Admonition to Peace

In the spring of 1525, peasants across Swabia and much of southern Germany were organizing, arming, and publishing their grievances. Their most widely circulated manifesto, the Twelve Articles, grounded demands about pastors, tithes, serfdom, hunting rights, and feudal dues in the authority of Scripture, and it named Luther among the teachers who could judge whether the demands were just. Luther answered in April with the Admonition to Peace, a reply addressed in two parts, first to the princes and lords, then to the peasants, and closed with a word to both. It was written before the uprising turned to open slaughter; within weeks he would issue the far harsher Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, and the two tracts have been read together ever since.

The first address is the one readers tend to forget. Luther tells the rulers that the revolt is their own doing: they have taxed and fleeced the common man, lived in luxury on his labor, and tried to stamp out the gospel, and now God's wrath is at their door. He warns them that they cannot win by force what they have lost by injustice, and that several of the articles are so reasonable that only tyrants would refuse them. He urges concession and negotiation while there is still time. The second address turns on the peasants with equal severity, but on different grounds. They may have been wronged, he says, but the name of Christ cannot be attached to rebellion. The Christian's law is to suffer injustice, not to avenge it; Romans 13 places the sword in the hands of authority, and Matthew 5 forbids the disciple to seize it. If they want to fight, they must do so as men asserting natural claims, not as Christians, because a Christian who takes up arms against his lord has already abandoned the gospel he claims to defend. He then works through the articles in turn: the right to choose a pastor he largely affirms, with conditions about who pays him; the withholding of tithes he calls theft; the appeal to Christian freedom against serfdom he rejects outright, citing the patriarchs and Paul, since spiritual liberty says nothing about bodily station. He warns the peasants against the preachers inflaming them, whom he does not hesitate to call murder-prophets. To both sides he proposes arbitration by representatives of the nobility and the cities, and predicts that if neither yields, Germany will be ruined and both parties damned.

The work endures because it is the clearest statement of Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms applied under pressure, and because it exposes the fault line in his thought: he could denounce rulers with real force and still deny the governed any right to resist them. Its sequel has overshadowed it, but the Admonition is the more balanced and more revealing document, written while Luther still hoped the catastrophe could be averted.

Who should read this: anyone working through Christian teaching on political authority, resistance, and the limits of appeals to Scripture in social conflict, and anyone trying to understand why the Reformation lost the peasants. It is not for readers looking for spiritual consolation or devotional reading; it is a political tract written in anger and fear, and it should be read as one.