LDS Perspectives Podcast (Released October 11, 2017) This is not a verbatim transcript. Some grammar and wording has been modified for clarity. This is Russel Stevenson. In studio today, we have Dr. Craig Harline, professor of history at Brigham Young University and author of A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation. Thanks for joining us today. I m glad to be here. The purpose of this podcast is to talk about historical issues that are relevant to the Latter-day Saint community. One thing that we see in how Latter-day Saints talk about the reformation, about Martin Luther, and about other reformers, is that we tend to see it as an essential part of how Mormonism came to be. Ultimately, we see it as a step forward toward the development of Mormonism. I m curious what your take is on that, because sometimes in so-doing, we tend to talk about there being the Dark Ages, and then there being the Reformation. Is that demarcation appropriate or is there another way of conceptualizing that? Right. Well, I m sure you know there was a conference at BYU a few years ago. A big volume that came out of that addressed this very issue more thoroughly than I can right now. They did it very well, and it suggested, I think, that there are new views emerging of how we should understand the world between the time of the ancient Christians and Joseph Smith. I m not sure there is an LDS view anymore. I always ask my students in my Reformation class on the first day, What do you know about the Reformation? What s your impression of it, rather, before we start this class? It s always pretty superficial. I don t think most people really have a strong sense of it either way, except that the time period after Jesus was bad or they re just mostly vague about it. I don t think there s the same negativity that there was when I was a kid in the 60s, though. Then we definitely got the Great and Abominable Church. I don t sense that as much anymore. It s rather a sort of vagueness that they have. Most people have heard the name Luther, but they don t really know what he did.
Mormons still regard him as this kind of hero. Maybe for various reasons that could be true, but most of the things that Luther was against, Mormons would be for. One of the things my students learn by the end of the Reformation class is that they have a lot more in common with Catholics than they do with Protestants. Over the course of looking at your book, I got a sense of the kind of person that Luther was. He was this great debater, right? He really enjoyed disputation. How would that kind of approach to theology play out in Latter-day Saint communities today, do you think? Well, he came from a different culture; he was a professor. Disputation was considered one of the leading forms of arriving at truth. Today we still might have debates at universities, but it tends to be lectures instead in the form of visiting speakers or in regular classes. We have discussion in classes. Iowadays the culture whether Mormon culture or American culture is not as strongly geared toward that. Certainly there are debating teams and debating clubs and so on. I think in England you have more of a tradition of that sort of full-on debating and disputing. But anyway, that s why he was arguing so much like that. A few of Martin Luther s touchstone issues I mean, the things that really mattered to him you know, issues such as works vs. grace or the use of indulgences. As you said earlier, the things that Martin Luther was against are the same things that Latter-day Saints would be for. Would you unpack that for us? We ll start with what he cared about most, and that is how you re saved. Everybody every theologian, at least pretty much agreed that you were saved by grace, but then there was always a qualifier: grace through what? Grace through something else, right? It wasn t just a question of whether you were saved by works or grace; it was a question of how grace went together with works. The system that Luther grew up in and the reason he entered the monastery and the reason he had these pangs of conscience said basically do the best you can, and Jesus will do the rest. That sounds a lot like You're saved by grace after all you can do, in the usual way that s interpreted. That just didn t satisfy him, because a really sensitive soul like his could always find something else wrong inside himself. He questioned, How do I know that I m doing all that I can? Because I see that I could still do this and this, right? So he s this tormented soul. He s really a sensitive soul, and he just can t ever feel like he s satisfying God. He s not sure that he s doing the best he can. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 2 of 15
You reference in the book that he probably suffered from what we would call today as overscrupulousness. Remember, he was a monk before he was a professor and before he was a PhD student, even. The monks called it overscrupulousness or the bath of hell. They understood this was an occupational hazard. If your occupation is to look inside yourself most of the day for sins, you were going to find them, and you could drive yourself really crazy almost literally, right? You could be so worried, because you can always find something else you could do better. So that was how his confessors approached him. They d say, Look, everybody faces this. Everybody knows that they have something wrong with them. The official verbiage was You re saved by grace, and your job is to do all that lies within you. And he s like, How do I know that I m doing all that lies