Martin Luther and the Translation of the Bible into German
The very life of Martin Luther (1483-1546) manifested turbulence, over and over. From his troubled youth in Saxony (Erikson, 1958/1962), through his contretemps against the Roman Catholic Church, and on into a bitter, even scurrilous old age, Luther trailed controversy, such that his name is readily associated with one of the most divisive eras in European history.[1] The Western church and its polity cracked and then splintered into a dozen denominations – some of which continue to bear Luther’s name. Obviously, he alone did not cause the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, but it would be foolish not to acknowledge his paramount role.
Of particular interest in this paper is his role in translating the Bible into the vernacular. In this capacity, Luther would be comparable to other translators across Europe who had an impact not only on the religious sentiments of the laity of Europe but also on the development of their discrete languages, a development compatible with an emerging sense of national identity that wasn’t resolved until the treaty (or treaties) of Westphalia in 1648, roughly one hundred years after Luther passed away. In this historical example, we find one of the ways that an individual’s exertions and attempt at influencing others at the micro level helped to cause (or at least to accelerate) a large-scale change that registered at the macro level.
A. Biographical Sketch
The basic facts about the life of Martin Luther are well-known. After renouncing the study of law in order to become an Augustinian monk, Luther had demonstrated an aptitude for language, earning his doctorate in 1512, at which point he was appointed as professor of biblical studies at Wittenberg University in the region of Saxony. Further study brought him to question certain practices in the church, such as the issuance of indulgences. This restless criticism eventually drew attention from the authorities. Because of the printing press, his arguments circulated quickly throughout Europe, so that he was summoned to account for his teachings – the most consequential of which was held at what was known as a “Diet” in 1521. Luther’s intransigence there influenced church authorities to excommunicate him and civil authorities to declare him outlaw, yet a sympathetic elector of the Holy Roman Empire spirited him away to Wartburg castle for his own protection. There, because Luther found himself with time on his hands for ten months, he began the project of translating the Holy Bible into German, while at the same time taking advantage of the printing press to continue his war of words with church authorities. (Luther was nothing if not prolific.) Eventually, he returned to Wittenberg to be among his growing number of allies, where he became embroiled in many more controversies for the rest of his life. Among his reforms was urging celibate nuns and priests to marry, including himself, becoming a father of six and something of an elder statesman to the Reformation until his death in 1546.
B. A Man in Contexts
Luther emerged onto the world stage in the midst of preexisting tensions he didn’t create and couldn’t control. From our vantage point several centuries after the fact, we may be tempted to construe the tensions as a simple dichotomy, i.e. an either/or conflict between Luther and the Roman Catholic church, but that would be an oversimplification of the times in which he lived. The cherished image of a lone hero confronting an enormous institution embroiled in corruption (“Here I stand. I can do no other.”) fits a recurring narrative that apparently satisfies something deep in the culture, as we celebrate so many martyrs to individuality. One thinks of Socrates before the Athenian jury, for instance, or Jesus bar-Joseph before the Sanhedrin. One can summon up many such examples, such as Galileo Galilei struggling against the Inquisition or Mohandas Gandhi seemingly bringing the British Empire to its knees, single-handedly. It is an ennobling, yet frankly ridiculous story.
The character John Adams in the musical “1776” sardonically captures this tendency to valorize the hero:
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t be in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them – Franklin, Washington, and the horse – conducted the entire revolution by themselves” (Stone & Edwards, 1970).
To this trope of the solitary and heroic individual belongs the lone Chinese student standing athwart the communist tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is the prophet Nathan pointing a finger at his king, declaring to David, “Thou art the man.” It is a play about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket or of Thomas More. It is a film such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or “Norma Rae”. It is the One against the Many, the fragile new thing challenging the established old thing, the triumph of the underdog. Such a convenient and archetypal narrative plainly ignores the messiness of reality – a messiness that students of leadership ignore at their peril. The situation is always more complicated than the binary opposition we find it convenient to remember. Even so, the singular character of Luther lends itself to such a narrative. As Eric Voegelin wrote: “The spectacle of this one man, bending the course of a great civilization through the impact of his individual force, has never been equaled in its dramatic grandeur (1998, p. 246).”[2]
In order to tell the story of his leadership responsibly, let us accept the injunction of Wren and Swatez (1995) to examine the historical context. In Luther’s own sixteenth century Saxony, the peasants had grown restless at the reign of their princes, and their discontent would break out into rebellion during Luther’s lifetime – the rebels often citing Luther as their inspiration. This was a societal tension Luther could not have created. And as it happens, he was powerless to stop it, try though he might. The princes themselves were not always in agreement with one another. (Neither were the reformers whom Luther would inspire.) For all its internal troubles, Saxony as a whole belonged to a loose empire that was torn among rival powers, including the following:
- the papacy (whose temporal authority was on the wane);
- the Hapsburgs;
- France; and
- England (personified by its willful king Henry VIII).
At this point in time, Western civilization was no monolith. All the while, at the gates of Europe there loomed the imminent threat of the Turk – a euphemism for the Muslim forces under Suleiman the Magnificent. In short, the region where Luther emerged was already fairly quivering with the potential for conflict.
