Elijah or John the Baptist at the time of Christ. Indeed, the famous Wittenberg painter Lucas Cranach oſt en depicted Luther the preacher as John the Baptist, point- ing to Christ, “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” T at is what pastors today also are— “fi nger pointers” to Christ the savior of the world.
Luther hated peasants. On a fl ight back from Germany, I was once seated next to a Philadelphia night watchman who was an amateur historian. When he heard what I did for a living, he got excited and said, “I’ve always wanted to ask two ques- tions about Martin Luther. Why did he hate the peas- ants, and why did he hate the Jews?” T e second question was answered defi nitively by the
ELCA Church Council in a 1994 statement titled “T e Declaration of the ELCA to the Jewish Community” (search for this title at
www.elca.org). Luther’s statements about the Jews were wrong, and we repudiate them. When it comes to the peasants,
however, the story is more complicated. When the Peasants’ War erupted in 1525, the peasants asked Luther to give his theologi- cal opinion of their demands found in “T e Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasantry.” He replied with an “Admo- nition” in which the nobles and peasants came in for almost equal condemnation. Aſt er experiencing a small por-
tion of the revolt fi rsthand, Luther then assumed (incorrectly) that the “Twelve Articles” was a ruse. So he wrote an appendix to his fi rst tract, which was quickly reprinted sepa- rately, titled “Against the Murdering and Marauding Peasants”—that is, against these other lawless peasants who were destroying all good order. Even some of his supporters were shocked, lead- ing him to write another tract in the sum- mer of 1525 defending his harsh language. When Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s early sup-
porter, wrote a history of the Peasants’ War, he blamed Luther for being bourgeois and uncaring toward the lower classes. T is was never the case. Luther’s grand- father had been a farmer, and he wrote many of his most important tracts to educate what he called the “simple” folk, that is, the illiterate. T ere weren’t nearly
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the enormous class distinctions in the 16th century that arose in German-speaking lands during the 18th and 19th centuries. Luther wrote all those tracts during the Peasants’ War
not to destroy German peasantry, but to prevent the chaos of revolution and protect those who were getting caught up in the fray against their will.
Luther invented the Christmas tree. Of course, every age reinvents historical fi gures to serve their times. In this case, a famous 19th-century etching showing Luther and his family sitting around a Christ- mas tree rewrote history.
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