We Have Got to Talk About Usury (Part XI): The Strauss Affair and Luther’s Long Sermon
The following post is the eleventh in a series on usury by the Rev. Vincent Shemwell. Rev. Shemwell serves as pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Johnson City, Tennessee. He graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne with the M.Div. in 2022, and received his STM from CTSFW in 2024, writing his thesis on Johann Georg Hamann. The previous installments can be found below:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: The Old Testament
Part III: The New Testament
Part IV: The Church Fathers—Clement of Alexandria through Hilary of Poitiers
Part V: The Church Fathers — The Cappadocians
Part VI: The Church Fathers — Church Councils and Ambrose
Part VII: The Church Fathers—Chrysostom through Leo the Great
Part VIII: Medieval Theologians
Part IX: The Medieval Church Continued—Councils, Canon Law, Dante, and Other Matters
Part X: Luther—His First Foray, in Translation
“Usury and avarice have burst in like a flood and have been made lawful … [and yet] are contrary to God.” (SA Preface 12)
As mentioned in the previous part of our series, Luther took his 1519 Short Sermon on Usury and reworked it into a much-expanded sermon, published early the following year and now known as his Long Sermon on Usury (LW 45:273–310). Four years later, this sermon was revised once more and published together with his extensive treatise on trade, translated in the American Edition under the title Trade and Usury. Before turning to this text, however, it is necessary to outline certain events that transpired between 1519 and 1524.
In both of his sermons on usury, Luther inveighs against all forms of interest-bearing loans. While he does make certain narrowly defined allowances for Zinskauf—the purchase of rental income—which he does not classify as a loan in the strict sense, he vehemently opposes every other form of interest-taking, even when the proceeds are ostensibly directed toward the benefit of the church. Suffice it to say, Luther’s position was warmly welcomed by many of the common people in his day, who were then groaning under the tyranny of usurers, but it was received quite differently by those engaged in moneylending and in the nascent accumulation of capital. At the same time, Luther’s words were taken to heart by a number of evangelical preachers, most notably Jacob Strauss (1480–1530), pastor at St. George’s Church in Eisenach.
Likely inspired by Luther’s boldness on the issue, Strauss published a pamphlet in 1523 entitled Haubtstuck vnd artickel Christenlicher leer wider den vnchristlichen wucher (in English: Chief Concerns and Articles of Christian Teaching Against Unchristian Usury) which was penned in response to local debates in Eisenach regarding the problem of usury. Through this pamphlet, he unequivocally declared to his expectant audience: “Usury, by its very nature as a violation of both the love of neighbor and the command of God, constitutes a most grievous and manifest mortal sin. All who countenance such sin, together with those who lend it assistance, protection, or defense, thereby render themselves deserving of death…. Both the exaction and the payment of usury stand in open contradiction to the Gospel of Christ.”
Unsurprisingly, this pamphlet caused quite a stir in Eisenach and elsewhere. Like Luther, Strauss had taken a hard line against usury. But going much further, Strauss argued that borrowers are likewise guilty of mortal sin and can only avoid further sin by ceasing their interest payments. Even though Luther had urged civil authorities to intervene and abolish usury in his first few sermons on the topic, little was actually done to curb the practice. Therefore, in 1523, when the Strauss pamphlet hit the streets, usury was still rampant. And obviously, this zealous pastor’s encouragement to cease interest payments upset more than a few moneylenders and civil leaders, especially once borrowers started heeding the Eisenach pastor’s advice.
Later that same year, Gregor Brück, chancellor of Electoral Saxony, wrote to Luther seeking his counsel on this controversy. Brück knew well that Luther harbored no sympathy for lending at interest, yet he rightly recognized that Strauss appeared to be advancing something altogether novel. In reply, Luther addressed letters to both Brück and Strauss in order to resolve the matter (his letter to Brück can be found in LW 49:50–55). In his correspondence with Strauss, Luther set forth a clarification of the evangelical position regarding the payment of interest (WA, Br 3:179): “[In your pamphlet] you add one point: namely, that you command those who owe interest not to pay, and you accuse them of being guilty of usury if they do pay, since in handing over these illicit charges they are, as you claim, consenting to and condoning usury. Yet neither the Gospel nor we have ever taught this. For by the same reasoning, it would follow that to the one who takes away the tunic or strikes the cheek, the cloak should not be given, nor the injury endured. But we, in accordance with the Gospel, judge otherwise: that interest is indeed unlawful, yet it does not lie within the power of the common people to abolish it. This task belongs rather to princes, who bear the sword. For the common people it is sufficient that they know it to be unlawful and declare that in paying it they yield only to an unjust exactor. Therefore, they ought to render it, however unjustly it is demanded, with conscience secure, provided they confess that they suffer this injustice, not that they consent to it. Thus, I would wish you to be wise. But if you will not be wise, it may become necessary that we act wisely against you.”