As for the church itself, Voegelin (1998) asserted that “the schism came first, and Luther made a problem of it . . . (p. 220).” In other words, Luther did not cause the rift that we know today as the Protestant Reformation.[3] The process of disintegration had begun long before he entered onto the scene. The church had become differentiated in space and time. That is, it varied by geographical territory (with the prime example being the split with the Greek Orthodox churches several centuries before, but made ridiculous during the so-called Great Schism of 1378 to 1417 when two or more rival popes started excommunicating each other), and this complex network of fractures varied down through the ages (Voegelin, 1998, p. 220f). The church wasn’t everywhere and at all times the same. This was a fact – a realization brought home to Luther during his visit to Rome in 1510-1511, when as a young monk he expressed shock at the many ways that the culture there differed from what he had come to know back in his little home town (Marty, 2004, p. 13). The undisguised differences in time and space revealed deep divides in the edifice of the church.
As José Ortega y Gasset had suggested in another context, superficial differences do not always need to cause alarm; instead, they may actually promise to strengthen a society, yet sometimes the superficial differences one sees in everyday life are the result of a more profound societal rift, like cracks along the valley floor caused by shifts in tectonic plates far below ground. As Ortega put it, such “radical dissension necessarily terminates in the annihilation of the society in which it befalls (1940/1946, p. 16).” One could argue that it was into such a seismic event that Luther had stumbled. Voegelin offered a similar hypothesis: “The appearance of the ‘great individual’ does not cause the revolution, it is itself the symptom of a civilizational breakdown that may need only a suitable occasion for manifesting itself in the revolution (1998, p. 247).”
A young and impressionable Luther would have first encountered evidence of such a “radical dissension” via his professors, when he heard about the theoretical confusions surrounding thinkers such as William of Ockham (who had died a hundred years before Luther was even born) (Marty, 2004, p. 6). Scholasticism was thought to have fallen into purposeless rancor. Thus, Luther inherited many of the issues his predecessors had struggled (and failed) to resolve intellectually. But this was more than an academic disputation. The Hussite Wars to the south had begun with the execution of Jan Hus in 1415; the obstreperous Lollards before that had followed the influence of John Wycliffe in England (Bobrick, 2002, pp. 58-70). John Stuart Mill (1859/1992) once remarked that “the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down (p. 31).” Luther therefore inherited many of the issues these heretics had struggled to resolve politically. Europe was splintering in thought and deed. Part of Luther’s importance lies not so much in what he had said about all of this, but in the fact that he so profoundly experienced the sense that a disintegration was underway. Luther came to maturity suspended in a liminal time that Ortega would have formally called Discord (1940/1946).
Voegelin cites the controversy surrounding the sale of indulgences as an example of this burgeoning discord – a superficial difference of practice which was in his words “ripe” as a scandal at the highest levels of international finance before Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517.[4] By Voegelin’s calculations (1998), as a result of this “focal event” (p. 218) Luther became a celebrity within a month, and the issue over indulgences escalated quickly into revolution (pp. 228-231). That sequence of events could not have happened without certain prior conditions.[5] Luther was therefore born into a world in turmoil, only vaguely aware of a massive fault line under everyone’s feet, and he left it many years later openly and irretrievably broken (Marty, 2004, p. 8f). Or as Voegelin put it: “The Reformation . . . begins with a release of pent-up forces and a crystallization of issues that were already present before 1517 (p. 218; Eire, 2016, p. vii).”[6]
In what sense, therefore, did Luther lead? In response to this volatile situation, Luther did not offer unique solutions. As George Sabine in A History of Political Theory (1947) noted, “The antecedents of all Luther’s ideas both about church and state had been current since the fourteenth century (p. 359).” In that sense, he brought very little that was new. So we cannot ascribe this sort of originality to him. In fact, he would have denied originality. He claimed to be trying to restore lessons from the past. That is, Luther saw himself as confessing a faith that was rooted in the Gospels written roughly fourteen hundred years earlier and that found expression in the works of Paul and Augustine. His movement’s goal was to reform the national church by doing two things:
- taking it back to an earlier time of relative purity, even if that earlier time was to a large extent more of a fantasy[7]; and
- taking it away from foreign influences, such as Rome.
In this regard, his was an ostensibly conservative mission.
Not only did Luther say nothing new, he also did very little that was new. Luther was by no means the first reformer. Figures such as Jan Hus and Desiderius Erasmus had preceded him (Nestingen, 1982, p. 18). Their treatment by the authorities colored how he would be treated in his time and place. This is not to say that Luther was an ordinary character in a recurring drama. Something different was happening all around him, and it happened in large part because of him, but we need to put things into perspective. His emergence coincided with the printing press, for instance, and a surge in new universities across the landscape, thereby increasing the number of intensely curious readers (Voegelin, 1998, p. 218ff). As Alister McGrath explains, it was the rise of literacy that made the printing press economically viable (2001, p. 7).[8] Luther drew heavily from the humanists and mystics, who had laid a kind of groundwork (Marty, 2004, p. 19). And when he did act, he did not act alone; Luther always had allies – powerful allies – both within the clergy and among the political class (Marty, 2004, p. 47f; Pettegree, 2015, pp. 18-25, 254, & ch. 7). Soon, he had attracted tremendous popular support: his superiors noted with dismay, for instance, that upon arriving in the city of Worms to be interrogated about his heterodox views, Luther was greeted at the gates by a boisterous and cheering crowd (Marty, 2004, p. 67; Pettegree, 2015, p. 135). In 1520, a papal legate who visited the region complained that nine-tenths of the people there supported Luther (2004, p. 55). Marty writes: “Luther had become a celebrity with whom rulers had to reckon (2004, p. 87).”[9] Luther also had his imitators and hotheaded zealots (see e.g. Eire, 2016, pp. 187-199). We might say that in response to all of the pent-up discontent across the land, the grinding cultural tectonic plates, Luther was something of a catalyst, i.e. a precipitating cause, yet he was always responding to a welter of gradual, nearly imperceptible underlying causes. Part of his genius lay in his responses to the state or condition that so many others plainly felt.