within me? He could never get a satisfactory answer to that question. At one point, he has followers who are really holding him up on a pedestal and he says, No, no, listen. I m a poor stinking maggot fodder, just like you. Yeah. It comes out of that very experience. Even after he had his big moments and so on, he still would doubt and the rest of his life, he would doubt. Even in his good moments, he would know that he was flawed, and it was the flaws that made him believe more in grace. Basically, the answer to his question was that if doing all that lies within you is impossible, then there must be another solution. So his solution was that you re saved by grace through just assenting to letting God save you. It s no longer saying that you have to do all you can, because the problem was how to know that. You could ask that of anybody how do you really know that? His answer was to say, Since you can t know that, just give it up. Just give it up and realize that you re saved by Jesus. Do everything you want; you ll still be saved by Jesus, and if you accept that, you ll be a lot happier. Now some of these disputations that he had with people such as Johann Eck and others, they are doing some pretty fine analysis of scriptural verse. It seems to me, especially in 21st-century Mormonism, we have this general sense that you do have to put forward some kind of effort and then grace picks up the rest, as it were. We don t really have the same kind of exacting theological sensibilities that he did. That s probably true. We re usually content with more of this concept that it s a mix of grace and works, right? I mean, that s usually what it always comes down to when you hear it in a Sunday School class. I mean, I think http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 3 of 15
there are some Mormon thinkers who might make a more sophisticated argument either way, but it s usually left as this kind of vague thing you need grace and works. Since you don t know exactly what that combination is, you just do everything you can. But again, to sensitive souls, it raises that question: how do you know? Other people might be very satisfied with that. There were plenty of medieval Catholics who were satisfied with that system, but it just didn t satisfy Luther and others like him. Another major issue that played a role in his ultimate disaffection from the Roman Catholic Church is the place of indulgences and whether they were efficacious. I know that the way it s typically conceptualized not just amongst 21st-century Latter-day Saints, but in general is that essentially you re paying for the forgiveness of sins. We sort of laugh and mock that, but there certainly was an underlying theology guarding this. Yeah; there had been since the Crusades. That s really when indulgences were invented, around 1100. They d been around for about 400 years by now. And this was the issue that made him famous. Justification by grace through faith? Most people didn t really care about this. He tried having a big disputation about it and some people showed up, but there was no aftereffect. He thought it would rock everybody's world, right? All these theologians would be upset, or they d want to come and dispute with him. Nobody really cared. The reason why is because the church hadn t really determined that issue of exactly how grace worked. In fact, he drew upon some medieval thinkers in this. He wasn t the first to come up with this idea of justification by grace through faith. This is a reason why his idea on that wasn t even condemned until the 1540s by the central Catholic Church. And so, right, it was indulgences that got him into trouble. The reason why is that it was the job of professors to dispute and debate subjects that hadn t been settled by the church. That was their job, professors of theology especially. Justification by grace was one of those unsettled subjects, so he was just doing his job when he did a disputation on that. Indulgences, the theology behind them, also had not been settled by the church, and so he wanted to have a disputation on them too, but indulgences were not just another unsettled subject. They were really sensitive because of the person who was ultimately in charge of them: the Pope. What Luther saw was that after these 400 years of practice, indulgences had become abused and he wasn t the only one to see this. There were a lot of people who complained about them in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Some of them had gotten into big trouble as well. One was locked up for ten years in prison and so on, as well as for other statements that he d made. So Luther was hardly the first to recognize this. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 4 of 15
