THE LIBERATION OF MARTIN LUTHER FROMHIS CAPTIVITY

It is obvious that for centuries after the Reformation and for the majority of his followers Martin Luther was not a theologian of the worldwide church. Rather, already in the seventeenth century, in Lutheran Orthodoxy, he was considered to be the father, founder, and foremost – if not normative – theologian of the Lutheran church and tradition. Luther became the Lutheran par excellence. He was not only the Lutheran, but the German Lutheran, and as a central figure and cornerstone of German Lutheran identity his critical and even polemical position over against the Roman Catholic and Reformed traditions became prominent while his vision of the universal church was forgotten or ignored.

Throughout the ensuing nearly four centuries after his appearance asa reformer, Luther was owned and reinterpreted, misrepresented and misusedas the chief ideologist and hero of Lutheran Protestantism. During theEnlightenment period of the eighteenth century, Luther was seen as theChristian hero, who had liberated Protestant Germany from the dictates ofa foreign power, the papacy in Rome. He had brought freedom from theyoke of tradition and the bondage of conscience. In the nineteenth centuryLuther was praised as the grandiose representative of the German nationalspirit, while in the twentieth century at the time of World War II such distortedimages were replaced by a sharply contrasting one when some Anglo-Saxon writers considered Luther as initiator of a movement of authoritarianideology that led, by way of Bismarck, finally to Adolf Hitler’s Nazism.