If Luther did not offer unique solutions, it may be because the problems themselves had been around for quite some time (Voegelin, 1998, pp. 220-228). Luther was not exactly confronted with an entirely new problem. So why should he require a novel solution? Luther’s attitude helps to explain why he was so surprised by the consequences of his efforts. His voice had resounded almost immediately, to a vast audience. Events overtook him. He was unprepared for the upheaval. Rivals, acolytes, and pretenders flourished. The institutions designed to ameliorate the crisis failed, sometimes spectacularly.
Making matters worse for subsequent interpreters, Luther did not profess a coherent system of thought about leadership and social change. He found himself embroiled in controversy, turning this way and that, reacting to opposition and taking advantage of a medium that put a premium on quick responses, rather than long, patient works of theoretical rigor. The fact that he did compose such lengthy works in addition to his partisan, polemical pamphlets and letters is a testament to his capacity for work, but these more substantive studies, such as his commentary on the book of Romans (1908/1954), tend not to shed much light on his leadership. They were usually about other things that he regarded as more enduring.[10]
One could argue that especially in his polemical works Luther’s apparent inconsistencies and rhetorical excesses might have served as a turbulent surface for a calm under-layer, such that they might be understood as lapses in judgment or extravagances attributable to the heat of the moment. Otherwise (perhaps), there was a persisting core to his beliefs. The problem for us today is that scholars continue to quarrel over what that under-layer might have consisted of, except to the extent that it would have been grounded in his religious faith. Thoughtful critics are tempted to give up and say that Luther was simply not altogether coherent. He was a man of contradictions (see e.g. Pettegree, 2015, p. 283). The possibility of this did not seem to trouble Luther, who frequently held seemingly contradictory positions with glee, yet the turbulence and contradiction in his soul arguably mirrors the turbulence and contradiction in the world he inhabited. We are not able to shed much light today on this psychological question.
Nevertheless, I am aware of nobody who would contend that Luther had no impact on his historical context. On the contrary, he has been ranked as one of the most significant figures in European history[11] and certainly a founding influence on the German nation. His leadership is unquestionable, even if his thinking about leadership was never clear. As one biographer put it, “[B]etween 1517 and 1530, Luther stood toe-to-toe with emperors and kings and contended with many of the forces that have shaped modern life (Nestingen, 1982, p. 11).” The world is different today because of him.
In 1844, the social philosopher Karl Marx said of the Reformation in Germany that it “originated in the brain of a monk” (1978, p. 60), yet in 1852 he explained: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past (1978, p. 595).” In fact, he went on: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living (1978, p. 595).” Then Marx presents as exhibit A for this proposition the historical figure of Martin Luther, the monk in whose brain the Reformation supposedly began. As we pointed out earlier (and Marx here mentions openly), Luther was not issuing something new so much as something quite old. Yet he did lead. He was not just a victim of his circumstances. Neither was he a puppet of his spiritual ancestors. How is that possible?
Perhaps as a way of seeing these lessons in a concrete example, we should consider his role in translating the Bible into the vernacular, which in his case was the German language.
C. Translating the Bible
A social scientist would expect to be able to classify Luther’s leadership. Howard Gardner’s dimensions of leadership (1994) would classify this one episode of translating the Bible in which Martin Luther exhibited indirect leadership, letting his exertions speak for themselves; although as we shall soon see, even in this particular undertaking he did exercise direct leadership within a widening circle of collaborators. His leadership, however, was within a narrowly drawn domain. That is to say that Luther in no way presided over society broadly, with the same scope of responsibility held by princes. That was not his kind of leadership. As he conducted the translation, he acted as a scholar and a churchman, a linguist and a poet. In all, his work was truly visionary, even if he was not the very first to have made the attempt. What then did he actually do?
For one thing, Luther had already chosen to write in the vernacular for many of his earlier print publications, before he even tried making a translation. This decision had been, in the words of Andrew Pettegree (2015), “bold” and “radical” (p. xii; p. 79). It gave him a tactical advantage of reaching beyond the narrow circle of intellectuals who were used to conducting disputations in Latin – a reach that in turn expanded the market for his books. Curiously, his opponents resisted for some time to do the same (p. 82).
