Luther as Pope

Luther as Pope: Episcope in Earliest Lutheranism Adam G. Cooper In his 1997 Chicago address entitled ‘The Augsburg Confession and Polity: Where We’ve all Screwed Up,’1 historian David Gustafson, who has since been received into full communion with the Catholic Church, proposed seven theses in which he sought to demonstrate the theological and ecclesial disparity between contemporary American Lutheranism and the confessing movement responsible for the Augsburg Confession of 1530. In particular, Gustafson wanted to highlight the fact that the Augsburg Confession assumes as normal, even normative, a certain ecclesial structure, ‘namely the episcopal structure that had been in place for centuries.’2 The existence of such an office, he argued, is inseparably linked to the office of the holy ministry, itself the very Godordained means by which the constitutive marks which make the Church what it is are given and preserved: the pure preaching of the word and the right administration of the sacraments.3 Gustafson wanted to show, then, that in their plea for reform, the confessors at Augsburg were not advocating the abolition of this essential ecclesial structure. On the contrary, it could be said that their interest in reform actually demonstrated their commitment to its continued existence. It is by divine right that the bishop teach and judge doctrine and perform the tasks of his office. What the confessors were objecting to was not the existence of the episcopal office in itself, but its abuse occasioned by the confusion with it of the exercise of temporal, political power. On account of the episcopal office’s divine origin and evangelical character, the confessors confirm that ‘parish ministers and churches are bound to be obedient’ to their bishops. Gustafson highlights the very concrete and practical shape he thinks this ministerial ordering ought to take for the church today:

1

Published in the online forum Semper Reformanda at http://users.aol.com/SemperRef/. Accessed February 2001. 2 Gustafson, 1. 3 Gustafson, 2.

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Who is going to see to it that the Word of God is preached and the Sacraments are rightly administered? It seems to me that the Augsburg Confession holds the pastors accountable for these things in relationship to the people under their charge; then bishops are to see to it that the pastors do what they are called and ordained to do. The bishop is not superior to the parish clergy. He is a first among equals who has the responsibility of doctrinal oversight, which is intended to result in doctrinal fidelity and good order in the church.4 It is my intention in this brief essay not to dispute Gustafson’s basic thesis: that the episcopal office is constitutive for the preservation of the Church’s existence. It is rather to contend that while the churches of the Augsburg Confession certainly seemed to presuppose this thesis theologically, they did not realize it historically. In other words, while the confessors represented at Augsburg assented in principle to the necessity of the episcopal office, it would appear they had already assented in practice to its abolition among their own ranks and thus prepared the way for the eventual establishment of rival ministerial orders apart from the orders traditionally accepted by the ancient and ecumenical Church as constitutive of catholic ecclesial existence. At least one of the things going on in Article 28 of the Augsburg Confession is an attempt to demonstrate grounds for disobeying the bishop in order to provide theological justification for an already existing situation of dissent. Thus while we may to an extent attribute a theological continuity to the confessors’ ministerial orders to those of their Papal counterparts, we cannot overlook the stark fact of their historical and material discontinuity.

Before Augsburg: The Utraquists and the Question of Episcopal Succession None of the momentous crises which led to the formal separation of the churches of northern Germany from the Roman see took place out of the blue. Some kind of schism between the papal leadership and the German churches had been a long time coming. For at least a century the German prince-bishops had enjoyed relative independence from the papacy. The exercise of ecclesiastical authority thus had become increasingly diffuse and 4

Gustafson, 4.

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parochial. Combined with this there ran within German Christian piety itself a strong strain of anticlericalism and, within its universities, an openness to the new ‘modern’ humanist learning.5 The political and intellectual climate thus offered a supportive, catalytic context for the Lutheran movement and effective asylum for its chief protagonists. Given this increasing rift between existing structures of ecclesial authority and the evangelical movement in German lands, we might ask how the reformers thought about the likely question of ministerial continuity, and what rationale, if any, they offered for the impending need to ordain and install priests and bishops apart from the established mode of formal episcopal succession. The question became a real one quite early in the 1520’s in Luther’s dealings with the Bohemian Brethren, inheritors of the Hussite reform movement. Luther felt great affinity for John Hus (d. 1415), even admitting to Spalatin in 1520: ‘we are all Hussites, without knowing it.’6 While Rome had formally denounced the Hussite movement in the previous century, it did recognise the continuing validity of the ministerial orders of the Hussites’ organised branch, the Czech Utraquists,7 in which there had been preserved a legitimately-recognised episcopal succession.8 Yet it was these Utraquists, more than the ‘enthusiast’ Bohemian Brethren, that troubled Luther. The Utraquists preserved historical continuity in ministerial orders largely in two ways: by returning to Italy to pay for episcopal ordination, or else by seeking ordination from episcopally ordained priests, such as one Gallus Cahera.9 Thereby they remained open, as they had for over half a century, to the possibility of full reunion with Rome.10 In the summer of 1523, this same Cahera came to Wittenberg with talk of plans for reunion with Rome. Luther’s mostly unhappy response is preserved in the form of his 5