Put otherwise, Luther maintained that the responsibility for curbing the sin of usury properly belongs to the civil authorities, who, as he exhorted Brück, ought to “abolish the practice altogether” (LW 49:52–53). The Christian citizen’s duty, on the other hand, as taught in Matthew 5 and Luke 6, is to endure the injustice of interest with patience. While Luther agreed with Strauss that the government should outlaw interest-taking, he did not share the Eisenach clergyman’s view that interest-paying implicates a person in some shared mortal sin. By the spring of 1524, fortunately, Luther and Melanchthon had succeeded in persuading Strauss of the evangelical position.
I recount this episode, the so-called Strauss Affair, because it illustrates that Luther, in continuity with the medieval tradition, did not regard the borrower as guilty of sin when compelled by necessity to take out a loan, even if it involved the payment of interest. The borrower, according to Luther’s view, is the victim of injustice, and the task of restraining and punishing the unjust moneylender belongs to the civil authorities alone. I also highlight this event because it played a significant role in Luther’s decision to rework his Long Sermon and publish it alongside his treatise on trade in 1524. He realized that the evangelical position on usury required explicit restatement and promulgation. In addition to Luther’s intense frustration with the worsening monopolistic practices throughout the empire and the explosion of artificial demand generated by foreign trade which inspired his treatise on the subject, the Strauss Affair was one of the main impetuses behind the publication of Trade and Usury.
Another factor prompting Luther’s public restatement was an ongoing debate among theologians such as Thomas Cajetan (1469–1534) concerning the role of intention in lending. In the patristic and medieval tradition, lending was deemed permissible only for the sake of charity, never for profit; it was understood as a good work, not a means of gaining wealth. If a person lent with the intention of receiving back more than was given, that very intention was regarded as sinful, one of the “two sins” of usury (the other being the actual receipt of interest payments). By the sixteenth century, however, theologians like Cajetan began to minimize the role of charitable intention in lending, shifting the focus instead to the actual nature and structure of the contracts themselves. For Luther, by contrast, intention remained paramount. This was because, as we shall see, he understood usury primarily in relation to the first commandment, wherein one ceases to serve God or the borrower and instead serves the idol of mammon. Whether or not lending at interest may be justified by the jurists in this or that specific scenario, if a lender ever expects more back than he has lent, for the sake of his profit, he serves mammon rather than his neighbor. Or so Luther emphatically taught.
I recognize that the average reader of today may be taken aback by Luther’s position on lending at interest. It may appear antiquated and economically naïve, even harsh. Indeed, most scholars these days do not seem to take Luther’s economic ethics very seriously. The prevailing assumption is that he was either ignorant of the dynamics of emerging capitalism, deliberately reactionary and intentionally antimodern, or, at best, merely helplessly “impulsive” in his economic thought. But such claims, I find, are not only uncharitable but unfounded. In my mind, Luther simply took his faith seriously and expected others to do the same. For him, the Word of God was everything, and on this subject, like the early church fathers before him, he believed the Word of God to be unambiguous. The Word of God is not always popular, and seldom is it profitable, but it is clear, Luther taught. He opens Trade and Usury with these words (LW 45:245): “For it must be that among the merchants, as among other people, there are some who belong to Christ and would rather be poor with God than rich with the devil.” These are words worth hearing today as well.
Finally, before delving into the sermon, it should be made abundantly clear at the outset that Luther did not base his arguments against lending at interest in the Old Testament. He did acknowledge the Old Testament moral law against lending at interest, but for him, the key texts on this matter were Matthew 5 and Luke 6, our Lord’s own sermons. Among the scholastic theologians of his time, it was argued that a great deal of what our Lord commands in these sermons are not commands for all people, but only “counsels” for the especially holy. But in his 1523 work entitled Temporal Authority, Luther demolishes this thinking. These commands in Matthew 5 and Luke 6 are like every other command, and “Christ lays such stress on [them] that He is unwilling to have the least word of [them] set aside,” and condemns to hell all those that do not follow them (LW 45:88). Hence, the commands in Matthew 5 and Luke 6 are binding on all Christians, even if the Christian world should sadly still treat them as somehow supererogatory. Let us now see how Luther interpreted them in terms of lending.