Martin Luther did more than translate the Bible. For instance, he judged whether certain passages and even entire books should be included, in addition to helping determine the order in which those books would appear (e.g. Volz, 1963, p. 100). He also took an interest in how his book would appear – its font and layout, so to speak (Pettegree, 2015).[12] He was not even the first person to translate the Bible into German (Volz, 1963, pp. 94 & 104). That process had begun as far back as 1350 C.E. – 130 years before Luther was born. He was also not the first person to translate the Bible into what is known as Low German, let alone into a couple of other regional dialects (Volz, 1963, pp. 102 & 106). That remained for somebody else to do.
To the extent that he did work on translating the Bible into German, Luther did not work alone. Obviously, he was dependent on earlier versions of the Bible in Hebrew, with some Aramaic, Greek, and the Latin Vulgate from which to translate (Volz, 1963, p. 99).[13],[14] He also became dependent on a coterie of scholars and editors, not to mention the printers who distributed his translation(s) far and wide, swiftly. Most important among his collaborators were Philip Melanchthon and Mattäus Aurogallus, but eventually there was an entire committee for the 1531 and 1534 versions (Volz, 1963, p. 97).[15] Some portions of the eventual publication, such as the Apocrypha, were not even translated by him at all (Volz, 1963, p. 96). It is also the case that he did not just sit down to do the work all at once and emerge sometime later with a finished product; Luther kept making edits throughout his lifetime – so much so that after his death there was some confusion which draft was in fact the final and authoritative version (Volz, 1963, p. 103). A number of changes were made by other people after he died, but the casual reader was none the wiser. Pettegree (2015) estimates that between 1522 and his death, there would be 443 whole or partial editions in circulation (p. 188).
All of which is to say that Martin Luther did not retire to Wartburg castle in 1521 and emerge three months later with a fresh beard on his face and a German New Testament in his satchel. That is not how it happened. Yet something very much like that did happen. Luther’s translations soon had their rivals. Roman Catholic scholars tried to catch up with their own authorized versions (see Volz, 1963, pp. 107-109). Jerome Emser, for example, found so many errors in Luther’s version that he decided to publish his own – also in 1522 (Marty, 2004, p. 74).[16] Nevertheless, it is widely held that it was simply Luther who translated the Bible into German.
What is to be gained by singling out this one man and his exertions, from out of the flow of world events? The problems he faced were not unique to him. Other men across Europe faced them, also, and to some extent these problems had existed for some time before he was even born. Luther’s response to these problems was not unique, either. Other men had translated the Bible into their own vernacular, going back to Pentecost, and translations were afoot in other parts of Europe as he began. He was not even the first to translate the Bible into German! Yet there was something original in his contribution. Although part of what made his story unique were the circumstances of his time and place (such as the printing press and the rise of nationalism), his response was — for all intents and purposes – original. In the same fashion, poets rarely invent the languages they use, yet they bring a certain style to their compositions – a style that is both novel and fitting, like a composite that other men are compelled to notice and affirm, even as it is constructed of familiar elements. We might say that Luther may not have created anything new, but he fashioned a response in a creative way (Simmel, 1916/2005, p. 155).
John Stuart Mill (1859/1992) once wrote, “The first service which originality has to render [unoriginal minds] is that of opening their eyes: which being once fully done, they would have a chance of being themselves original (p. 65).” One way that Luther led others from within his context is that he released others not so much to mimic him as to develop themselves after their own fashion, to take up the project of individuality. This would be true in two ways. First, it would be true in the narrow sense of interpreting scripture for themselves in the so-called priesthood of all believers, now that the text was available in their native tongue. Any literate lay parishioner had unmediated access to scripture. Second, though, it would be true more broadly that Luther released others to develop themselves in the sense of living their peculiar vocation, whatever that happened to be, just as he had been trying to live his.[17]
I think we have landed on an important lesson here, but it pays to be careful. As Jaroslav Pelikan (1964) pointed out, it would be a mistake to construe Luther’s significance as introducing individualism into the Christian West (p. 20). A nuanced argument would emphasize Luther’s abiding desire to uphold the unity of the church. It was not the case that Luther broke away as an expression of his individuality, to stand alone in his judgment of the world. He was not trying to exacerbate the splintering of Christendom. That move was to be made by other, more radical reformers (e.g. Eire, 2016, pp. 187-199). Luther had insisted on using the traditions of the church – and especially the traditions consonant with scripture – to criticize the institution, for its own good. It is still the church, no matter how mistaken or misled. So it is still the church throughout the variations of time and space that had seemed so disturbing; Luther ultimately embraced the variety that was routinely regarded by those in authority as a threat (again, so long as it was consonant with scripture).[18] For Luther, each Christian is both committed to the whole and yet free, bound to the church while at the same time liberated to engage in fulfilling its mission in changing circumstances. There is a unity to be enjoyed among the unlike expressions of the faith. And that position entails a rhythm of conservation and criticism, valuing the church enough to hold it to account, to become its best expression in each contingent time and place.