See further Pardon E. Tillinghast, ‘An aborted reformation: Germans and the papacy in the mid-fifteenth century’, Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976), 57-79. 6 Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther in Mid-Career 1521-1530 (ET Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 104; Frederick G. Heymann, ‘John Rokycana – Church Reformer between Hus and Luther’, Church History 28 (1959), 240. 7 The principal tenet of the Utraquists was that Holy Communion must be received under both kinds (sub utraque specie) for salvation. Heymann characterises the Utraquist Church as no more than ‘just a slightly irregular Catholicism’ (‘John Rokycana’, 241). 8 This recognition was formalised in the Compacts of Prague (November 30, 1433) and reinforced by another agreement made at Iglau in 1436. 9 Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: Shaping and Defining the Reformation 1521-1532 (ET Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 73. 10 Heymann, ‘John Rokycana’, 251; Bornkamm, 105.

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famous treatise Concerning the Ministry, addressed to the Senate in Prague.11 In it the Wittenberg doctor strongly denounces the reception of papal ordination, though concedes that the assumption of episcopal functions by those ordained – like Cahera himself – at the hand of papal bishops, was at best tolerable.12 Thus in the judgement of Jaroslav Pelikan we find Luther ‘urging a congregational polity as a substitute for an episcopal polity’, but at the same showing a willingness ‘to agree to a presbyterian polity if congregationalism seemed too extreme a solution….’13 Ministerial continuity, according to Luther’s theory, was not to be guaranteed by an episcopal church structure, but by conformity of the baptised to the word of God. As Pelikan concludes, however, the situation in Prague ‘proved to be altogether uncongenial to this experiment in the creation of instant structures for the church.’14 The Utraquists valued the traditional understanding of the ministry too greatly to be able to adopt Luther’s theory, and in the end the two movements went in separate directions.15

From Episcopal to Political Bureaucracy In addition to the doctrinal and theological objections Luther directed against the validity of the Papacy and its associated ecclesial polity, there also existed strongly secular and political incentives for formal dissociation from Rome. One could get the impression from Luther’s early theory of ministry outlined above that churches in German lands were so spiritually charged that they could manage without episcopal oversight and a structured ecclesiastical system. As it was, however, the first Protestant groups found a certain level of structural stability by winning over already-established political infrastructures. The benefits were seen to be mutual. As Harvard medievalist Steve Ozment observes, ‘many communities believed the Reformation to be an aid not only to long-term providential blessing but also to be a certain democratizing of local government…. In many instances cities and territories found direct economic and

11

LW 40.7-44. LW 40.41. 13 Jaroslav Pelikan, Spirit versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church (London: Collins, 1968), 37. 14 Pelikan, 48. 15 Cahera himself was reconciled to the Catholic Church. 12

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political benefits in breaking with the ecclesio-commercial complex that had long served the distant interests of Rome….’16 This mutual interdependence of church and state, of theological and political camps, may be less familiar to present-day Lutherans of non-European countries. In late medieval society, local affairs including those of the local congregation were largely overseen by the town council. These councils – basically made up of magistrates, burghers, and rich politicians – functioned as a vital conservative, organising force in the spread of Protestant power. One of the tasks of the town council was the levying of the town’s citizens to pay for the priest’s stipend. Throughout northern Germany these local councils were thus able gradually to sack ‘papist’ priests and replace them with those confessing adherence to the evangelical reforms. Monasteries, convents, and schools also fell under their jurisdiction, and with the willing assistance of a given region’s electoral prince they were able to expel leaders faithful to the papal curia and install in their place leaders trained in the new humanism and committed to the Protestant movement. By the mid-1520’s the oversight of bishops faithful to Rome had in effect as good as lapsed into non-existence in Electoral Saxony and in many of the lower German provinces. The town council, thereby, arguably came to wield a fairly direct jurisdiction over the incumbent pastor and congregation – to an extent probably greater than any bishop had previously done so. As Ozment has it, ‘[w]ith the demise of episcopal authority, canon law, and the traditional means of religious support, Protestants early became dependent on political bureaucracies to ensure beneficed parishes….’17 In this respect the churches of Germany were somewhat unique, since in many other regions where the reform movement struggled to take hold the princes and town councils of Roman persuasion took active measures to oppose it, as was the case in Ducal Saxony and the Netherlands.

