaval that would roll through the centuries, swaying the hearts and minds of students and disciples. He not only transformed humdrum, centuries-old writings into stunning good news, but he would also set a precedent for studying, exegeting, interpreting, and translating the Bible. And not just translating, but encouraging laypeople to read it. Who could have imagined the sweeping consequences? From the pope and the emperor on down, the Bible became a book to be reckoned with—a book, not simply the teaching of one man whose conscience was captive to the Word of God.
Luther insisted he did not wish to establish a new church or start a Reformation: “I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip [Melanchthon] and my [Nicolaus von] Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.”
The good news that Martin Luther found in Romans in 1515 would, from this time forward, be preached in churches and cathedrals and studied in small groups. One such occasion was a spring evening in 1738, 223 years later, when John Wesley’s heart was strangely warmed. “I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine,” Wesley confessed, “while he was describing the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in 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.”
Luther’s biblical teachings and translation would reverberate far beyond the borders of what we know as Lutheranism, turning him into a giant figure in the history of world religions. Others before him had taught justification by faith, but no one forged and fired and hammered passages in Romans into fine gold as he did. The just shall live by faith—faith alone, not by works, not by the filthy rags of righteousness. In Sunday school, we memorized one verse after another from Romans, and Luther was our hero. Paul too. But Luther was more Pauline than Paul himself. The just shall live by faith, a single sentence that stands above all others in all sixty-six books of the Bible. Indeed, Luther was the one who brought those thundering words into my world of the little Green Grove Alliance Church in northern Wisconsin. Luther was the one who taught us that, unlike those Catholics who rode the school bus with us, we wouldn’t be going to hell for believing in salvation by works.
But do the just truly live by faith alone—sola fide? Although a hallmark of the Reformation, many argue (both Protestants and Catholics) that it is not an entirely biblical doctrine. The actual text in Romans 1:17 reads, “The righteous will live by faith,” and Luther alone added the word alone. It stuck. Faith alone. He was certainly not above exaggeration, and perhaps that also included his exegesis.
His discovery of justification by faith had above all else challenged his own spiritual path—that of striving to earn salvation through good works. He was terrified of going to hell because of unconfessed sins. Indeed, he thoroughly exasperated his confessor, Johann von Staupiz, who reportedly scolded: “Look here, brother Martin: If you’re going to confess so much, why don’t you go do something worth confessing? Kill your mother or father! Commit adultery! Quit coming in here with such flummery and fake sins!” But even while Luther was praying, fasting, and confessing for hours on end, he was at times raging against God: “I did not love, indeed I hated, that God who punished sinners.”
Luther was as complicated as was the revolution he spawned. By 1515, while teaching and preaching the gospel he discovered in Romans, he was still a monk on the make, having been appointed supervisor of a dozen monasteries. He seems to have worked nonstop. In a letter to John Lange, prior of Erfurt, he vented his frustration:
I have need of two secretaries, and do almost nothing all day long but write letters . . . I am convent preacher; reader at meals; I am required to preach every day in the parish church; I am director of studies . . . I am vicar of the Order, i.e. prior eleven times over; I have to superintend the Leitzkau fish pond; I have charge of our people of Herzberg at Torgau; I lecture on St. Paul, and collate the Psalms.
Although a busy man, he was not too busy to identify, write down, and publish ninety-five theses in the autumn of 1517. And with that accomplished, the Reformation bell would begin to peal—a bell that would continue to ring out for centuries to follow. A well-known quote from Karl Barth could more aptly apply to Martin Luther: “As I look back upon my course, I seem to myself as one who, ascending the dark staircase of a church tower and trying to steady himself, reached for the banister, but got hold of the bell rope instead.”
Calls for revival, renewal, and reformation have over the centuries popped up like crocus blooms in springtime. Even today, there are those who claim to be carrying out a new Reformation. But never has Christianity seen a religious reformation of historic proportions like the one that rocked the sixteenth century. There were dozens of great religious leaders who were contemporaries of Martin Luther, as well as hundreds before and after. But he alone fit the bill as the great Reformer. Sure, the times were right. Sure, someone else would have come along. But no one else had the intellect and personality to carry it out, with its three most critical components: biblical teachings and translation; daring disputations on wide-ranging church traditions; and, most scandalous of all, clerical marriage demonstrated by his own public marriage to Katharina von Bora.