To the sermon.
Luther begins by alluding to 2 Timothy 3:1, where Paul warns of the coming of “perilous times” (LW 45:273). In Luther’s mind, these times had already arrived, as evidenced by the fact that “avarice and usury [had] taken a mighty hold on the whole world,” so that the Holy Gospel was regarded by many “as having no value.” “Therefore,” Luther writes, “it is necessary in [such] perilous times for everyone to be alert, to use proper discretion in dealing with temporal goods, paying diligent attention to the Holy Gospel of Christ our Lord.” Once again, for Luther, Matthew 5 and Luke 6 serve as the chief texts guiding conduct with temporal goods.
A few pages later, Luther rejects the notion that any civil toleration of usury renders it righteous. He writes (pg. 277): “[Civil laws] permit public brothels, although they are contrary to God’s commandment, and many other evil things which God forbids; they necessarily permit also sins and wickedness. The things that human laws command and forbid matter little, not to mention the things they permit or do not punish.” In other words, what the civil law permits is of no consequence when its permission stands in contradiction to God’s law.
Luther then addresses the three degrees of dealing with temporal goods already outlined in his Short Sermon: relinquishing goods when they are taken by force, giving freely, and lending without charge. With respect to Matthew 5:40 and the first degree, Luther argues that Jesus commands this in order to cleanse us of our “attachment to temporal goods,” so that we might “thereby be trained to turn our hearts away from the false temporal goods of this world, letting them go in peace, and fixing our hopes on invisible and eternal goods” (279–80). This command teaches us to trust in God, so that “even [if] everything were taken from us,” there would be “no reason to fear that God [would] forsake us and fail to provide for us” (280). Without this divine command, the human heart would become “too deeply enmeshed in temporal things and too firmly attached to them,” with the result that “satiety and disregard of the eternal goods in heaven” would follow. As he goes on to write, the same basic principle applies to the other two degrees of dealing with temporal goods.
On the second degree, drawn from Matthew 5:42, Luther astutely observes that the command to give freely is “hard and bitter to those who have more taste for temporal goods than eternal goods,” because “they have not enough trust in God to believe that He can or will sustain them in this wretched life” (280–81). But if a man cannot trust God in temporal matters, how can he trust Him in eternal ones? Luther paraphrases Jesus in Luke 16:10: “He who does not trust God in a little matter will never trust Him in something greater.” He then warns that “he who will not listen to this [command] and follow it will never acquire the art of trusting,” an art essential to keeping the very first commandment of all (281).
Luther also takes great pains to demonstrate that this command to give freely applies to all people, even to our enemies, and not only to the poor but to any who are in need (282–83), since Christ “excluded no one from His commandment” (290). It should go without saying that this includes beggars, and Luther is clear and resolute in his conviction that the local Christian community and the government have a major role to play in providing relief for the needy through Community Chests, based on Deuteronomy 15. According to Luther, there should be no begging at all in Christian communities (281–82). On the Last Day, he claims, it will not matter “how much [we] have left in [our] will” or “whether [we] have given so and so much to churches,” but whether or not, in accordance with Matthew 25:42–43, we have fed and clothed Jesus during our lives (286). He thus alludes to Proverbs 19:17; as you will recall, a key text for the patristic witness against usury.
He then moves on to the third degree, “willingly and gladly lending without charge or interest” (289). Here, too, all are included in this command, for Christ excludes no one when He says (Matt. 5:42): “From him who would borrow from you, turn not away”; and when He likewise says (Luke 6:34): “If you lend only to those from whom you expect a loan in return, what kind of goodness is that?” With this degree, Christ straightforwardly commands (Luke 6:35): “Lend, expecting nothing in return.” Luther even asserts that lending with any charge or condition whatsoever is not true lending, “because lending is, in its very nature, nothing else than to offer another something without charge, on the condition that one eventually get back the same thing or its equivalent, and nothing more…. [thus] there is no other kind of lending except that which is without charge” (291–92). If a loan is issued with the condition of interest, it is not a loan in the biblical sense, but only blatant usury. For again: “Lending is not lending unless it is done without charge and without any advantage to the lender” (292). Which is to say, contra Cajetan and others, intention is decisive, and self-interest and profit have no place in lending.
In this same section of the text, Luther rejects the notion that “gifts” can be expected from the outset of a loan. If a borrower is able to compensate at the conclusion of a loan and wishes to do so freely, which is his Christian duty, provided he is able, then that is well and good (see here Luther’s 1524 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher on the responsibilities of debtors according to the Golden Rule; WA 15, 302–3). However, for Luther, such “gifts,” which are often just “camouflaged avarice,” cannot be the basis of a loan or expected from the start (292).
