Luther / Bossuet/Hobbes Martin Luther\'s Radical Religion

Luther / Bossuet/Hobbes

Martin Luther's Radical Religion Vision

When Martin Luther nailed his infamous 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, he could hardly have foreseen that the consequences of his declarations would shake the Western world for centuries. While Luther was certainly not working in a vacuum and absorbed many of his attitudes towards the Catholic Church from the growing mistrust of the papacy in Germany at the time, his elegant theological arguments against the power of the pope and the rituals of Catholicism provided a strong religious alternative to the Roman Catholic faith.

The instigation for the 95 Theses and one of the issues at the heart of Luther's argument against the Church was the practice of the selling of indulgences. Indulgences were essentially letters of forgiveness from the Church that could be bought in lieu of the traditional good works that had to be performed for salvation. The idea that one could "buy" salvation from the Church was horrific to Luther. In the letter that prefaced his 95 Theses, he expressed dismay for "the unhappy souls [who] believe that if they have purchased letters of indulgence they are sure of their salvation" (Luther, 26). For Luther, salvation was solely at the discretion of God, and not even the most pious man could be sure of his salvation, much less the man who paid money for the forgiveness of his sins.

If salvation is to be achieved at all, according to Luther, it must be achieved through an intense awareness of one's sins and an accompanying "self-hatred" and self-mortification that remains constant "until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven" (30). This attitude fundamentally undermined one of the cornerstones of Catholic faith: that the absolution of sins could be achieved through penitence, and that it could be dispensed by priests. For Luther, salvation was a matter between the individual and God.

There is a strong strain of individualism running through the Theses that serves to call into question not only the selling of indulgences but also the power of the Papacy. While Luther acknowledges that the declarations of remission and the ritual role that the pope plays are important to the life of the Church and are indeed indicative of the will of God, he does not acknowledge that the pope's power extends to the personal relationship between an individual and God. "Every true Christian," he states, "whether living or dead, has part in all the blessings of Christ and the Church, and this is granted him by God, with or without letters of pardon" (33).

While Luther does not seem to have conscientiously set out to break with the Catholic Church -- in fact, he makes many attempts in his early writings to protect the Church from the implications of his own statements -- his radical view of the deeply intimate relationship between every man and God, his demotion of priestly ritual to expressions of the Church, not expressions of God, and his declaration that the power of the pope is not fundamentally different from the power of the poorest man in God's eyes, all combined to make his theology a powerful argument against Catholicism.

Bishop Bossuet and Thomas Hobbes

One of the primary political issues in Europe during the 18th century was the role of the monarchy, its licenses and limitations, and it appropriateness as a government for free and rational men. Important voices emerged for each side of the debate: arguments for the containment of the monarchy were made by Locke and Rousseau, while arguments for the absolute power of the monarchy were made by Bishop Bossuet and Hobbes. Bossuet and Hobbes both had similar views of the nature of man and reached similar conclusions about how best to govern that nature, but their arguments are based on very different premises.

Bossuet was an important theologian of his day, and sought to defend the absolutism of the French monarchy through the Scripture. In his Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, Bossuet defends monarchy based on four characteristics: it is divinely ordained, paternal, absolute, and rationally justified (Carsten, 100). According to Bossuet, the state of original sin has led to a natural anarchy among men, and absolute monarchy is the remedy that most resembles God's relationship to man. Additionally, monarchy is the government most often seen in the Scriptures and in human history, and therefore is the government most naturally arrived at by the course of civilization.