Until October 31, 1517, Martin Luther was not known beyond Wittenberg. In 1511, he had traveled to Rome on official monastic business, but left as anonymously as when he had arrived. Disillusioned with the shameless impiety of the holy city, he would later see that the trip had a formative influence on his thinking. Back in Germany, he quickly became recognized as a brilliant monk. In 1512, he was invited to become a professor at the University of Wittenberg, specifically in the field of biblical studies. He was in his element, teaching and learning at the same time. “Luther set himself to learn and expound the Scriptures,” writes Roland Bainton. “On August 1, 1513, he commenced his lectures on the book of Psalms. In the fall of 1515 he was lecturing on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The Epistle to the Galatians was treated throughout 1516–17. These studies proved to be for Luther the Damascus road.”
He might have remained a monk professor the rest of his life. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how his future would have unfolded had not the Catholic Church found itself deeply in debt in rebuilding the most celebrated landmark of Renaissance architecture—St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. A battle was looming, though hardly between Martin and Michelangelo. The eventful year was 1516. Enter Johann Tetzel, sent by Rome to sell indulgences for cold, hard cash. Tetzel had personality and a cool jingle: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Actually the jingle may be pure legend, but it has served historians for centuries.
Luther’s ninety-five theses, written in Latin, were meant to be a disputation to be discussed primarily by scholars who had shown interest in reforming the church. We often imagine that the bell rang on Halloween night, and by the next morning most of Germany was ready to take down the papacy. Not so. It wasn’t until more than two months later that friends translated his theses into German and printed them as a pamphlet for wide distribution. Then the wheels began to turn. The pamphlets quickly made their way around Germany and beyond the borders. The ringing bell could never be unrung.
Now eighteen, what did nun Katie know about these ninety-five theses? It is not difficult to imagine that merchants making deliveries might have been curious to see how a cloistered woman on kitchen duty would react to this storm raging right outside her convent walls. Did she read a printed pamphlet during the winter months of 1518? If so, we can only imagine her heart pounding—fear combined with cautious excitement.
All the while, as Luther continued to teach and publish his lectures, the pope essentially ignored the little dustup in Germany. He did, however, direct theologians to challenge and to question the monk. But Luther was quick to respond. When he was questioned by Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg in the summer of 1518, he did more than wonder aloud if the pope might be the antichrist. He likewise refused to recant his writings against the church. For such, he should be burned at the stake. But before that cagey cat Cajetan rounded up his henchmen and pronounced the verdict in the morning, the mouse Martin had slipped away in the night. In the summer of 1519, Luther took the stage to debate the brilliant professor Johann Eck, who came face-to-face with Luther in Leipzig. Hot topics were on the docket, including purgatory, papal authority, penance, and the sale of indulgences—all key elements of Catholic tradition. Without biblical support, Luther argued, they were indefensible. Again a cagey cat set a trap, but before the mouse could be caught, he slipped out of sight.
By now, the news was seeping through the gates and barred windows of even the most tightly cloistered convents. What was Katie thinking? Had she heard about the audacious monk who dared to debate the noted professor from Ingolstadt University and that the streets of Leipzig were packed? Incredible events were passing her by. Nothing like this had happened before. Who was this monk who had been accompanied by two hundred armed students? Social media whispers must have been shocking—and dreadfully slow in coming. Once again, the monk not only pounded nail holes through indulgences and purgatory, but also through papal infallibility and the power of the church. Before the two-week drama had ended, before the curtain calls were over and the crowds could cheer him on, he was gone.
But in this debate, more than in any other forum, he had been exposed. His heresy hung in the air—stark naked sacrilege without even a papal pallium to cover his blasphemy. The pope took notice and took his time. Not until the summer of 1520 did Leo X issue his now-infamous bull, Exsurge Domine, threatening the monk with excommunication. In vintage Luther style, the monk gathered friends and supporters and burned it. The bull had called on faithful Catholics to rise up in opposition to this wild boar. There is no hard evidence, but perhaps the papal bull was read aloud before morning prayers at the convent of Marienthron? Which camp would Katie have joined—the side of the bull or the side of the boar? The opening words of the papal bull read as follows: “Arise, O Lord, and judge thy cause. A wild boar has invaded thy vineyard. Arise, O Peter, and consider the case of the Holy Roman Church, the mother of all churches, consecrated by thy blood.” The papal bull further stipulated that Luther’s books were to be burned.