Erasmus had already criticized them in some detail and much more humorously than Luther. By the time Luther got on the subject, he felt like there were indeed a lot of abuses. The idea of indulgence was that Christ and the saints had done more good works than they needed for their own salvation. Those excess works were in a thing called the treasury of merits. That treasury was controlled by the church, specifically by the Pope. So the Pope could dispense those excess goods to people who had done certain acts of penance for their sins and who just felt in need of these excess good works. That was the form of an indulgence. Indulgence means kindness, so it was a kindness extended by the church. What the indulgence typically did was not to forgive your sins, but to forgive the punishment that was attached to your sins. In other words, if you went to confess, the confessor would require you to make the confession of your sin and would absolve you, but then would also give you a punishment. This usually involved a pilgrimage or maybe a certain number of prayers or something like this, or maybe a donation. The indulgence was designed to relieve that punishment. It wasn t designed to relieve or give forgiveness of your sins. It was designed to relieve that punishment. This was necessary because sometimes people got sick, so they couldn t carry out the pilgrimage they had been assigned to do or various other reasons. There were legitimate reasons why a bishop especially might, under the authority of the Pope, grant somebody an indulgence. By the time of Luther, though, many people understood this to be a straight financial transaction as forgiveness of sins. They didn t understand these finer points of theology that were behind it. When Luther first started criticizing indulgences, he said, Look, the theology behind indulgences is okay. It s the practice that s bad. People just need to understand that. Then within a year, he was criticizing the theology as well. He just didn t think that it really held up there s no such thing as a treasury of merits; the saints were humans just like we are; and it was impossible for there to be excess good works and so on. He wasn t immediate in coming to these kinds of conclusions and criticizing them but still, this is what made him famous because it involved the Pope, where justification by grace did not. Luther, he had his own ideas of who the heretics were and who the radicals were, especially the Anabaptists. Would you comment on who the Anabaptists were within the millennia of Luther? http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 5 of 15
The Anabaptists came just a little after Luther, and he anticipated that they would come, because he s a very strict Bible interpreter himself. He knew that people would come along reading the Bible in kind of the same spirit that he did, who would say, Oh look there s nothing here about infant baptism. In that case, he decided to oppose those who were arguing for a strict biblical interpretation. They believed that a baby or even a young child could not decide for himself or herself about the decision to be baptized, and so it had to be made as an adult. Anabaptist means a second baptism. It was a derogatory term, just like most religious nicknames are. The Anabaptists also believed pretty strongly in the separation of church and state. That s right, and Luther did not. Let s put it this way: Calvin and Zwingli, who were two other reformers at the time, believed that the church and the state should basically be as one. They were very positive about the state. Luther saw the state as a necessary evil. It was to tame naturally evil people when they got out of line. A prince could also kind of be in charge of the church, but really it was up to the church the clergy themselves to kind of direct things. Luther believed in not a separation of church and state, but not in the same unity as Calvin and Zwingli, either. He viewed it more as a necessary evil. What kinds of parallels or lessons might we draw in looking at Luther when we understand the 21st-century relationship between Mormonism and American nationalism and the American nations today? Luther certainly believed that the true religion which he believed he was putting forward should be supported by the state. Of course, there are Americans who believe that as well, so I think that comparison is pretty obvious. The Anabaptists didn't have the kind of separation of church and state that was a positive thing; it was more of a negative thing, right? It was more this sense of We don t want anything to do with the state because we re running our own little society here. Within their society, everything was united, so you could say there was a unity of church and state within Anabaptist society, but it was more to keep themselves free from the secular state. There are people within many societies probably, especially where there s an official religion or some in American society, who want a more positive view; that church isn t to be free of the state or the state isn t to be free of the church. The church is exerting good influence on the state. That almost strikes me as reflective of different stages of Mormonism, because in the mid-to-late 19th century, you have a number of Latter-day Saints who are exhibiting this kind of separatist impulse, wanting to have http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 6 of 15
an independent kingdom in the intermountain west, which you might see as being somewhat similar to the Anabaptist tradition Yes. whereas later on, in the 20th and 21st centuries, you end up seeing more of the Lutharian or even a Calvin-esque approach. Yeah, I think that s right. At first, the separation is very Anabaptist. Then there s a kind of joining in and not only saying, Stay out of my business, but also, Can we contribute to the state? That s much more Calvin-esque Not as far as they would have gone, though. They really did have this kind of unified theory of church and state. One of the major points of contention about papal authority was the interpretation of Matthew 16 and John 21: who is the Pope and who is the head of the church? Of course, in Matthew 16, Jesus tells Peter: Upon this rock, I will build my church. Where many people interpreted that to mean papal authority, Luther said, No, that actually refers to the faith as a whole. The rock was the body of believers, the