Ranke did a great service to Reformation history by discarding the philosophical presuppositions of the idealistic school and insisting that the history of the sixteenth-century religious upheaval should only be written after a fresh and full confrontation with the sources. But his hope that history might be written with utter objectivity, just as it happened, proved to be illusory. In order to bring the record of the past into manageable compass, the historian must perforce select his sources, and that selection can be highly subjective. ...

The modern historian is aware of this and seeks to fortify himself by declaring his prejudices in advance. ... But a deeper difficulty is that we are not even aware of our prejudices because frequently they are those which we share with our age. If we are to recognize that they are prejudices, we must engage in a comparison between the point of view of our time and those of previous times. Thus we invoke history to disclose to us our presuppositions in the approach to history.

The historiography of the Reformation ... [in] its main lines ... may be indicated. The age of the Reformation itself was polemical and documentary. ... The eighteenth century tried to achieve impartiality. This was done in either of two ways: by the historian's dissociating himself equally from all parties and movements or by projecting himself into them all with equal sympathy. ...

Under the impact of idealistic philosophy the nineteenth century sought to surmount the disjointedness of all previous treatments and discover connections, motifs, and laws. ...

Ranke swept away philosophical theorizing with his demand for a thorough and extensive examination of the sources. But he, too, had a philosophy--that of divine providence in history, evidenced in order, necessity, and coherence. The discontinuities of the Reformation were, therefore, minimized, and the conservative side of Luther was exalted.

The liberal Protestants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated the Renaissance and Reformation as conjoint phases of a movement of emancipation away from the authority of the church. ... The Reformation itself, however, was addicted to dogma, intolerance, and constraint.

The most radical break with all of these positions was inaugurated by the essay of Karl Holl in 1917, "What Did Luther Mean by Religion?" Holl rediscovered the core of Luther's piety, his overpowering sense of moral obligation, his feeling of utter impotence before the demands of God, his terror of the divine wrath justly impending, his unshakable clinging to God's Word and promises. Luther was afflicted with the malaise de l'univers and found surcease only through a new view of God and the Scriptures. Neither philosophy, sociology, nationalism, nor economics can explain Luther. Only religion can provide the explanation.

From this analysis, which inaugurated the Luther renaissance, we may take our departure. The question immediately arises, if this be a true picture of Luther, what then of the Reformation? Why did he gain a following? Did his disciples really understand him or did they rally for the wrong reasons? Were they convinced that indulgences were blasphemy because they are based on the contention that the saints have earned merits which can be presented as a claim upon God, or did the populace respond in order to rid themselves of financial exploitation?

There are those who say that this or some other extraneous consideration must have been determinative because, as a matter of fact, Luther's religious affirmations were in no sense novel and when previously made had no such effect. Luther happened to emerge amid a set of circumstances peculiarly auspicious. Without such a stage and without concommitants both economic and political the Reformation never would have taken hold. ...

But if it be granted that Luther was original as to religion, the question still remains whether men were stirred by his religion or merely by his revolt. Some historians ... offer an economic explanation. This of itself is by no means novel. The charge arose almost at once that the princes supported Luther in order to expropriate the goods of the church, that the peasants at first rallied to him in the hope that the freedom of the Gospel would mean freedom from serfdom, that the masses espoused the Gospel in order to throw off tithes, fees, and indulgences. To such an explanation ... the most decisive [reply] is that in short order the populace and the princes risked their goods and their lives by adherence to the new faith.

Other interpreters stress political factors, contending that the Reformation could have begun in no other country than Germany because of the political decentralization. ... There is some point no doubt in this contention. ... Perhaps one may safely say that the Reformation took hold and survived only where it coincided with some sort of political interest, but the identification must not be too precise.

Contemporary histories of the Reformation tend to be misleading because the religious understanding of the Reformation is subordinated to the exigencies of teaching. Political history predominates in ... [recent] works. ... The explanation may be that these works are not histories of the Reformation, but rather histories of Europe or of Germany during the period of the Reformation. ... In these works politics and sociology play as much or even a greater part than religion. One suspects that the demands of university courses have determined the allocation of space.