Another tract, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, suggested that the sacraments themselves had been taken captive by the church. Luther even went so far as to reduce the number of the sacraments from seven—baptism, the Eucharist or mass, penance, confirmation, ordination, marriage, and extreme unction—to two. He defined a sacrament as a rite instituted by Christ himself as revealed in Scripture; therefore only baptism and the Eucharist were strictly sacraments, and penance and the other traditional sacraments were either dropped or their definitions were altered. For example, extreme unction was dropped, but confession, which Luther thought was wholesome, was preserved as a voluntary act that could be made to any fellow Christian. Marriage, on the other hand, was not a Christian sacrament, because it had not been instituted by Christ but by God in the garden of Eden and was valid not only for Christians but also for Muslims and Jews. Baptism was to be administered but once and to infants on the grounds of their dormant faith.
Luther’s greatest offense, however, concerned his teachings on the mass. The wine, he asserted, should be given to the laity along with the bread, as in the Hussite practice. No masses should be said for the dead by a priest alone without communicants, because the Eucharist involved fellowship not only with Christ but also with believers. The most drastic change, however, was that Luther denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which, during the performance of the rite of communion by a priest, the elements of bread and wine, though retaining their accidents (i.e., appearance) of colour, shape, and taste, lost their substance, which was replaced by the substance of the body of Christ. He rejected transubstantiation because he believed it was an opinion developed by medieval theologians and was not revealed in Scripture.
Luther taught the doctrine of consubstantiation, though he never used that term. He believed that the Lord’s Supper was one of the central mysteries of the faith and that the body of Christ was physically present in the communion offering because Christ said, “This is my body.” Therefore, Christ’s body must be “with, in, and under” the elements of the offering. The bread and wine, however, do not change their substance, and, for Luther, there was no miracle of the mass in which the priest was thought to alter the substance of the sacrifice. This view undercut sacerdotalism, which emphasized the intermediary role of the priest between God and humankind, since the words of the priest did not bring the body of Christ to the altar. The undercutting of sacerdotalism destroyed the hierarchical structure of a church that culminated in the papacy. Diet of Worms
But what was to be done with Luther? On December 10, 1520, instead of submitting, he defiantly burned the papal bull together with a copy of the canon law. The normal course would have been to excommunicate him (which indeed occurred on January 3, 1521) and then turn him over to the political authorities for execution, but Frederick the Wise insisted that he be given a fair hearing. Consequently, the diet of the empire (not an ecclesiastical council), meeting at Worms in the winter and spring of 1521 would hear his case. Luther was brought before the diet and given an opportunity to repudiate his books and recant his teachings. He did neither and gave a long speech, in German and Latin, defending his ideas. When asked for a simple answer he replied: “I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—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. God help me. Amen.” The emperor then placed Luther under the imperial ban. The bull of excommunication by the church was formally released only later. Frederick the Wise at this point intervened and wafted Luther away to a place of hiding.
Luther was concealed for a year at Frederick’s castle of the Wartburg. During this period he produced one of his most important works, a translation of the New Testament from the Greek text of Erasmus into an idiomatic and powerful German that contributed greatly to the shape of the modern language. Nothing did so much to win popular adherence to his teaching as the dissemination of this translation.
But some were not so convinced. Many of the liberal Catholic reformers, like Erasmus, recoiled from Luther’s paradoxes, from his confidence that his interpretation of Scripture was correct, from his acceptance of the doctrine of predestination, which makes of God a tyrant when he elects some and damns others regardless of their behaviour. The German national movement collapsed. Then in Luther’s own circle, variant forms of Protestantism arose, which in the aggregate are variously described as the left wing of the Reformation or as the radical Reformation. The terminology does not matter so much as the recognition that no neat classification is possible. Radical reformers related to Luther’s reform
Luther’s impact on his contemporaries was profound, particularly on two figures whose activities anticipated many developments to come. One was Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (c. 1477/81–1541), who believed that art and music should be abolished as external aids to religion and that the presence of Christ’s body on the altar should be interpreted in a spiritual sense. He extended Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to mean that all laymen were pastors. Accordingly, if one person was assigned the tasks of a parson, he was to dress no differently than other parishioners and, like others, should work with his hands. Moreover, the clergy was not only permitted to marry but required to do so. The sabbath was to be strictly observed. This program, involving a blend of spiritualism and legalism, anticipated the Puritan movement. The sensory aids to religion were to be discarded by those advanced in the spiritual life and by law snatched away from those still weak.
A much more disquieting figure than Karlstadt was Thomas Müntzer (c. 1490–1525), a man of learning and an apocalyptic firebrand, who may be regarded as the first formulator of the concept of the Protestant Holy Commonwealth. Unlike Luther, with whom he was first associated, Müntzer believed that the elect, those predestined by God for salvation, could be sufficiently identified to form a distinct group. Müntzer’s test was the new birth in the spirit. Recognizing that among the wheat there might be some chaff, however, he did not regard the test as an absolute determinant. Rather he accepted it as an adequate trial for the formation of a community bound together by a covenant. The mission of this group was to set up the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Holy Commonwealth, by wiping out the ungodly, often identified with the rich and powerful. In the attempt they would have to endure suffering, and here Müntzer drew from German mysticism the theme of walking in Christ’s steps toward the cross. But the trial would end in triumph, for the Lord Jesus would speedily come to vindicate his saints and erect his Kingdom.