The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (review)

This is an interesting work, which throws light on the neglected issue of the fate of auricular confession in the first years of the German Reformation. As the author points out, the issue of private confession has to do with the power of the keys as exposed in Mt 16:19 and it is indeed regrettable that, until the appearance of the present study, scholars of the German Reformation have tended to limit their studies of the power of the keys to the sacrament of penance. Rittgers's particular aim is to examine not just the theological basis for maintaining private confession in the Lutheran church but also its social and political implications. The question that preoccupies him has to do with the coexistence of the practice of private confession with the emphasis on lay control of religion characteristic of the Lutheran Reformation. He wants to show that, contrary to the received view, Lutheran magistrates did try to protect the people from excessive interference with their consciences. According to him the Reformation in the German states was not just a tool for civil rulers and the maintaining of auricular confession was fully in keeping with Luther's early ideas of spiritual freedom. He has chosen Nürnberg to illustrate his thesis for three reasons. Firstly, it was one of the richest and largest cities in the Empire and one that adopted the Reformation very early on. Secondly, it experienced a major conflict involving private confession and absolution. The conflict that first arose in the early 1530s involved the local preachers, notably Andreas Osiander and also Brenz, Luther, and Melanchthon, as well as the city's magistrates and burghers. Thirdly, historians have tended hitherto to consider the Nürnberg regime as particularly oppressive of people's consciences.

Rittgers develops his thesis in nine chapters. Discussing pre-Reformation times, he points out that the Nürnberg Council gained control of the city's religious life as early as the fifteenth century. He also notes that in the early sixteenth century Johannes von Staupitz also publicly attacked traditional piety and therefore the power of the papal church. He then discusses how early Lutherans sought to undermine the power of the keys, or the power of the church to pardon or retain sins. Luther even allowed lay confession if no clergy were present. Both he and his disciples strove to reduce the role of the priest to that of a servant to his brethren. Luther, however, endorsed private confession while giving it a distinctive evangelical form. Moreover, unlike public confession, which was instituted alongside it, private confession was voluntary. In fact, after 1524, most Wittenberg communicants had to undergo an examination of faith and conduct before participating in the eucharist. Nürnberg was more radical. At first general confession and absolution were substituted for private confession. In 1533, with the appearance of the Brandenburg-Nürnberg church order, the Nürnberg Council finally took over all episcopal powers. However, the order contained no form for the general confession although it continued to be practiced. Theologians who elaborated the order, when questioned by the council, had no objection to making this explicit. A minority, however, led by Osiander, wanted to dispense with public confession as useless and unscriptural. Osiander especially wanted to maintain only the evangelical ritual of private confession as bolstering sacerdotal authority to promote spiritual welfare. In contrast with Luther, Osiander saw confession as the third sacrament along with baptism and the eucharist. This attitude provoked much hostility especially among the burghers and private confession was not imposed in Nürnberg until the 1548 Interim. It was maintained after the Interim in 1553 (a year after Osiander's death) when Nürnberg rejoined the other Lutheran states in officially adopting both public and the non-obligatory evangelical private confession.

The work constitutes a solid and...