On a cold January day in 1521, Martin Luther was excommunicated. Then came the emperor’s summons to appear before the Diet of Worms. Here Luther was expected to recant what he had written, by this time an impressive body of work. But once again the Catholic cat (in the form of Emperor Charles V) will fail to catch the mouse. “All Germany is up in arms against Rome,” wrote the papal envoy Jerome Alexander. “I cannot go out in the streets but the Germans put their hands to their swords and gnash their teeth at me.” The Imperial legates, however, seemed to be playing a game of psychological warfare. Most of three months were consumed with mundane business before Luther was called upon to recant—three months of misery to mull over a slow and excruciating death by fire. When ordered to recant, he was sorely tempted, and at first he faltered. On the second day, however, his courage returned. No, he would not recant. He made his case, ending with those ever-memorable lines. Fact or fiction, they live on as the chorus of the fight song that split the Catholic Church:
My conscience is captive to the Word of God.
I cannot and I will not recant anything,
for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.
[Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.]
God help me. Amen.
With no other choice, the emperor issued the Edict of Worms, condemning Martin Luther as a heretic. He was now an outlaw. The penalty, death by burning. But once again, with the help of friends, including Prince Frederick the Wise, he slipped out of town—kidnapped during the night and taken to the secluded Wartburg Castle. Does the full report filter into cloistered convents, or does Katharina hear only half the story? Does she imagine the audacious monk is dead?
For his own safety, Luther remained incarcerated at the Wartburg for nearly a year. His emotional state might almost suggest bipolar disorder—highs of almost unstoppable productivity and a sense of accomplishment, and lows of depression and apathy. On the positive side, he translated the New Testament into vernacular German and wrote essays, and thus that time was critical for his own development and for the progress of the Reformation.
During these early years of the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon and several others worked alongside Luther in Wittenberg, sometimes giving advice that he contemptuously ignored. There were others who supported him at a distance, including Argula von Grumbach (von Stauffer). She also stood before princes in defense of his teachings, appearing before the Diet of Nuremberg in 1523. Though often ignored by historians, her willingness to risk everything for the Reformation illustrates how profoundly the gospel message had captured the hearts and minds of vastly diverse individuals.
Born and marrying into German nobility, Argula’s worldview, social status, and a history of family intrigue were very different from those of either Martin or Katie. We shake our heads and wonder why this wife and young mother of four would lay everything on the line to take a public stand. She was aware that her husband’s court appointment was in jeopardy because of her speaking out in support of Luther, but her sense of duty trumped her family’s financial welfare and social status. If God cares for the birds and the flowers of the field, he would care for her family. Her defense of Luther and Melanchthon, she insisted, was no more than defending the Word of God itself.
The issue that most roused her ire and brought her before the Diet of Nuremberg was the arrest and exile of a student supporter of Luther. She argued from Scripture that he was clearly no heretic, but her words were dismissed as those of a woman, worse, an “insolent daughter of Eve.” The princes who might have at least listened to her arguments, she wrote, regarded “the Word of God no more seriously than a cow does a game of chess.” Her support of Luther’s teachings, however, was taken very seriously, and Luther recognized that. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:
The Duke of Bavaria rages above measure, killing, crushing and persecuting the gospel with all his might. That most noble woman, Argula von Stauffer, is there making a valiant fight with great spirit, boldness of speech and knowledge of Christ . . . Her husband, who treats her tyrannically, has been deposed from his prefecture . . . She alone, among these monsters, carries on with firm faith, though, she admits, not without inner trembling. She is a singular instrument of Christ.
During the six years she remained cloistered after 1517, was Katie longing to be in on the action? Was she craving for news and hearsay that seeped into the convent? Nothing like this had happened during her lifetime, and heretics like the fifteenth-century Jan Hus were hardly the stuff of saintly hagiography. Did she know that all Germany was up in arms—that her own people were gnashing their teeth at Catholic envoys? What would happen to her? We may be on the mark if we suspect that this determined woman, later known as Frau Luther, was chomping at the bit to be out in the streets herself. When she did break free, she would not be confronting cows at a Nuremberg diet as did Argula, but she would never be out of earshot of the latest news.
