ANTO ́NIA SZABARIletters, scandal has been used as a term to impose moral order on society and to prevent
it from lapsing into the chaos of individual differences.^31 In the Christian world of the
Middle Ages, to transgress againstcaritasmeant to transgress against and seek to destroy
theratioof society, which as a whole was subject to Christian morality, represented and
safeguarded by the Church. Renaissance humanists did not fully accept the Church’s
absolute right to determine the rational order of Christian society. Notably, Erasmus
delegates the responsibility of acting and speaking in society in accordance with the prin-
ciple of Christian love to the educated individual, a position not always welcomed by the
Church. Erasmus believes, as we have seen in his debate with Luther, that this idealized
Christian humanist subject should be allowed the freedom to disagree or be skeptical
about some tenets of Church doctrine, so long as he does not go too far in putting into
questioning the authority of the Church.
By reinterpreting the biblical wordscandal, Luther transforms this legal, theological,
and ethical notion into a subversive polemical tool to use against the Catholic Church.^32
In his programmatic tractThe Freedom of a Christian(1520), he accuses the Catholics of
impiety—offending the ‘‘faith’’ of the ‘‘weak’’ with false doctrines—and proclaims that
one does not need to worry about offending such people. For Luther the theologian, the
greatest scandal, the only one that really matters, is false doctrine. While a Christian
should behave charitably to other Christians ‘‘[the impious] he must resist, do the very
opposite, and offend them boldly lest by their impious views they drag many with them
into error. In the presence of such men it is good to eat meat, break the fast, and for the
sake of the liberty of faith do other things which they regard as the greatest of sins.’’^33 In
this citation, Luther is paraphrasing a passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, in
which Paul exhorts the Corinthiansnotto scandalize their brothers. Luther’s paraphrase
of the passage from the Corinthians is probably influenced by Luther’s favorite Pauline
epistle, the one to the Galatians, to whom Paul preaches Christian freedom. Luther shifts
the meaning of the termscandalto signify words rather than deeds, first by declaring that
the ‘‘false doctrine’’ of the Catholic Church is the greatest scandal, then by providing the
Christian with the right to challenge those who scandalize ‘‘the weak.’’ His lesson for the
sixteenth-century Christian is that it is allowable to offend the impious. This justified
offence, in Luther’s eyes, is best done in words. It means to proclaim one’s conviction,
one’s faith, to combat the adversary with the word of Scripture—itself a stumbling block.
The Outrageous Book
By the early 1520s, with the publication of the New Testament in German, Luther had
transformed Scripture (his own translated and printed version of it) into a weapon against
the Church. This was made possible by his reading of it as a divine speech act, one that is
both felicitous and binding—one that demands to be viewed as felicitous by the reader
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