community of believers. That s what he believed. In fact, he believed more specifically that it was their faith. So faith was the rock not Peter himself or the authority of Peter but faith itself was the rock. By faith, he meant a very specific thing. He meant, just as he did with his doctrine of salvation, (which was the heart of everything else) the faith that Jesus would save you if you merely assented to letting Him save you. It seems over the course of these few years, Luther seems to be doing alright. At least, he s relatively safe. It s when he begins to tacitly and eventually explicitly attack the authority of the Pope, that s when he s coming under real scrutiny and facing the potential for excommunication. When he criticized indulgences, some people saw from the beginning that the implication was that this was an attack on the Pope. Luther didn t mean it that way. He went out of his way to say, This is not an attack on the Pope. He ended some of his theses by saying, I hope these are not in conflict with the doctrine of the church, and so on. He was trying very hard not to offend the Pope. He wrote a special explanation for the Pope in sending it to him to say exactly what he meant. He s saying, Look, some people in the church are ruining your authority because of their faults, and the way they re preaching indulgences. We need to preach indulgences in the right way, and so on. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 7 of 15
There were some people from the start who recognized that this had implications for the view of the Pope. Luther didn t start attacking him explicitly until 1519, 1520, and that s when it really began right after the debate that you mentioned in Leipzig, known as the Leipzig debate or the Leipzig disputation, in 1519. That s when Luther himself was stunned into realizing how against the Pope he was. All the historical reading he d done as well convinced him that the Pope s authority just wasn t what the Pope claimed. The Pope could be the bishop of Rome. He had no problem with that, but as far as being the universal head of the church, he just didn t see that. As far as interpretation of Matthew 16 and how they interpreted the idea of the keys, Luther just thought that it was completely wrong. So that was what he attacked. When he started doing that, he got more and more desperate. He began to believe that he was going to be executed. When you believe that, you get more and more excessive in what you say and more desperate in what you say. By 1520, he was saying all kinds of angry things against the Pope that s what made him really popular in Germany especially, but in other parts of Europe as well. There was a lot of anti-papal sentiment in Germany for a whole variety of reasons. People latched onto Luther not because of justification of grace through faith, but because of the perception that he was this kind of enemy of the Pope and the defender of the German church. He was really torn by all this. It s like getting the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. You know what I mean? You want all the support you can, but you don t necessarily want it from these people. He would criticize these people and say, Look, that s not what I m saying here. This is about justification by grace through faith, and you re turning it into this kind of German rebellion. He was really against violence, so the last thing he wanted to see was some kind of armed rebellion against the church in Germany. He believed that the word itself should be the source of revolution and it should come from within people. As I recall, he used some pretty violent rhetoric in regards to the Anabaptist radicals, yes? We have to remember, in that context, that almost all disputers used excessive language. He wasn t much different from everybody else in that. If you read any of these disputations or notes that have survived, they re all using these kind of nasty attacks. It was just part of the culture of disputation. He was against these people who would save baptism until you were adults. He was also against anybody who promoted violence, including the peasants when that began in 1524 1525 (the Peasants War). The only http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 8 of 15
way to stop that violence was through more violence, he said mainly by killing the peasants. That really made him unpopular among some people. The title of your book is A World Ablaze. Why did you choose that title? Well, [Luther] wrote a letter in which he mentioned that, so that phrase comes from him. He writes to the Pope again, his first letter to the Pope explaining what his 95 theses against indulgences were about. He sent not only the theses, but an explanation for each one. Whenever there was a disputation, you asserted a statement or a thesis, and then you would offer proof or explanations, as they were called. Luther published not just the 95 theses themselves, or the 95 statements, but then a long tract in which he offered proof for each of these statements, or explanations. He sent that to the Pope. In the letter to the Pope, he said, Look, let me explain now this thing, which my critics say the world is all ablaze with, right? These 95 theses. That s where the phrase comes from. That moment in which he submits the 95 theses for public scrutiny, it s often romanticized in our collective memory as this great act of defiance. Yet, the way you re describing it to me now, he s sending it to the Pope rather directly. He s not seeing it as an inherently subversive act but rather an invitation for discussion. That