Theological Origins of Modernity

117. Ibid., 243.
118. Marius, Martin Luther, 385.
119. “What made Luther’s theology so vivid and intelligible was not the outer rhetoric,
but the connection of the Word of God with corporeality.” Oberman, Luther, 274.
120. Ibid. Th e apparent connection here to Ficino’s conception of love is probably illusory.
For Luther God is in the world as love but that love is not in me until I
am infused with Christ. Th ere is thus no general human attraction to God. Only
through grace are the elect redirected to the divine.
121. Oberman, Luther, 327.
122. Marius, Martin Luther, 453. Jesus uses charis fi ve times in the Gospels but never
in the salvifi c sense Luther employs. Th ere are also two uses of the word in Acts
15:6–11 and 18:27–28 and one use in John 1:14–17 that may in a general way support
Luther’s reading, but they are at best contestable.
chapter five
notes to pages 126–136 325
1. While Tilly was a religious zealot, he apparently did not want to destroy the city
since he needed it as a bastion against the fast-approaching Gustavus Adolphus.
Th at said, he seems to have had little concern for the fate of its inhabitants and did
nothing for the women who had been carried off to the camp. Th e destruction of
Magdeburg earned him a principal place in John Foxe’s famous Book of Martyrs
(1663) as the epitome of evil. For years aft erwards, Protestants replied to Catholic
pleas for mercy with assurances that they would show them “Magdeburg mercy”
and “Magdeburg justice.” Th e various contemporary accounts of the destruction
of the city—Europe’s fi rst media event—are contained in Werner Lahne, Magdeburgs
Zerstörung in der Zeitgenössichen Publizistik (Magdeburg: Magdeburgs
Geschichtsvereins, 1931).
2. For an account that calls into question the religious origins of the Wars of Religion,
see William Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’:
Th e Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Th eology 11, no. 4 (October
1995): 397–420. I do not mean to deny that the consolidation of the state was an
important factor in these wars. I do want to assert, however, that without religious
fanaticism they would have taken a diff erent and much less violent form.
3. Cited in Gordon Rupp, Th e Righteousness of God: Luther Studies (London: Hodder
Hodden and Stoughton, 1953), 259.
4. Rupp, Th e Righteousness of God, 263.
5. A. G. Dickens, “Luther and the Humanists,” in Politics and Culture in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Phyllis Mack and Margaret Jacob (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 202. Lewis Spitz, Luther and German Humanism (Aldershot:
Variorum, 1996), 70, 76, 78.
6. Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1983–87), 2:212.
7. Harry J. McSorley, Luther: Right or Wrong? An Ecumenical-Th eological Study
of Luther’s Major Work, “Th e Bondage of the Will” (New York: Newman Press,
1968), 63.