The Visitation: An Alternative to Episcopal Jurisdiction?

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Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 117. 17 Ozment, 131.

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While it is usually thought that the first Lutheran ordinations did not take place until 1536,18 liturgical scholar Paul Bradshaw states that the first evangelical ordination was performed by Luther himself on May 14, 1525.19 Whether or not this is the case, Ozment has suggested that in Melanchthon’s installation of Adam Krafft of Fulda as court preacher in Marburg in August 1525, we see ‘the first theological embracings of magistracy’.20 By ‘magistracy’ Ozment means a form of polity worked out in terms of ‘a basic partnership between Protestants and magistrates’ which the reformers, who had lost the Roman magisterium as ‘the only bar to a relapse into barbarism’, envisaged as the optimum way forward. 21 And indeed, that is how things did go forward. By the end of 1527 there was established a de facto episcopal order in the form of the visiting team operating under the dual aegis of Duke John Frederick of Electoral Saxony and Luther with the Wittenberg faculty. The idea had been conceived of well before 1525 in view of the fact that the bishops were no longer exercising any supervisory function. At Duke John’s behest, several apparently less effectual visitations by Protestant leaders went ahead in the first half of 1525 focused on correcting false teaching.22 Then in a letter to Duke John dated October 31, 1525, Luther – ‘inundated with complaints’23 about poor conditions in the parishes - impressed upon him the ruinous spiritual and financial state of the schools and congregations and called upon the Duke to intervene by way of ordering their inspection and re-establishing their spiritual and administrative order, finally reminding him that ‘it is God who asks and requires this action of you through the emergency situation itself.’24

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October 20, in Wittenberg, and at the order of the electoral prince, according to the editors of Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche [BK] (Göttingen: Van den Hoek and Ruprecht, 1976), 458, fn 2. 19 The Bradshaw reference appears in Jones, Wainwright et al. (eds.), The Study of Liturgy (London: SPCK, 1992), 381. I have not been able to verify the details of this claim. BK simply identifies the case as that of the Wittenberg Archdeacon, Georg Rörer (458, fn 2). What the difference is between installation and ordination is not clear. According to Luther’s (1536/7) comments in SA III.10 (Tappert 314.1-3), ordination seems to be more closely tied to the office of bishop. For having described the proper functions of the episcopal office, Luther asserts: ‘… as the ancient examples of the Church and the Fathers teach us, we want and ought ourselves to ordain (wollen und sollen wir selbs ordiniern) qualified persons to such an office.’ 20 Ozment, 134-135. 21 Ozment, 134. 22 Brecht, 260. 23 Brecht, 260. 24 Bornkamm, 488.

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As an aside, such an impulse is said to have led eventually to ‘the creation of the office of superintendent, with its dual function of visitation and pastoral care.’25 It is likely that Luther – at least at this stage - regarded such action as provisional, necessitated by the peculiar circumstances of the hour. Initial responses on Duke John’s part were cautious, for he understood the economic implications of administrative reforms. But even after further visitations in January and March of 1526, Luther wrote again in November with still greater urgency. In this letter Luther explicitly links the spiritual and moral demise of the congregations to the abolition of papal jurisdiction, a fact confirmed later by Melanchthon who, finding evidence among them of faith but none of repentance, lamented their ‘fleshly security’ and regarded their blatant libertine tendencies as ‘worse than all the former errors of the pope.’26 ‘With the ending of papal influence,’ reports Bornkamm citing Luther, ‘the elector, “as supreme head,” retained control of the monasteries and cathedral chapters in his hands. With such control now came “the duty and burden to put things in order.”’27 Or, quoting Ozment, what had begun ‘in the heady name of freedom soon came face to face with the sober demand for discipline….’28 Eventually, by Trinity Sunday of 1527, a team of four lay-people was assembled and ready to roll. The University faculty at Wittenberg elected Phillipp Melanchthon and lawyer Jerome Schurff (who later resigned to return to his legal career), and Duke John elected city council members and noblemen Hans von der Planitz and Asmus von Haubitz. Their task was to visit congregations and ecclesiastical establishments throughout Saxony and examine their doctrine, life, and administrative affairs. Unsuitable leaders were to be removed – if necessary by means of the law enforcement agencies provided by local [town council] authorities. It was Luther’s desire that all parish pastors should ‘offer their diligence to our sovereign and most gracious lord [Elector John], [and] willingly – without duress and motivated by love – submit to such a visitation and together with us live with it peacefully until God the Holy Spirit begin something better

