THE SCANDAL OF RELIGIONor hearer. Moreover, Luther challenged the Church to refute him on the basis of this
Scripture; for him, the battle had to be fought with words—and those were, most often,
printed words. Whereas ‘‘the papists have washed the mouth of the Gospel,’’ Luther
claims to go back to the ‘‘original’’ gospel—realized in his translation—the original one,
the ‘‘stumbling block.’’^34 In so doing, he reached back to the moral teachings and language
of late-medieval preachers. The fourteenth-century Dominican preacher Johannes Tauler
emphasizes the dangerous consequences of the improper reception of Scripture by com-
paring the malevolent reader or hearer to a ‘‘venomous spider’’ who is able to draw only
deadly poison, instead of honey, from a beautiful rose. Luther also zooms in on the
negative effects of reading Scripture. The paradox Luther elaborates is also expressed in
Sebastian Franck’sParadoxa(1534): ‘‘the Gospel creates subversion in the world and is
an obstacle to truth.’’^35 Luther insists that the ‘‘good news’’ is for those who are ‘‘poison-
ous spiders’’ a source of venom.^36 Luther here equates the rhetorical figure of the venom-
ous spider with the termscandal. New Testament uses of this complex figure allow Luther
to do this: the ‘‘word’’ is a scandal for those who lack perseverance; Christ is a scandal
for his disciples and the Pharisees; and the gospel is a stumbling block for the Jews,
according to Paul. These images allow Luther to underscore the potentially subversive
effects of the book. Luther not only reinterprets the theological notion of scandal, break-
ing the normative legal and moral hegemony for which it served as a tool, but also exploits
the passages in the Bible that define scandal as a positive and powerful speech act.
Scripture is not only a promise but also a threat or warning. In this double quality,
it polarizes its readers.^37 The Bible is a potentially ‘‘scandalous’’ text; what it ‘‘does’’ de-
pends on the reader’s disposition, her felicitous or infelicitous reading act. By extension,
Luther’s books possess the same essential ambivalence. The most significant effect of this
rhetorical practice is not political division (or sedition, as the charge went) but the politi-
cization of public speech. In his writing practice, Luther makes blasphemous statements
that can be interpreted in opposite ways: one is either offended or converted by them. In
other words, they have the effect of being perceived either as deeply religious or as deeply
antireligious. Theirmodus loquendiis inextricably tied to themodus audiendi(and hence
also themodus agendi) of the audience. The politicization of public discourse feeds on
the creation of what Bakhtin, reflecting on the inseparable interplay between formal and
ideological (hence also political and confrontational) elements in literary texts, called a
dialogicsituation, in which words do not have a meaning independently of the situation
in which they are spoken by a speaker and understood—and appropriated—by an audi-
tor. They have no neutral meaning and cannot be taken in a sense that is independent of
the interlocutor’s ideological position.^38 Although the termideologydid not appear until
the eighteenth century, Donald Kelley has shown that the shift from dogma to conviction
(‘‘assurance’’) in Luther’s theology led to the development of a Protestant ideology and,
later, to the development of different kinds of religious ideologiesavant la lettre.^39 The
aim of Luther’s inherently violent and destabilizing rhetorical practice was to claim that
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