was how he understood his job as a professor. Again, as a professor of theology, his job was to try to discuss issues that had not been settled by the church, so he thought this was a perfectly legitimate thing to do. But the culture of disputation among theologians pretty much said, Except for indulgences. We re not going to touch that, because That s the third rail. Yeah. The Pope has authority over that. To him, it was routine to discuss these kinds of subjects. Yet to his critics who just didn t want to stand any criticism of the Pope, he had gone too far. You mentioned that Luther was afraid that he would be executed. Was that fear well-founded? Yeah. There was a real possibility of that. Other people had been excommunicated for heresy. Other people saying similar things hadn t necessarily all been excommunicated or executed, but they had gotten into trouble. There was a real fear about that. He was nervous about it all the time. This was where the protection of his particular prince was crucial. Prince Frederick of Saxony later became called Frederick the Wise. He was a man interested in humanism and learning. He didn t necessarily http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 9 of 15
have a university education himself, but he established a university in Wittenberg where Luther was his star professor. He had a great respect for learning and engaged in some learning himself. He really trusted the judgement of experts. He said, I trust the carpenter about cabinetry; I trust the shoemaker about shoes; I trust the theologian about theology. He really had a respect for expert opinion, so he said, Until Luther is proven to be a heretic, I m not going to execute him or send him off to Rome to be tried there. As long as he had the protection of his prince, Luther was in pretty good shape. Had he lived in another principality, maybe there would have been a prince against him. Maybe they would have sent him off to Rome. But it really was precarious, and that s what I tried to bring out in the book that it s so easy to look back and act as if this was inevitable, but when you look at how precarious it was all along the way, it s really amazing that he survived. What was Luther s relationship like with other reformers such as John Calvin, Zwingli, or John Knox? These came much later. Zwingli was one of the first that he encountered; Knox, not really. Knox came around later. Calvin only came on the scene in the late 1530s, so that s toward the end of Luther s life as well. With Zwingli, he had his most famous confrontation. There were other reformers besides them, mostly in South Germany and what s now Switzerland, France, and so on, and they would meet for conferences and they would write to one another. In the late 1520s, Luther got into it with a number of them, especially with Zwingli over the Eucharist or what Mormons would call the sacrament. They tried various times to come together. They had various colloquies, as they were called. The most famous one was in 1529 at Marburg. They came up with fifteen points that they wanted to discuss and agree on, and they could agree on all of them except the Eucharist. It's because Zwingli insisted that the sacrament should be understood merely symbolically, and Luther said, It says, this is my body. Zwingli is saying, How do you get to see when it s literal and when it s figurative? In other parts of the Bible you re saying it s figurative, but here you re saying it s literal. This is my body. Luther didn t mean it the same way the Catholics did (that there was this transubstantiation), but he did believe that the spirit of God was present in the sacrament. Zwingli did not. Alright, so you think to yourself, That s just a small theological thing, but really, how you understood the sacrament was crucial because that was what gave you your community identity. This was the big communitarian moment, when you took the sacrament or when you took the Eucharist together. If you didn't understand it the same way, this really threatened http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 10 of 15
unity; that s how it was seen by a lot of people, including Luther and Zwingli. What that meant is that it prevented Protestants from really having this united political front, and they needed it because they were not organized. There were Catholic states and princes the Catholic Church was built into Catholic states. With Protestant states, it was assumed there should be some kind of religion, but people were arguing over it often. When you couldn t come to agreement on the matter of the Eucharist, you threaten political unity, and this cost the Protestants some political points probably in the late 1520s and early 1530s a chance to really unify them. Zwingli and Luther never did. These were two of the largest movements, and they never did unify. Zwingli ended up dying fighting in a battle in Switzerland, and Luther became a little more isolated from the southern Germans. Some other reformers became more popular. Luther was especially famed or popular in central Germany, eastern Germany, and the North Scandinavia and so on. He wasn t necessarily universally loved. So for Latter-day Saints who are looking to interpret the Reformation in the context of their faith and in the context of this general narrative that we have about the Restoration of the gospel in 1830, what would you say is the most historically responsible way to do so? You can see it in so many different ways, and it can be a very personal thing instead of a matter of history or something. It just becomes a