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Bornkamm, 490. Bornkamm, 492-494. 27 Bornkamm, 490. 28 Ozment, 151-152. 26

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through them or us.’29 Luther thus appeared very keen to point to the Duke as the new seat of divinely-appointed ecclesial authority and as the one on whose shoulders the burden of exercising the vital ministry of pastoral oversight fell. There is no evidence that Luther viewed this new system as a re-establishment of the episcopal office in any formal sense, yet on the basis of the biblical and traditional understanding of the inherent connection between episkope and visitation, he clearly regarded it as fulfilling properly episcopal functions and openly spoke of the team of visitors as ‘bishops’ and ‘archbishops’, though apparently in jest.30 All the while as Luther was looking to the Duke to step into the breach and fill the vacuum left by the widening schism with Catholic bishops, the Duke in fact deferred to Luther and the Wittenberg faculty for authoritative guidance. The pastors were to submit to the visitors; the visitors were under the guidance and protection of the Duke; but the Duke acted under the direct counsel of Luther himself, and in fact from the very inception of the visitation idea had wanted the excommunicated Reformer to conduct the visitation personally.31 It was to Luther’s credit that he chose not to undertake such a task off his own back, but the fact remains that from the outset he was universally regarded as its principal advocate and its authoritative arbiter in matters of life and doctrine. One of his pastoral responses to this dire need for the exercise of de facto episcopal oversight and the re-introduction of Christian discipline was the publication of the Small and Large Catechisms, documents which have binding, magisterial authority upon Lutheran pastors and congregations to this day. Ozment’s comments on the significance of this shift in the locus of authority are worthy of careful attention:

Luther prescribes a tight regiment to ameliorate the situation. Fathers are to question their children and servants daily on the catechism, seeing that children develop the habit of saying the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer upon rising, during meals, and at bedtime – “and unless they repeat them they should be given neither food nor drink.” The tribunal of confession and the episcopal bureaucracy, primary objectives in the Reformation’s original assault on

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Bornkamm, 500. Bornkamm, citing Krumwiede, 500 fn 73. Compare Brecht, 260.

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traditional religious practice, seem now to reappear in new forms within the very homes of Protestants. Parents are urged to become “bishops” within their households.32

All of this leads to an important conclusion with direct import for our assertion that the Augsburg Confession assumes an episcopal polity theologically, but not historically: over the course of the 1520’s there can be seen to have escalated in the churches of northern Germany a discernible shift in the seat of effective spiritual episkope away from the Papacy and its episcopal and political arms and the dispersal of that authority into a number of key locations, each occupying its own place in a hierarchical scheme. The whole shift could be characterised as a deformalisation of traditional spiritual authority and its reformalisation in new objective loci. At the grass roots it was to be found in the home/school/congregation; then moving up the hierarchy it was to be found in visitors/superintendents; then in the city council and magistracy, the electoral princes, and the Wittenberg faculty; and finally and more narrowly, in Luther himself.

Back to 1530 and the Future None of these historical details is stated in the Augsburg Confession, but all are present below the surface. Looking more closely at Article 28, we can see that its complaints are alleged primarily towards the neglect by bishops of their evangelical office, their institution of human customs as though divine, and their illegitimate exercise of coercive force in matters of conscience. Note that the confessors do not negate the office per se, not even its medieval form in which the bishop often exercised both ecclesial and political jurisdiction. Their confession is that bishops, qua bishops, possess a limited jurisdiction circumscribed by the apostolic call to teach the Gospel, exercise the keys, and judge doctrine. Any additional jurisdiction - in political affairs, for example - belongs to them by human, not divine right.