Luther goes on to demonstrate that lending at interest is against both natural and divine law (292–93). His understanding of natural law here is shaped by Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, the Golden Rule. If a moneylender were himself in need of a loan, he would not wish to be charged interest, Luther says. Therefore, he argues, the moneylender should not himself charge it. Regarding God’s law, Luther contends that lending at interest is against both the Old and New Testaments, which command us to love our neighbors as ourselves (Lev. 19:18; Matt. 22:39). Usurers, however, “love themselves alone and seek only their own,” and are thus “guilty of mortal sin,” putting their salvation at risk (292–93). As Luther maintains, if only people would consider the Golden Rule in their dealings with temporal goods, there would be no need for a great debate on this issue of lending.
Luther then considers the obvious objection that if all lending were without interest, there would be no motivation to lend (293–94). Yet as he points out, according to the first and second degrees of dealing with temporal goods, we are called to relinquish our goods for the sake of our neighbor, friend, or enemy. The same applies to this third degree. So what if you lose your interest? God commands you to let it go, for your own sake, that you would not be inordinately attached to temporal things. As Luther makes clear, this objection is itself wholly unchristian. And even if it is the practice or custom of a community to expect interest, this carries no weight, since “it is not Christian or godly or natural” to do so (294). Lending is to be done in love and charity, not as a way of enriching oneself; and this very charity is what yields true riches.
As in his first sermon on usury, Luther briefly takes up the matter of the church’s involvement in the charging of interest (294–95). He insists, once again, that true service of God consists in keeping His commandments. Consequently, even if the profits derived from lending at interest were directed toward pious and charitable causes, the practice itself remains sinful and nothing other than “usury-loving greed,” because it is predicated on a rejection of God’s clear command (294).
So far, Luther has addressed the sinfulness of interest-bearing loans. But as the sermon progresses, he turns his attention to Zinskauf, or the purchase of rental income, that distinct financial product explained in the previous part of our series. Although Luther does not classify the purchase of rental income as an interest-bearing loan, he nonetheless acknowledges the similarities and the ways in which “this slippery and newly invented business” becomes usurious (295). For Luther, Zinskauf in general is an “odious and hateful practice for many reasons,” particularly because of its usurious appearance, which Paul explicitly warns Christians to avoid in 1 Thess. 5:22 (295–96). Even if this financial product does not involve genuine usury, Luther contends that it still transgresses both natural and divine law, since the purchaser (i.e., the lender) “is seldom if ever seeking and desiring the welfare and advantage” of the seller (i.e., the borrower), thereby violating the Golden Rule and the command of Christian love (296).
Furthermore, Luther argues that this financial product, whether usurious or not, often “accomplishes exactly the same thing” as usury, namely, it “lays burdens upon all lands, cities, lords, and people, sucks them dry, and brings them to ruin as no usury could have done” (297). As Jesus teaches, a tree is known by its fruit (Matt. 7:16–20). On this basis, Luther delivers a stern warning to “the rich who use this contract,” which “gives free reign to avarice,” cautioning that, in so doing, they place themselves in “grave danger” spiritually (298).
Luther then quickly turns to the matter of interesse, an indemnity for damages incurred as a result of a loan, explained in Part IX of our series. Although this narrow allowance was widely accepted in the Middle Ages and in Luther’s own day, he directly challenges it, arguing that it is virtually impossible to prove that one has lost an opportunity for profit rather than for risk (298–99). For Luther, the possibility of risk almost always outweighs that of profit. Hence, interesse remains an altogether questionable allowance.
Luther also affirms his categorical agreement with the Aristotelian conception of money, declaring outright that “you cannot make money just with money” (299; see also Luther’s 1542 Table Talk in WA, TR 5, 146, where he plainly agrees that “money is a sterile thing”). In this connection, Luther draws a careful distinction between money unjustly and unnaturally multiplied through interest and money increased through productive trade in a fair manner, with the latter being commended, at least superficially, by Jesus in the Parable of the Talents (see also Ap XXI 4).
In the pages that follow, Luther underscores the necessity that both purchaser and seller in a rental income contract share the risk. This is a crucial point for Luther: the purchase of rental income is only ever permissible when the burden of risk is borne mutually; otherwise, “it is plain and simple usury” (304). In practice, however, most purchasers in his day did not share risk and, uncoincidentally, often grew wealthier than all others (301). Luther concedes that this requirement makes the purchase of rental income less attractive to many, but he regards this very fact as evidence that the contract is typically driven by “security, greed, and usury” (304).