The aspect of the Luther revolution that no doubt most piqued Katie’s interest was that which related to clerical celibacy and marriage. Truly, this aspect of the sixteenth-century Reformation was as stunning as was his scriptural stance against indulgences and papal authority. Married clerics? The idea was preposterous. But marriage and procreation were part and parcel of Luther’s gospel message. Monks and nuns were now duty bound to kiss the convent good-bye. His language, as we have seen, was shocking. He declared that monasteries and convents were the very opposite of what they claimed to be. They were “worse than common brothels, taverns, or dens of thieves”—not institutions enhancing spirituality and devout living. Families, he insisted, have the responsibility to free their daughters.
Imagine how such words might astound a nun who as a virgin had pledged to be married to Christ and to remain so the rest of her life. Scandalous, to be sure. To accept the gospel as Luther had set forth was radical enough, but to abandon her vows and convent—how could she?
Luther’s utter scorn of clerical celibacy might be best summed up in the personal admissions of one of his bitterest rivals. Not Pope Leo X or one of his representatives, but another Magisterial Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, across the Swiss border in Zurich. When Zwingli was about to move up the priestly career ladder and take over the pulpit of the local cathedral, people began to whisper about his seduction of the daughter of a local official. On examination, he admitted his shortcomings, but emphasized that he clearly had standards: “My principle was to inflict no injury on any marriage . . . and not to dishonour any virgin nor any nun.” In fact, he could prove it: “I can call to witness all those [women] among whom I have lived.”
In some settings, such an admission would have been sufficient to stop the process. But as it turned out, the only other candidate the church was considering had fathered six children. Zwingli got the job. His ministry there would continue for more than a dozen years, until his death in 1531. Along the way, he preached against enforced clerical celibacy—a stance considered then to be a radical notion. And again he was engulfed in scandal. That a priest would have a live-in housekeeper to cook and wash clothes seemed fair enough. Anna Reinhard was a widowed mother of three. When she became pregnant with her fourth child in 1522, he did what was right and married her, albeit secretly. When his enemies found out, they cried foul. Everyone knew that “celibate” clerics fathered children left and right. Clerical marriage, however, was the serious scandal.
So in many respects, Martin Luther’s stance against clerical celibacy was the most radical aspect of his reform. His scriptural writings were a natural outgrowth of his teaching, and his translation of the New Testament into German was a reasonable next step. His raging against indulgences was an obvious reaction to Tetzel’s selling of salvation. But clerical marriage? How could the church carry on if the pope and cardinals and clergy on down had wives and children to inherit its vast stores of wealth? The problems were already nearly out of hand with the succession of the Renaissance Borgia popes. What would happen if parish priests and monks began passing church property on to their children?
Clerical marriage was, according to Reformers, a matter of morality. Katherine Schütz Zell (two years older than Katie) expressed this loud and clear when she married a priest from Strasbourg, Matthew Zell. But her rationale that marriage “uplifted the moral degradation of the clergy” fell on deaf ears. Luther, however, was louder than she was. Shut down the convents. Empty out these brothels, he thundered. (In medieval times, brothels were sanctioned by the church—even now in the 1520s.) But Luther’s cry for reform was not aimed at prostitutes. It came straight from Genesis—to become one flesh in marriage and to be fruitful and multiply. It was aimed particularly at nuns residing in cloistered convents, with little hope of breaking free. Imagine nuns hearing such language. It would have been difficult to remain neutral.
Would Katie stand her ground and resist any attempt to shut down the only way of life she had ever known? Or would she, like other anonymous German nuns, cut all ties to convent life? Would she tiptoe down the hallway and slip out the door in the predawn hours and climb aboard a herring wagon? It was an exhilarating and dangerous time to be alive. Staying or leaving was a decision that, either way, carried critical consequences.
Luther was the man of the hour. No other Reformer was prepared to raise the stakes so high and call for monks and nuns to flee their monasteries and marry. Reform to be sure—reform that would stand the test of time, with a very distinct revolutionary cast. Kimberly Kennedy writes:
In 1530, the Augsburg Confession, the foundational Lutheran statement of faith, affirmed and made official Luther’s rejection of monastic vows . . . Thus monasticism, despite its auspicious beginnings, great heroes, and impressive accomplishments, served primarily to obscure the truly important truths of the Christian faith. It ensnared the ignorant . . . as well as sincere converts, in a corrupt discipline not unlike “a carefully planned prison,” while preaching that its rigorous “show” was the superior form of a Christian life and service.
While he preached God’s blessings on priests, monks, and nuns who married, Martin Luther himself vowed to remain single. No one would lure him into the marriage bed. No one—until an escaped nun still in love with another man made a proposal too good to refuse.