Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments

Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments is Martin Luther's longest and angriest treatise against a former ally. Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt had been his senior colleague at Wittenberg, had led the stripping of images and the reordering of the Mass during Luther's absence at the Wartburg, and had then moved to the parish of Orlamünde, where he abandoned clerical dress, denied Christ's bodily presence in the Supper, and taught that the images condemned in Exodus must be torn down. After a bitter confrontation at Jena in August 1524 and Karlstadt's expulsion from Electoral Saxony, Karlstadt published a series of tracts from Basel attacking Luther by name. Luther answered in two parts, the first appearing at the turn of 1524 into 1525 and the second in January 1525, with Thomas Müntzer and the Peasants' uprising already in view. The title is sarcasm: the "heavenly prophets" are those who claim an inner voice of the Spirit superior to the outward Word.

The argument turns on order. God, Luther insists, works from the outside in: he gives the preached Word and the sacraments first, and through these the Spirit creates faith; Karlstadt reverses this, demanding inner mortification and Gelassenheit before anything external may count, and so makes the Christian's standing depend on self-produced experience. On images Luther argues that the Mosaic law as a civil and ceremonial code binds Jews, not Christians, and that only what agrees with natural law in the Decalogue remains in force; images are therefore a matter of freedom, to be removed where they are worshipped and removed by lawful authority, not smashed by a crowd stirred up by preachers. Idols must first be torn out of the heart by the Word. On the Supper he dismantles Karlstadt's reading of "this is my body," in which Christ supposedly pointed to his own seated body rather than the bread, and defends the plain sense of the words: the forgiveness won once on the cross is handed out in the Word and the sacrament, and to deny the body in the bread is to deny the place where God has promised to give it. The whole is laced with mockery, repetition, and real theological precision at once.

The treatise has continued to matter because it fixed positions that outlasted the quarrel with Karlstadt. It supplied the Lutheran doctrine of the means of grace, the standard Lutheran treatment of the law of Moses and of things indifferent, and the hermeneutic of the words of institution that Luther would carry into the dispute with Zwingli and to Marburg in 1529. It also shows the Reformation's first major fracture from the inside, with the fear of revolt already shaping the theology.

Who should read this: those studying Reformation sacramental theology, the Lutheran distinction between inner and outer, or the roots of Protestant arguments about images and iconoclasm will find it indispensable. It is not a devotional text and not a first Luther book; readers wanting the pastoral or consoling Luther should begin elsewhere and come to this prepared for a polemicist in full cry.