In short, even though Luther would not have spoken this way, he embraced the worsening discord in the church and the world as a generative opportunity, out of which something fresh (though imperfect) emerges. Luther certainly experienced the worsening fragmentation, as so many others had before him, but instead of treating it as some kind of collapse or irreversible split within the apparent unity of Christendom, he regarded it as an opportunity. The rift was actually a gift. The monolith of church and empire was no longer a reality (to the extent it ever had been), despite frantic efforts by guardians of both. Yet the significant conclusion to which Luther spoke so eloquently was that the monolith was no longer a desideratum. The very idea of a monolith was no longer a desideratum. He may not have appreciated just how far the fragmentation would go, but Luther exhibited it in his own life and endorsed it and gave it inertia.
Recently, in a book titled The Shipwrecked Mind, Mark Lilla (2016) cautioned similarly against blaming the reformers for advancing – not individualism, but pluralism.[19] Again, these men might have contributed to conditions that led to the emergence of pluralism later, but they were not themselves pluralists in the philosophical sense of the term. If anything, they were responding to a plurality of expressions of the church by bringing it all back under the aegis of scripture. Which is why it was so important to Luther that he share scripture with as many people as possible. To blame Luther for the “confusing, unsatisfying, hyper-pluralistic, consumer-driven, dogmatically relativistic world of today” is a convenient, but misleading myth (2016, p. 79; see Sartori, 1997).
The following adage is variously attributed to early reformers as a way of encapsulating the prevailing attitude: In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas which can be translated as “In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, freedom; but in all things, charity.” Just as the one church abides in different situations differently, in Bohemia and Saxony and Rome and Britain, in a kind of macro diversity, so also the church requires a variety of stations and orders as vocations as a kind of micro diversity. In other words, it takes many types of people to make a church. Paul Althaus, writing in 1972, devoted the third chapter of The Ethics of Martin Luther to this question. We are each called to different tasks or roles, he wrote. We must not assume that every Christian must conform to one image of the best life. Such a uniformity contradicts scripture itself (1 Corinthians 12). But the diversity among Christians goes deeper than this inasmuch as any one person might occupy multiple roles – as employer, bishop, husband, and loyal servant of the prince, all at the same time. It was Luther, after all, who wrote that the individual human being is both saint and sinner, simul justus et peccator. That is, he embodies the contradictions of a created world, the tensions and antinomies that were to be explored further by such luminaries as Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel.
Once again, therefore, we must not see in Luther’s example any kind of championing of individualism (or pluralism) as a creed or doctrine at the expense of community and the complex interlocking web of relationships that constitute the good life. Individualism that masquerades as license and to hell with everybody else completely misses the point; we are bound to an ethic of duty. We are part of the larger whole. Nevertheless, what that looks like for one person in one situation will look very different from what that will look like for another person in a completely different situation. Not to be too facile about it, but Luther represents individuality, and not individualism.[20]
Philosopher Georg Simmel (2005) wrote a penetrating essay in 1916 on art. Part of his analysis treats the issue of individuality. What is it? He wrote, “The essence of individuality is that the form cannot be abstracted from its content and still retain its meaning (p. 48).” You cannot empty it and then fill it up with something else and still call it the same thing. “The form . . . corresponds exactly and exclusively to the life of the respective individual. It lives and dies with him (p. 49).” Martin Luther as a whole was unique. There would never be another. The problem is that a strictly scientific way of knowing, according to Simmel, cannot abide this conclusion. It must categorize, classify, and otherwise sort any phenomenon – for that is part of its mission. It might put a person such as Luther into a grouping, as for example among Saxons or Augustinian monks, or it might isolate a trait or characteristic that a person possesses, such as courage (p. 67). It would certainly try to determine what “type” of leader he was, as we did earlier using Howard Gardner’s taxonomy. In so doing, science occludes vitality, the life-force that made him what he was.
But that is not all, wrote Simmel. In addition, science tends to freeze time and examine a phenomenon as it might present itself in a fixed moment in the flux of time. Yes, science is certainly capable of dynamic or developmental models, marked in phases or stages to represent the predicted series of phenomena, though even here it tends to rely on the same basic method, albeit for successive moments. Stage #1 gives way to stage #2, which is turn proceeds to stage #3, and so forth – one right after the other (see p. 79f). Where, asks Simmel, is the unifying flux? He (Simmel) takes this a step further, however, to reject the idea of an atemporal reality, simply manifesting here and there, like a river that passes a succession of bridges. The person Luther is not the accumulated total of his experiences, manifesting here and there, so that he is the sum of these manifestations. The Ohio River is not the whole of it. Individuality is not some abiding reality, detached from the circumstances of life. Individuality is deeply historical, which is to say that the entire river is fully present at each bridge along the way. The fact that we do not talk that way reveals the limitation of the metaphor. For the individual human being, when I am present, I am fully present. This is entirely me, now.
And so we might say that at Wartburg, even in his exasperating solitude, during a lull between open controversies, Luther was fully present, fully himself as he bent himself to the gargantuan task of translating the New Testament from the best Latin, Greek, and Hebrew accounts he could get his hands on. All that made Luther Luther was manifest in this work, not unlike a portrait in oils depicting a single occasion yet telling us something about the man as a totality. His experience can be said to have inspired others – a surprisingly large number of other people, surprisingly rapidly – to do the same with their lives. And is that not precisely what is meant by leadership?
