Can Christian Politicians Reform the Church? Martin Luther’s Address to the Christian Nobility (1520)

If a church refuses to reform itself, who must reform it? Three years after affixing his 95 Theses to Wittenberg’s Castle Church door, Martin Luther was confronted with such a question. Since 1517, Luther had pursued reform in the Catholic Church. By 1520, however, all his appeals for reform had been rejected and opposed by the ecclesiastical hierarchies. In June 1520, Luther received a copy of Epitome of a Response to Martin Luther, in which Silvestro Mazzolini (c. 1426–1523)—the pope’s theological advisor and censor of books—argued that the pope’s authority superseded church councils and Scripture itself. Mazzolini’s work enraged Luther, who now concluded Rome incapable of reforming itself from within. The church needed outside intervention. But who could, or should, carry out such a task?

In his booklet, Address to the Christian Nobility, Luther answered that question by placing the responsibility of reform at the feet of the German nobility. Luther wanted the German princes to call a church council to reform the church. But there was one problem: German rulers did not hold office in the church’s ecclesiastical structure. So, on what basis might they call this council?

The Church’s Three Walls

To build his case, Luther first sought to tear down “three walls” that, in his view, the Catholic church used to avoid accountability for its conduct and doctrine. Only then could the German nobility get along with the reformation of the church and stop Rome from dealing spiritual and economic damage to Germany. As we will see, Luther’s logic behind the dismantling of these three walls set forth important theological principles that apply down to the present day.

The first and most fundamental wall the church hid behind was its claim that “spiritual authority is above secular authority.”^[1] The church considered the pope, bishop, priests, and monks to be the “spiritual estate,”^[2] while princes, lords, artisans, and farmers were the “secular estate”^[3]. This sharp divide created two jurisdictions. For example, clergy were tried in ecclesiastical courts rather than secular ones, even when charged with civil crimes. Political rulers, as members of the secular estate, had no right to interfere with spiritual matters.

Luther rejected that divide. He considered the so-called spiritual and secular estates a false dichotomy, for “all Christians are truly of spiritual status, and there is no difference among them except that of office” ^[4]. Because of their shared baptism in Christ, all Christians should consider themselves priests, even as the community sets individuals apart to occupy the priestly office.

If all believers are priests, then two key implications follow. First, secular rulers “must regard their office as one that has a proper place in the Christian community and is useful to it” ^[5]. In other words, the German princes of Luther’s day—simply by virtue of being Christians—should feel both empowered to invest in the church and, as Luther urged, responsible to seek its reform. Second, according to Luther, “a priest in Christendom is nothing but an officeholder” ^[6]. Thus, if a priest is “deposed, he [becomes] a peasant or a townsman like anybody else” ^[7]. Ordination, then, did not confer a change in a person’s ontological state; it merely assigned a function within the community.

With the first wall down, Luther turned to dismantle the second, which concerned who may interpret Scripture. If all believers are priests, then Rome’s “claim that only the pope may interpret Scripture is an outrageous fancied fable.”^[8] Jesus gave the keys of Matthew 16:19, Luther argued, to the entire church, not to one man alone. As priests, believers possess the power to “test and judge what is right or wrong in matters of faith” and therefore bear the responsibility “to understand and defend it, and to denounce every error.”^[9] Whatever their vocation, every Christian, Luther insisted, must be a person of the Book.

The third wall, Luther said, “falls of itself once the first two are down.”^[10] Rome claimed that only the pope could summon a church council, leaving secular rulers powerless to pursue doctrinal reform. Luther countered that this claim rested on weak canon law and contradicted Scripture. In Acts 15, apostles and elders called the first church council, not Peter. Likewise, the emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, not a Roman bishop. More importantly, secular rulers were uniquely suited to do so, not simply because of their political power, but because they too were “fellow-Christians, fellow-priests, fellow-participants in spiritual authority, sharing power over all things.”^[11] When the church fell into decay, Luther argued, such rulers had both the right and the duty to call a council without the pope’s consent.

Redefining Authority

With these three walls dismantled, Luther redefined authority in Christendom, relocating spiritual power from the papacy to the shared priesthood of all believers and the faithful exercise of their secular callings. He did not urge princes to invent doctrine, but to wield their God-given authority in a Christian manner for the health of the church. Having exposed the corruption of the so-called “spiritual” estate, Luther devoted the rest of the treatise to calling for the German nobility—as Christians now awakened to their duty—to enact concrete reforms in church and society.