matter of theological interpretation. I m reluctant to try to say that there is a way to do this. Maybe you could explain what is your way. Well, I don t even know that I have a particular way except to say that it really strikes me that what Luther was against is what many Mormons might be for. That kind of upsets the whole narrative, right? It kind of upsets this idea. I remember when I was a kid and this really got me interested in the Reformation when I was 12, and I went to the visitor s center in Salt Lake, and they had this exhibit basically on Christian history and the Mormon view of it. There was Jesus, then here were some ancient Christians, then here were these hooded, shrouded figures the medieval monks, and all the sudden here were Luther and Calvin and these other Reformers bringing the world closer to truth. But the truth if you believe in Luther s truth is quite against this idea of being saved by doing everything you can. It s quite against that. He believes with Paul, it s either grace or works. It cannot be a combination. It has to be one or the other, and he s sure it s grace because no human can http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 11 of 15
do enough or do anything, in fact to save themselves. He would never allow for any kind of infusion of: Oh, maybe a few works are necessary or the classic Catholic view if you want to get into it a little more, which is as Augustin said You do enough to get what s called an operative grace. You have enough good within you to get this operative grace. When you arrive at operative grace, then you get the grace of God that allows you to become saved. It gives you this kind of perfection that you need or whatever. There were other Catholic views of this, too, but all of them basically assumed that you had a little bit of good in you, and you had enough good to get God on your side. You had to earn grace from a certain point. Luther just rejected all those ideas. How do you ever know that you ve done enough to please God? You just cannot know this, and nobody can do everything perfectly. Therefore, this is the only way. Now his critics, of course, didn t like this because they said, This just makes people lazy if you believe in grace. Luther said, If you believe that, you don t understand grace because when you realize you cannot save yourself, your heart becomes so sorrowful. You feel this sense of reprieve. You re so grateful and so glad that you do more good works than you ever would have done than when you were trying to earn points with God. His famous saying was, Good works don t make a good man. A good man does good works, the good man being the one who s already been justified by God. You re made righteous; you get the grace that you need. Then from that point, you accept that you re just sinful, but you re happy because you re able to do all kinds of good things, actually. Your being happy results in acts of love toward your neighbor and so on. You actually end up doing more good works that s his argument. Do you think this was informed, to some extent, by his intense sensitivity to personal weakness, sinfulness, and kind of the frailty of the human condition? Yeah, and I think he universalized that. I think he believed that the way he felt about all this was the way everybody else should feel to. He saw how frail he was and how hopeless and what a sinner he was and therefore, everybody else ought to see it the same way. He believed he had come to an objective solution. That s why I said that there were others especially in the monastic tradition that had come to some of the same conclusions that Luther had, but you haven t heard as much about them. They kind of kept it to themselves or they didn t make such a big fuss about it, because they weren t necessarily sure that they d found this universal truth. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 12 of 15
You mentioned how when you were a child, you went to this museum exhibit, and you saw kind of how reformers existed within the Latter-day Saint memory. Eventually you chose to enter the academy and become a historian of the Reformation. I recall a story that you once told about how when you first entered graduate school, you actually believed that through the spirit and through spiritual revelation, you wouldn t actually need to use primary sources. Well, it wasn t quite that drastic, and I don t know that I believed it. I think I secretly, barely consciously thought, I m going to get special help because I m Mormon. When there aren t documents, I m going to get insights where there should have been documents. So I have to admit, that was how I felt, and what I came to realize is that it just doesn t happen that way. I had to learn it learn the hard knocks of what was really going on in that world and learn it on its own terms. Again, I became more convinced that that was the best way to approach it. There s a major historiographical debate about this, but one could argue that at approximately the same time as Luther s initial agitations, you also have the rise of what has been called the counter-reformation, right? The Society of Jesus? You ve got Theresa of villas. Mysticism. Could you comment on the relationship between Lutheranism to use somewhat of an anachronistic term Protestantism, and this counter-reformation impulse within the Catholic Church? Yeah. In fact, those terms are a little bit distorting and confusing because Luther s own sense of reform was part of a tradition of Catholic reform that was already there. He wasn t Lutheran. He was Catholic. He was a