An Open Letter on the Harsh Book Against the Peasants

In May 1525 Luther published Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, a short tract urging the German princes to strike down the peasant rebellion without hesitation. By the time it circulated widely, the rebellion had already been crushed at Frankenhausen and elsewhere, and the pamphlet appeared to many readers as a blessing on a slaughter. Luther was attacked from both sides: Catholic opponents charged that the rebellion was the fruit of his own gospel, while sympathizers of the peasants and even some of his friends accused him of cruelty, inconsistency, and flattery of tyrants. Caspar Müller, chancellor of the county of Mansfeld, asked him to answer these charges. The Open Letter, written in July 1525 and addressed to Müller, is Luther's refusal to retract a word.

The letter's governing move is the distinction between two kingdoms. The kingdom of God, Luther argues, is a realm of grace and mercy, where sins are forgiven and the wronged forbear. The kingdom of the world is a realm of wrath and severity, where the sword punishes evildoers so that the innocent may live in peace. The critics who demanded mercy for the rebels, he says, had confused the two: they wanted the sword to act like the gospel. A rebel who takes up arms against lawful authority has placed himself under the kingdom of wrath, and to show him mercy while he is in arms is to show cruelty to everyone he would kill. Luther is caustic toward what he calls the preachers of mercy, whom he regards as cowards who had been silent when the peasants were plundering and found their voice only when the peasants were losing. The peasants had refused to listen to his Admonition to Peace or to anyone else; having stopped their ears to the word, they had to have them opened by force.

Yet the letter is not a simple defense of everything the princes did. Luther insists his tract was aimed at rebels still in revolt, not at the defeated and captured, and he condemns the rulers who kept killing after the fighting was over, calling them furious and raving tyrants who would answer to God. Mercy belongs to those who lay down the sword and plead for it. He promises that he would write against the bloodthirsty nobles as well, and he closes by granting that God will judge the whole affair, princes and peasants alike.

The Open Letter has endured because it is Luther's fullest statement, in the heat of events, of how he believed Christians should think about civil violence, and because its tone has shaped judgments of him for five centuries. It shows the two-kingdoms teaching under maximum pressure, and it shows a theologian who could not or would not soften a position that had helped sanction mass killing.

Who should read this: readers studying Luther's political theology, the Peasants' War, or the history of Christian thinking about rebellion and the state, and anyone who wants to weigh Luther's own defense before passing judgment on him. It is not devotional reading, and those seeking comfort or spiritual counsel should look elsewhere in his writings.