D. The Authorized Version in English
By way of comparison, the Authorized Version of the Bible in English (frequently known as the King James version), which became the undisputed standard for centuries in the English-speaking world, was itself not the first attempt to make the translation. It had been preceded by quite a few other attempts. In 735 CE, for instance, the Venerable Bede had made considerable progress (Bobrick, 2002, p. 51f). King Athelstan (c. 895 – 939 CE), the first king of England, supposedly tried to get the job done. John Wycliffe, who lived in the fourteenth century, had publically championed the cause in England (McGrath, 2001, p. 19; but see p. 21; generally Bobrick, 2002, ch. 1), though Wycliffe’s exertions were not without a furor.[21],[22] It wasn’t until William Tyndale made the effort in 1525, with the first complete Bible arriving in 1535 (McGrath, 2001, pp. 315, 68-89).[23]
As McGrath explains, “Powerful vested interests were . . . stacked up against the production of an English Bible. English kings and bishops feared that this might cause the English people to rise in revolt, and overthrow them (McGrath, 2001, p. 22)” – not unlike what appeared to have happened over in Saxony. These fears were not unfounded (McGrath, 2001, pp. 52 & 65). “The religious establishment spoke Latin and French; English was the language of its political opponents (McGrath, 2001, p. 32).” The powers that be (in politics, the church, and academe) were content with this social and linguistic bifurcation until the reign of King Henry V (McGrath, 2001, pp. 29 & 35).[24] For reasons such as this, S.J. Greenslade tells us, the Tyndale offering was officially prohibited and burned publically, and everyone associated in its manufacture and sale was threatened with charges of heresy. Tyndale himself died at the stake (1963, pp. 142-147). The times did change, of course. The culture shifted not long after Tyndale’s martyrdom, as the nation’s international status rose (McGrath, 2001, pp. 25 & 34), but not until efforts to suppress the earliest versions as being “too Lutheran” faltered (e.g. McGrath, 2001, pp. 80-89; Greenslade, 1963, p. 145).
Several lesser forays into translation now popped up (Greenslade, 1963, pp. 147-155), but the first successful new translations evaded the political establishment in England by being printed elsewhere in Europe and imported, at first as contraband (McGrath, 2001, p. 66). The so-called Geneva Bible, for example, drew from the labor of Protestants living and working elsewhere, in a hotbed of scholarship on the continent, where they drew inspiration and ideas from John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and texts being written in French and Italian (Greenslade, 1963, p. 155f). Only after considerable political intrigue did the way become clear for English Bibles to be printed in England (McGrath, 2001). Eventually, in a complete reversal that took many decades, the printing of an English Bible became a patriotic act, with accompanying imagery of the king bestowing the scripture upon his grateful people (McGrath, 2001, p. 98).[25] Even then, with the way clear to publishing in the vernacular, the struggle over different versions of the Bible (and their published interpretations) reflected a continuing struggle between the Anglican and Puritan understandings, with the Rhemes-Douay version also emerging to represent a Roman Catholic perspective (Greenslade, 1963, pp. 161-163).
By this point, a bishop by the name of Richard Bancroft groused, “If every man’s humour should be followed, there would be no end of translating (quoted in Greenslade, 1963, p. 164).” Consequently, once King James assumed the throne in 1603, he tried to thread the needle, as it were, and put a stop to the bewildering variety by authorizing one version, once and for all. If there were to be struggles, he reasoned, they could take place on the learned committees where the translation was to be hammered out. And so it began, among both Anglicans and Puritans who shared an animus against any Roman Catholic influence in England (McGrath, 2001, p. 163).[26]
The committees were charged to borrow heavily from previous efforts, including those of Wycliffe and Tyndale (Bobrick, 2002, p. 238; McGrath, 2001, pp. 176-178; Greenslade, 1963, p. 165). The preface stated: “We never thought to make a new translation, nor yet of a bad one to make a good one, but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one (quoted in Bobrick, 2002, p. 249).” By this point in history, the assembled scholars had become aware of an entire literature in other languages, such as Chaldee, Syrian, Spanish, and Dutch (Greenslade, 1963, p. 166; Bobrick, 2002, pp. 238 & 249). Accordingly, there was work to do for dozens of men, divided into six “companies”.[27] Then, they had to reconcile and interweave their various contributions to achieve a sufficient continuity of tone throughout. Undoubtedly, leadership occurred during these scholarly disputations, not least by Richard Bancroft, but the obvious thing should not go unsaid: namely, that there was no single individual to be credited with the translation. The King James version was far less of a solitary effort than Luther’s had been. As Bobrick (2002) points out, “Individual genius was not, perhaps, what was called for (p. 259).” The influx of new knowledge and parallel efforts in other languages to translate the original from across Europe amplifies the fact that this was truly a collaborative effort.
A complete history of any translation into the vernacular would include its subsequent reception and significance down through the ages – factors that draw things further and further away from the exertions of any single individual and distribute agency far and wide. This phase of the story is more plainly sociological than anything we might refer to as leadership studies. McGrath (2001) even admits that the triumph of the King James version, many years later, had little to do with the merits of the translation itself and more to do with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 (p. 289; cf. Westcott, 1911, p. 121). So once again, not unsurprisingly politics intrudes.[28] Yet even in the telling of the story there had been influential figures such as Wycliffe and Tyndale (and Bancroft) whose individual exertions shaped the final product.