Luther called for sweeping changes within the papacy itself. The pope’s “ostentatious” lifestyle and court should cease,^[12] and the bloated papal household reduced by ninety-nine percent. The “pope’s household should be supported out of the pope’s own pocket,”^[13] not through external revenues. Luther further urged the abolition of pilgrimages to Rome, the permission for priests to marry, the cessation of masses for the dead, a reduction in the number of festivals, and other reforms that would soon define the Reformation.

Luther also demanded changes in Germany’s relationship to the papacy. German rulers, he argued, should “govern and protect the physical and spiritual goods” of their realm from papal administrators “who, dressed in sheep’s clothing, pretend to be shepherds and rulers.”^[14] They were to end all payments to Rome and prevent benefices from falling into Roman hands. Most ecclesiastical matters within Germany, Luther maintained, should be adjudicated within Germany, not by Rome. His essential point was clear: Rome had long exploited Germany, and the time had come to resist.

Luther’s bold appeals in Address spread like wildfire. Published in German, the initial print run of 4,000 sold out in six days, “an unprecedented feat at the time.”^[15] His appeals did receive an answer, though not the one he had hoped for. A year later, at the Diet of Worms (1521), the German nobility delivered their response: they declared Luther and his teachings outlawed. But despite this, throughout the 1520s, German rulers began to heed his call for reform, setting in motion the spiritual and political upheavals that would define the Reformation era.

Conclusion: Three Ways Luther’s Address Speaks Today

15. Herman Selderhuis, Martin Luther: A Spiritual Biography (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 144.

More than five hundred years later, what should Christians take away from Luther’s Address? On the one hand, Luther’s context was vastly different from that of an evangelical Christian in the United States today. The Roman Catholic Church does not draw direct financial support from the American government, nor does the papacy wield the same political or religious authority it held in 1520. Furthermore, most Protestant churches in America would resist the idea of governmental involvement in church councils. And, for independent, congregationally ruled churches, any such council would carry no doctrinal authority.

On the other hand, Luther’s Address still speaks powerfully to believers today in at least three ways. First, many of his critiques of the papacy remain unaddressed. Luther opposed the concentration of spiritual authority in a single office and rejected the doctrine of papal infallibility, which the Catholic Church reaffirmed in 1870 at the First Vatican Council. Catholic priests remain forbidden to marry, and masses for the dead continue to be celebrated in many Catholic churches. All these practices persist, as Luther said, “without any proof from Scripture,”^[16] and are rightly rejected by Protestant churches.

16. Luther, “To the Christian Nobility,” 386.

Second, Luther’s reaffirmation of the priesthood of all believers carries profound implications for every Christian, whether lay leader or pastor. For ordinary church members, this doctrine is a call to active participation. Luther sought to awaken ordinary Christians to live out their priestly calling within their congregations. Of course, most readers of this article do not possess the influence of the sixteenth-century German nobility. Yet the call remains the same: lay believers are not to be mere spectators in the life of the church but active participants responsible for its spiritual health, whether through service, stewardship, prayer, or mutual care. The care of the church, Luther would insist, belongs to every covenanted member, not only to those on the church payroll.

For pastors, the priesthood of all believers rightly limits and refines the authority of their office. Luther did not abolish the pastoral role or encourage interpretive chaos; rather, he insisted that every believer, as a priest, bears the responsibility to discern and, when necessary, challenge unbiblical teaching. In turn, pastors must exercise their authority with gentleness and teachability, recognizing that their authority stretches as far as they are aligned with His written Word.

Finally, Luther’s call to embrace the ordinary means of grace remains deeply instructive. In his critique of the Catholic Church’s canonization of saints, Luther writes, “My advice is to let the saints canonize themselves. Indeed, it is God alone who should canonize them. And let all stay in their own parishes, where they will find more than in all the shrines even if they were all rolled into one. In one’s own parish one finds baptism, the sacrament, preaching, and one’s neighbor, and these things are greater than all the saints in heaven.”^[17] True spiritual vitality, Luther reminds us, is found not in pilgrimages or spectacles but in the steady rhythms of Word, sacrament, and community life within the local church.

17. Luther, “To the Christian Nobility,” 435.