monk. It s a little bit distorting to say that he s trying to resist the Pope. He wasn t trying to resist the Pope at first. Eventually he was, but he wasn t even trying to replace Catholicism. He just wanted the locus of authority in Catholicism to be shifted away from Rome. As time went on, he came up with a number of innovations within theology. The tradition of reform was already underway in Catholicism and Luther was part of that. There were big reformers before him. There was a reformer in the 14th century who was so close to Luther, he was seen as kind of the proto-lutheran. Then again, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, there were all kinds of reformers around Luther. This reformation was already underway before there was a movement against Protestantism. That s what counter-reformation means. Catholic historians prefer to call it a Catholic Reformation. It was already happening. After the Protestants came on the scene called Protestants from 1529 on, which was also a derogatory name, essentially then you can speak http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 13 of 15
of movements against Protestantism and counter reform. If you look at the Council of Trent starting in 1545, for instance, it was the big Catholic council the biggest one until Vatican 2 in the 20th century, really. It was a major council and at that point, they basically went down the Protestant program and refuted every single point. At that point, you can say This is a counter reform, that s for sure. That s when they condemn justification by grace through faith, by the way, which was Luther s big, central doctrine. They finally condemned it at that point, but that hadn t really been something that needed condemning before that. Now they were just doing it to distinguish themselves from Protestantism. I mean, religions tend to do this. They tend to first say what they are not. They want to be separate from something else, especially when they re new; to say this is what we are not. Now these protestant religions come on the scene and Catholicism wants to make clear, This is what we are not. So you were raised in a Latter-day Saint household and, as you said, you first became interested in the Reformation after visiting this exhibit. What was it like entering the academy as a Latter-day Saint future scholar who is studying a world that is somewhat removed from your own experiences? I mean, there is a long and robust tradition of historians who write on this, and you re coming at it from this distinctive Mormon perspective. At first, certainly, that s what you do. It s like going to a foreign country. The first thing you do is compare it to what you know, right? So when you study a new subject, that s what you do as well but I quickly became convinced by the approach to history that says you need to try to understand things on the terms of the actors themselves. This is, ironically, in order to help it be of more use to you. Maybe the biggest reason to study the past is to get more to think with. And in order to think well with it, you have to understand what they were doing, obviously. But you have to understand it, in my view, on their terms. If you understand it on your terms, you re probably going to distort it more than usual. You re going to distort it anyway because you don t live in that world, but it is possible and worth doing to try to get it as close as you can. When you do that, then you can say, A-ha! Now this is how I can see. How I could convert this to my own world or translate it to my own world. I can see how this might be valuable to me. It s like understanding that Luther, when he used all that nasty language in his disputations, that it was pretty common. Or that when he was putting up his 95 theses, that was the most ordinary thing in the world to do. If you look at it through your lens, you distort it. You re thinking, Oh, that s a big deal. What a nasty guy. But that s just not how it should be understood. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 14 of 15
In other words, you ve got to get it right on its own terms. When you ve done that, then you have a better chance of getting some insight for your own life. I was quickly persuaded to the value of that approach, mostly because it seems like it s going to stay fresher. When you look at the past through your own lens, it s automatically going to change and it s going to change in ten years. But when you look at it through their terms, it seems like that s going to last. You can have something that you can hang on to and try to make sense of. When I tried to understand it through their terms, I kind of gave up trying to say, Gee, how am I supposed to understand this as a Mormon? It was more, Why can t I just appreciate it on its own terms and try to make sense of it, and realize that the world was a lot more complicated than that tidy little version that I learned. Most Mormons don t know much, as I said, about these years anyway, and what they do know is very distorted. What I ve seen from my students is that they really like to learn about what it was like. So why not learn it as accurately as possible? That s how we want others to see us, right? We want others to study us as we would recognize ourselves, so why wouldn t we study others in a way that they would recognize themselves as well? I think that s an excellent note to end on. Thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Harline. We ve benefitted from your insight. Thanks a lot. http://www.ldsperspectives.com/2017/10/11/martin-luther-mormon/ Page 15 of 15