Luther also was significant in the Reformation as he provided a figurehead, someone to look to for confirmation on issues being debated between the reformers. He was also not afraid to embrace technology, and this helped the Reformation most significantly by his exploitation of the newly developed printing press, as this enabled Luther and other Reformers to spread their word more easily than by word-of-mouth or by individually writing out any pamphlets. Showing this is a quote from Aleander, who said “Nine people out of ten cry ‘Luther’ and the rest ‘Death to the Roman Curia”.
Luther’s work itself was individual, and unlikely to have been recreated by someone else if he had not been there in the first place to write it. Even if he had been killed by Charles V at their meeting, he would already have published his three greatest pieces of work – “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation”, which played the national card, “The Babylonish Captivity of the Christian Church”, which attacked Roman authority, and “The Liberty of the Christian Man”, which asserted justification by faith alone. These were arguably the three most influential treatises out of all the Reformation texts, and without them the Reformation might never have occurred.
However, Luther did not entirely account for the Reformation. If, at the Diet, Charles had succumbed to the pressure from many people and arrested and executed Luther, it would probably not have made much of a difference to what was to happen after it. If Luther had moved against the wishes of the Princes, in particular Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, they would have turned against Charles, and he needed their support to maintain his role as Holy Roman Emperor. There were lots of other people who were prominent in its development, and would surely, had Luther been absent, have taken over the role as the figurehead of the movement, and by the time that Luther travelled to Worms, lots of people had picked up on and started supporting his ideas. This is shown by the same quote I used earlier; “Nine people out of ten cry ‘Luther’ and the rest ‘death to the Roman curia”.
Another point that leads away from the argument that Martin Luther was definitely instrumental in the German Reformation is that other people also wrote against the Catholic Church. John Calvin was a French Protestant Theologian, a central developer of the system of Christian Theology called Calvinism. He too rejected papal authority, but in Geneva instead, and established a new scheme of civic and ecclesiastical governance. He was also renowned for his teachings and writings, in particular for his “Institutes of the Christian Religion”.
Luther, towards the end of his life, actually had a detrimental effect on the movement. He drove away much support and isolated himself and some sections of the movement from others, drawing divisions in a usually strong, united front. He lost a lot of support when he denounced the peasants, condemning what they were doing. In the same year that this happened, when he returned to Wittenburg in 1521, Luther also denounced those who had attempted a radical reform of worship in his absence, including a former colleague of his, Andreas Karlstadt, who was eventually expelled from Wittenburg. Furthermore, he parted company with a great Dutch humanist named Erasmus after he finally wrote against Luther in 1525 in “On the Bondage of the Will”. Another argument Luther was involved in with another significant protester to the Catholic religion was the Swiss reformer Zwingli. Although his “right-hand men” Melanchthon and Oecolampadius realised that co-operation with the Swiss reformer would be beneficial for the movement, Luther did not, and bracketed him with Karlstadt and the leader of the peasant revolution, Thomas Mừnzer, which severely offended Zwingli and ultimately created a huge division in the Lutheran movement.
Overall I do not think that Luther himself was individually greatly important to the German Reformation. He was the catalyst for the timing of it, as he was the person to initiate the entire movement, but it would have taken place eventually without the 95 theses coming into existence: the work of people like Zwingli and Erasmus, as mentioned above proves that. However, he did play a very significant part in acting as the figurehead of the movement, unafraid of potential consequences, and for that he is a very big part of the history of the German Reformation.
