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The German city of Nürnberg, the setting of Rittgers' book, was one of the first European locales to enact these revolutionary changes. In the early 16th century, Nürnberg was a self-governing community with a population of approximately 40,000—one of the largest and most powerful cities in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire.
As in many other German cities, the force of Reformation in Nürnberg had a great deal to do with its powers of negation. Though Luther's theology offered a new, positive vision of grace, it gained strength and popularity largely as a rejection—both of traditional clerical authority and the elaborate system of penances, pilgrimages, processions, and pious bequests through which medieval Christians had sought to appease God. In the new "evangelical" doctrine, grace was not in the possession of a clerical caste, to be dispensed incrementally during each sinner's lifetime. Rather, it was offered freely and fully to all sinners. This new vision radically simplified religious life. The effect seems to have been something akin to a flood sweeping over fields crisscrossed by an elaborate irrigation network. Abundant waters made the old, grooved channels irrelevant. At times, they threatened to destroy the fields altogether.
By the mid 1520s, just a few years after the publication of Luther's 95 Theses, the Nürnberg city council had dismantled much of the traditional religious system. The magistrates abolished penitential rites, shut down the city's main monasteries, and took control of poor relief and marriage (two jurisdictions that had previously belonged to the Church). The secretary to the city council, Lazarus Spengler, a layman, wrote a theological treatise, An Apology for Luther's Teaching (1519), in which he attacked medieval churchmen as "preachers of fables," who taught the laity that they could buy their way out of purgatory as at a "fair" or "merchant's market." Reformers aimed to convince Nürnbergers that they need not rely on the elaborate penitential rites they had learned as youths.
After depriving the clergy of their traditional monopoly on grace, however, the city was left to determine exactly what authority a new evangelical pastorate would possess. How much power would they have to drive sinners to repentance and bring them safely into grace? For Protestants, of course, it was primarily the preached Word that enacted and promoted the sinner's rebirth, by leading her to trust God's free promise of forgiveness. Even so, a great quarrel arose in Nürnberg about the role private confession should play in bringing about true faith and salvation.
Medieval theologians had vigorously debated exactly how the clergy administered grace, but almost no one questioned that priests alone could administer divine forgiveness. Before laypersons took communion each year during Holy Week, they were required to confess all their sins to a priest, receiving from him absolution as well as penances for repaying God and shortening one's time in purgatory. Rittgers stresses the mercantilistic aspects of the traditional system. For late medieval men and women, purgatory was a sort of "debtors' prison." Penance was a means of settling one's spiritual account with God. If we extend these metaphors further, we might liken the priest to a banker or cashier—the middleman without whom these transactions could not take place.
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