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Bornkamm, 485. Ozment, 152-153.

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The combination of these factors, not any one of them by itself, is presented to Emperor Charles V at Augsburg as grounds for the reformers’ already existing state of religious disobedience. Towards the end of Article 28 the matter is summarised: ‘the bishops might easily retain the lawful obedience of men if they did not insist on the observance of traditions which cannot be kept with a good conscience’ (Tappert, 93.69). What the confessors are advocating is a quatenus obedience of bishops, that is, obedience insofar as the bishops do not contravene Scripture and universal Christian practice and thereby demand the faithful to cross their consciences (see Tappert, 90.55). Their basic appeal is not that the bishops restore concord ‘at the expense of their honour and dignity’ but ‘only that they relax unjust burdens which are new and were introduced contrary to the custom of the church catholic’ (Tappert 93.71-72). Melanchthon’s reply in his Apology to the subsequent Roman Confutation summarises matters likewise. The scriptural commands to obey one’s bishop (Lk 10:16; Heb 13:17; Mt 23:3) apply so long as they are not used to create an authority for bishops ‘apart from the Gospel.’ To the extent that the bishops teach wicked things, they should not be heard, ‘for we must obey God rather than men’ (Ac 5:29; Tappert 284.18 – 285.25). Presumably it would not have been too late to restore concord had the Roman leadership softened towards the confessors of the Augustana and lifted what the latter considered damning burdens on the faithful. Such concessions, however, quite apart from compromising theological principle, would no doubt have hastened the impending loss for the papal establishment of political power and its jurisdiction over lands fetching substantial revenue. But I dare say there may also have been a further obstacle to reconciliation on the side of the confessors themselves. I have in mind here their actual rejection of the episcopal office – at least in its historic form, in spite of their verbal acceptance of it in principle. Convinced that schism had been forced upon them, their provisional trials with Duke John Frederick of Saxony and the visitation team had confirmed the possibility that they could manage without Rome and its bishops altogether. If anything, Rome’s alleged abuses were taken as apparent evidence of its abdication from office and its own selfexpulsion from the Church, whereas the restoration of the glory of Christ and the consolation of consciences in the German churches – albeit at the expense of some

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Christian discipline – were taken as evidence that the true Church was being preserved unharmed quite apart from the traditional medieval episcopate. It was therefore precisely in actual separation from the traditional episcopal church polity that the confessors saw themselves as the true Church of God and as the authentic heirs of the catholic tradition.33 We wind up this brief exploration by returning to Gustafson, both to confirm and tentatively to correct. ‘The confessors at Augsburg were of the conviction’, he asserts, ‘that an evangelical episcopacy best served the church. Such an episcopacy both taught and judged doctrine and conduct. The buck stopped with the bishop.’34 Our cursory study leaves open the possibility that that may well have been the case. But we have also seen how that conviction had become a theological principle separated from the confessors’ actual ecclesial practice. I wonder whether the problems that Gustafson complains are inherent to North American Lutheranism are not themselves discernible in a sentence he offers as a summary of his whole agenda: ‘It is not a case of a perfect structure but rather of which structure is best.’ As long as people remain at the level of asking only what is best or most expedient in a given situation, they are at risk of subjecting their endeavours to utilitarian interests. I would argue that our question should first be not what structure is ‘best’, but what structure is true. It is a question at once both more simple and more complex, but whose answers I sense lie less in the realm of the ideal and abstract, and more in the realm of concrete struggle.

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Leif Grane (The Augsburg Confession: A Commentary [ET Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987], 153) also recognises the high esteem in which AC holds the office of bishop: ‘By avoiding any mention of the teaching of the priesthood of all believers, the AC has suppressed an important premise in Luther’s perspective on the ministry.’ He continues further on: ‘Precisely because the Lutheran reformers do not consider themselves church founders, it is logical that the AC regards the office of the bishop as being normal in the church’ (157-158). Nevertheless he concludes that in its view ‘[t]he church does not stand or fall by the office of the bishop. The only thing necessary is the ministry of the Word, which is the true task of the bishop as well. The fate of the office of bishop, therefore, must depend on whether or not it serves the Gospel’ (158). 34 Gustafson, 6.

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