Luther further insists that the purchase of rental income is prohibited whenever the seller, being in urgent financial distress, should instead, according to God’s law, be given the needed funds as alms or with a loan free of any charge (304). In those cases, however, where both seller and purchaser are each in genuine need and must resort to such a contract, the risk must be shared and the rates kept as low as possible, no more than six percent (304–5). Anything above this, Luther argues, is flagrant extortion, and those “thieves and rustlers” who demand nine or ten percent prove themselves to be “not men at all, but wolves and irrational beasts, who do not believe there is a God” (308). These rules likewise extend to those engaged in the work of the church, who are called to serve as an example to the laity. Luther reiterates a point from his first sermon: “I say it is better to make of ten institutions one that is in accord with God’s will, than to keep many that contravene His commandment,” for “you cannot serve one God with two contradictory kinds of service any more than you can serve two masters” (307).
At the conclusion of the sermon, Luther turns to the role of the civil authorities in restraining the sin of usury: “Emperor, kings, princes, and lords ought to watch over this matter, look after their lands and people, and help and rescue them from the gaping jaws of usury” (310). Within Luther’s theology and economic ethics, it is principally the responsibility of the state to abolish usury and conscientiously reform and regulate the purchase of rental income, and he even encouraged rulers to institute the jubilee, so that those groaning under the weight of burdensome contracts might soon be justly released (see How Christians Should Regard Moses, LW 35: 166–67). In 1524, he was still urging the authorities to act decisively, for the sake of the people; yet in time, he would despair of the state ever taking the matter seriously. In the next part of our series, we will get to Luther’s admonition to pastors concerning the evil of usury, in which that sense of hopelessness is especially evident.
But before I leave you, dear reader, I would very quickly draw your attention to another significant text in which Luther addresses the usury to which Zinskauf so readily gives rise, together with the avarice overtaking Germany at the time: his 1520 To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Much as in the first half of Trade and Usury, Luther here laments the German obsession with new clothing, food, and drink, which only fueled the people’s insatiable desire for more. This infatuation with material goods, further intensified by foreign trade and the expanding credit economy, was, in Luther’s judgment, transforming good Christians into servants of mammon, both the well-to-do and the poor alike, and obliterating opportunities for goods works in lending and giving. He warned that if this traffic in luxury persisted “for another hundred years, Germany [would] not have a penny left,” and the populace would be driven to “eat one another” (LW 44:213).
Moreover, Luther regarded Zinskauf in particular—a practice he denounced as invented by the devil and sanctioned by the pope, which shamelessly enabled people to desire and acquire far more than they ever needed—as a scourge that was devastating his homeland (213). Already in 1520, Luther was imploring the authorities not only to abolish usury and predatory Zinskauf contracts, but also to restrain the nation’s mounting mammonism, with the elimination of the former being indispensable to the containment of the latter. And yes, Luther even included in this hoped-for abolition lending at interest in the commercial sphere (see, for instance, his 1524 Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, where he condemns the unchristian self-interest inherent in all interest-bearing loans; WA 15, 301). Strikingly, in the same context in To the Christian Nobility, Luther was bold enough to identify Jakob Fugger by name as a key player in making this idolatry so pervasive.
In short, Luther opposed lending at interest and other usurious practices precisely because they fostered and emboldened avarice. Within his lifetime, he witnessed the increasing transformation of money into capital and its destructive consequences for the spiritual lives of the people. Rather than directing their attention to spiritual goods, Germans were becoming ever more addicted to temporal possessions, and the practice of lending only exacerbated this spiritually deleterious addiction. Luther thus discerned the dangers of the economic changes of his age not solely in terms of economic injustice, but in terms of profound spiritual self-harm. For him, usury was above all a matter of idolatry, a sin against the first commandment.
Accordingly, Luther was convinced that preaching against usury is absolutely essential. Indeed, he firmly believed that economic ethics belong in the pulpit. In the next part of our series, we will see how strongly he felt about this, particularly once he despaired of the civil authorities ever rectifying the situation. Even if the state fails to restrain avarice, the church, he contended, must at the very least speak forcefully against it, if for no other reason than for the sake of those pastors who will be held accountable for their preaching on the day of judgment.
God willing, next time, we will turn to Luther’s 1539 To Pastors, That They Should Preach Against Usury.
Stay tuned.