E. Concluding Thoughts
Leadership seems to have occurred in the process of translating the Bible into the vernacular, but isolating these individual exertions becomes incredibly artificial. So many other things were also going on. This person and that person influenced what was to happen, and we can try to study their individual impact, even though as a matter of intellectual honesty we have to acknowledge the larger flow of events. The Bible was being translated into many languages at roughly the same time. It is not simply a matter of widening our historical lens to take in more data, to appreciate the full sweep of an era (although that would also be prudent). At the very moment of leadership, no matter how narrowly drawn – even the wrangling over every jot and tittle in the text — multiple forces were at work, impinging on the social actors bent over their manuscripts. In fact, one reason Luther’s example can be seen to be so compelling is that despite the crushing tensions he so evidently felt, his experience in Wartburg Castle, hidden away at an undisclosed location, with time on his hands, safely hidden and at risk of boredom, he chose to undertake a task that was to have enormous implications – not only for the church, but also for the German language and national politics.
As Bobrick (2002) observes, Bible production “dominated sixteenth-century book production [such that] by the end of the century every European nation would have the Scriptures in its own tongue (p. 86).” Plainly, something in which Luther participated swept the whole of Western culture. And the original fears of the establishment turn out not to have been unfounded. Writes Bobrick (2002):
“[I]n time the struggles of Charles V with a Protestant league of princes would end in a divided Germany, England would be split into two armed camps, and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) would ultimately lead to the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire” (p. 103).
The Western world was different. Its culture was never the same. A mature analysis of such a colossal shift could profitably be told from either the micro or the macro perspective, inasmuch as they are complementary. There is little reason to adopt one perspective to the exclusion of the other, for that way lies reductionism and an imperfect understanding of social change.
References
Bobrick, B. (2001). Wide as the waters: The story of the English Bible and the revolution it inspired. Penguin.
Eire, C. (2016). Reformations: the early modern world, 1450-1650. Yale University Press.
Erikson, E. (1958/1962). Young man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history. W.W. Norton & Company.
Gardner, H. E., with Laskin, E. (1994). Leading minds: An anatomy of leadership. Basic Books.
Greenslade, S.L. “English versions of the Bible, 1525-1611.” In Greenslade, S.L. (ed). (1963). The Cambridge history of the Bible (pp. 141-174). Cambridge University Press.
Hayek, F. (1952). Individualism and economic order. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Lilla, M. (2016). The shipwrecked mind: On political reaction. New York Review Books.
Luther, M. (1908/1954). Commentary on Romans (J.T. Mueller, trans.). Kregel Publications.
Marty, M. (2004). Martin Luther. Viking Penguin.
Marx, K. (1978). The Marx-Engels reader (2nd ed.)(R. Tucker, ed.). W.W. Norton & Co.
McGrath, A. (2001). In the beginning: The story of the King James bible and how it changed a nation, a language, and a culture. Anchor Books.
Mill, J.S. (1859/1992). On liberty and other writings. Cambridge University Press.
Nestingen, J. (1982). Martin Luther: His life and teachings. Fortress Press.
Ortega y Gasset, J. (1940/1946). Concord and liberty (H. Weyl, trans.). W.W. Norton & Co.
Pelikan, J. (1964). Obedient rebels: Catholic substance and Protestant principle in Luther’s Reformation. Harper & Row.
Pettegree, A. (2015). Brand Luther: 1517, printing, and the making of the Reformation. Penguin.
Sabine, G. (1947). A history of political theory. Henry Holt and Company.
Simmel, G. (1916/2005). Rembrandt: An essay in the philosophy of art (A. Scott & H. Staubman, trans.). Routledge.
Skiena, S. & C. Ward. (2013). “Who’s biggest? The 100 most significant figures in history.” Time. Retrieved 13 November 2016 from http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/10/whos-biggest-the-100-most-significant-figures-in-history/.
Stone, P. & S. Edwards. (1970). 1776: A musical play. Viking Press.
Voegelin, E. (1998). The collected works (vol. 22; part V; § 1). University of Missouri Press.
Volz, H. “German.” In Greenslade, S.L. (ed). (1963). The Cambridge history of the Bible (pp. 94-110). Cambridge University Press.
Westcott, B.F. (1911). A general view of the history of the English Bible (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Wren, J. T., & Swatez, M. J. “The historical and contemporary contexts of leadership: A conceptual model.” In T. Wren (ed.). (1995). The leader’s companion: Insights on leadership through the ages (pp. 245-252). The Free Press.
Notes
[1] The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Rachel Wagner.
[2] The movement itself nurtured a mythology of Luther as the singular hero as a way of “branding” him (Pettegree, 2015, pp. 168f & 180).
[3] Luther did not cause the rift any more than Martin Luther King Jr. caused segregation in 1963, though he was accused of doing so (read his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”).
[4] It was ironic that the printing press which would give Luther such a powerful range of publication had also made the mass production of indulgences possible (Pettegree, 2015, ch. 3; McGrath, 2001, p. 16).
