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Two famous Reformation woodcuts depict Luther as the “German Hercules” and as a “Wild Man.” The former depicts Luther larger than life, the pope hanging from his nose, laying waste with a huge club the personifications of monasticism and scholasticism. The “Wild Man” depiction is what contemporary scholars refer to as the iconography of “the reversible world,” the world turned upside-down. The Reformation overturned the late medieval world, including its views of money.

Luther was a “Wild Man” with respect to money because he attacked every contemporary expression of the counterfeit gospel that a person’s worth depends on his or her accomplishments. His club was the good news that human worth is totally independent of success, be it measured in terms of renunciation or acquisition of the world. Thus Luther fought a two-sided battle against both monastic asceticism and emerging capitalism (“usury”). The first battle is well-known, but the second has frequently been obscured by the common association of the “Protestant ethic” with the “spirit of capitalism.” But to Luther both sides really belonged to the same coin, salvation by works.

Medieval monasticism narrowed the spiritual asceticism of the early church to renunciation of the world. Poverty was idealized into a kind of spiritual capitalism for poor and rich alike. The poor were on the preferred path of salvation, and the rich earned merit for salvation by almsgiving. The foremost figure in the medieval poverty movement was certainly Francis of Assisi, whose rejection of money served to radicalize discipleship and to alleviate anxiety about the corrupting effect of money and business.

Luther’s response was unequivocal: “Many people, of both low and high estate, yes, all the world, were deceived by this pretense. They were taken in by it, thinking: ‘Ah, this is something extraordinary! The dear fathers lead such an ascetic life;…’ Indeed, if you want to dupe people, you must play the eccentric” (“Sermons on the Gospel of St. John”).

On Francis, Luther commented: “I do not think that Francis was an evil man; but the facts prove that he was naive or, to state it more truthfully, foolish.” His foolishness was in supposing that money was evil in itself, and in displacing the free forgiveness of sins through Christ by a new law of renunciation. “If silver and gold are things evil in themselves, then those who keep away from them deserve to be praised. But if they are good creatures of God, which we can use both for the needs of our neighbor and for the glory of God, is not a person silly, yes, even unthankful to God, if he refrains from them as though they were evil? For they are not evil, even though they have been subjected to vanity and evil. …If God has given you wealth, give thanks to God, and see that you make right use of it…” (“Lectures on Genesis”). The problem is not money but its use. The greedy misuse the world by striving to acquire it; the monastics, by struggling to renounce it. The end result for both is personal insecurity because trust is placed in self-achievement rather than in God. Meanwhile, the neighbor is neglected.

The medieval ideology of poverty had been entrenched for centuries, but the acceptance of the idea that money can make money was relatively new in Luther’s day. This usury was condemned by the medieval church as late as the Fifth Lateran Council in 1515. But by all accounts, the entrepreneur was well-established by this time.

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