[5] Luther had posted a different set of theses on the same church door several months before, on issues that Luther likely considered more provocative, without those theses causing the least disturbance (Pettegree, 2015, pp. 50-52). So it was not simply the posting of such theses that constitutes his singular act of leadership. Historians do not even agree whether Luther ever nailed these theses to the door of the castle church in the first place (Eire, 2016, p. 149f.).
[6] Alister McGrath (2001) chose this metaphor: “In the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Western Europe was like a dry tinderbox. It was merely awaiting a spark before it burst into flame (p. 40).”
[7] Martin Marty (2004) does point out that Luther himself did not believe that they were restoring a previous historical condition (p. 56). For him, the battle was perennial. At the same time, however, McGrath (2001) asserts that part of the motivation was to restore authority in the church to the people (p. 55).
[8] Increasing literacy in Latin (and not the vernacular) also precipitated a call for translation into the vernacular, as more and more people discovered just how limited their clergy’s mastery of the language of the Vulgate made their understanding (McGrath, 2001, p. 35). It also made more people aware of the limitations of the Vulgate itself (p. 57). But keep in mind, notes Pettegree, that even then “a large proportion of the population could not even read”…(p. 206).
[9] As a result of Luther’s position in the Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 (consequently known as the Revolution of the Common Man), he did consequently lose support among the disappointed peasants (Marty, 2004, p. 98; Eire, 2016, pp. 199-214), although that came later in his career.
[10] The tension Luther experienced between what is enduring and what is ephemeral is critical for understanding his historical significance, inasmuch as he dwelt fully in both.
[11] Time magazine ranked Luther the 17th most influential person in human history (Skiena & Ward, 2013).
[12] Pettegree (2015) writes that “Luther spent his life in and out of print shops, observing and directing (p. xiii).” See also pp. 110, 141, 180….
[13] A long time earlier (circa 405), the original texts had been translated into Latin, most notably by Jerome, which to the Romans was their vernacular. Not surprisingly, Jerome’s efforts met with resistance (Bobrick, 2002, p. 15). Preachers had been making their own translations piecemeal in order to communicate with their parishioners, which should not be surprising inasmuch as the Apostles had addressed themselves to their listeners in their vernacular, going all the way back to Pentecost. As these Apostles wrote the books that were to become the New Testament, they translated from the original Aramaic into Greek, so the project of translating into the vernacular began contemporaneously with the church itself.
As Augustine had once exclaimed, “By God’s providence it is brought about, that the Holy Scriptures, which be the salves for every man’s sore, though at first they came from one language, now by diversity of many languages…are spread to all nations (Bobrick, 2002, p. 183, quoting Fathers of the English Church).”
[14] Martin Marty notes, however, that Luther did not rely on earlier German translations (2004, p. 72).
[15] James Arne Nestingen discloses that Luther also consulted ordinary people from town to help him understand certain specific terms and usages in the German, such as a butcher shop to learn about the terminology of meats (1982, p. 21).
[16] This before the Council of Trent (between 1545 and 1547) pronounced the Vulgate to be error-free and the church to be its authoritative interpreter (Eire, 2016, pp. 378-384).
[17] This is partly what Max Weber was writing about in the third chapter of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05).
[18] Pettegree (2015) explains Luther’s attitude toward the liturgy, for example, as strangely benign, because [he writes] “Luther positively encouraged variety (p. 322).”
[19] For a different and unrelated meaning of the term “pluralism”, see Eire, 2016, p. 45.
[20] One of the most astute spokesmen for individualism, Friedrich Hayek, explained that there are two different types of individualism, a “true” individualism and a “false” individualism, each of which emerged long after Martin Luther had left the scene. Then, in an interesting aside, Hayek acknowledges that in Germany individualism did not really make sense, even though they did possess a kind of cult of individuality with “deep roots in the German intellectual tradition… (1952, p. 26).”
[21] Bobrick recounts the hubbub at Wycliffe’s arraignment, with armed retainers arrayed on both sides, squabbling over whether Wycliffe could sit during the proceedings, until a spokesman shouted that he would drag the presiding bishop by his hair and throw him out of the chamber, at which point there was violence (Bobrick, 2002, p. 41).
[22] Wycliffe’s writings influenced Jan Hus in Bohemia who in turn preceded Luther (Bobrick, 2002, p. 74f).
[23] Bobrick (2002) believes that Tyndale was personally acquainted with Luther (p. 98).
[24] In another historical irony, the times called for a greater study of the Bible in its original languages and not English, yet the increase in scholars competent in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek created a brain trust that would later contribute to making the English translations with greater competence (McGrath, 2001, p. 71).
[25] The king grew to regret it. Bobrick (2002) reports that in his last speech to parliament, Henry VIII literally wept that Holy Writ was “disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every ale-house and tavern (p. 160).”
[26] The shared resistance to Roman Catholicism generally that united the translators was especially relevant as a shared resistance to using the Latin Vulgate (McGrath, 2001, p. 191).
[27] The identities and titles of these men are listed in Bobrick, 2002, appendix four.
[28] In a bizarre twist, the English language Bible which initially upheld the monarchy, eventually inspired a revolution against the monarchy (Bobrick, 2002, p. 12).
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