THE SCANDAL OF RELIGIONof God is incomparably superior to the church.’’^43 The Monk-Calf represents the ‘‘golden
calf,’’ both idol and idolatry—or, with Austin, the ‘‘false’’ speech act—of the Church, by
contrast to the solely felicitous promise as the revealed truth of Scripture.
In the sixteenth century, monsters abounded in satirical and popular literature be-
cause they represented the distortion of reality that satire operates. Yet ‘‘while normal
satire distorts reality in order to unmask the discord in a given situation, Luther’s treatise,
by adding the eschatological dimension, goes full circle: what is presented as a blasphe-
mous deviation and perversion turns out to be the actual state of affairs! Satire changes
from an attack into recounting the actual conditions. Satirical imagery is, in Luther’s
perspective, transformed into depiction of realities.’’^44 This is what really distinguishes
Luther’s pamphlet from ordinary, realist satire. In a satire, one is never asked to believe,
but a cognitive effort is necessary to keep in mind the difference between ‘‘reality’’ and
the fictional distortion of it carried out by the satire. Of course, the distortion serves to
bear out the reality, what otherwise might remain hidden. It also produces, mediates the
representation of, a reality. Nonetheless, fiction and reality are never allowed to collapse
into one another. But this is what Luther is asking his readers to do: to believe in the
reality of it. The crux of the matter lies in his claim not that this distortion is simply a
convenient fiction that helps to open the reader’s eyes to what actual, concrete reality is
and should be, but that it is not fiction at all—being instead the truth, a true image of a
reality not (yet) visible.
Luther’s belief in the apocalypse has been somewhat of an embarrassment for a theo-
logian who purportedly purged religion of the contamination of superstition and thus
greatly contributed to the ‘‘disenchantment’’ of the modern world. Heiko Oberman has
argued against those who would dismiss Luther’s eschatology as a leftover of late-medieval
superstitious and popular beliefs, showing that, rather, it constitutes an essential element
in Luther’s theology, indeed, that we ‘‘will not get closer to Luther’s mission if we do not
enter into his graphic, dramatic eschatology.’’^45
Oberman argues, moreover, that whenever Luther speaks of ‘‘Reformation’’ he never
means an improvement brought about on the social level but envisions it as a divine act
that takes place at the end of time.^46 God alone can bring about the general renewal of
the world, but such a renewal also marks the end of the world as we know it, that is, the
world with its established order, values, and morality. And such an end is announced by
preliminary signs such as the Monk-Calf.
The Monk-Calf, a preacher of false doctrine, is a sign of the divine act of Reformation
and at the same time a perfect example of Luther’s scandal. In the footsteps of late-
medieval preachers, Luther translated that term into German asergernis, the sixteenth-
century equivalent of the modern German wordA ̈rgernis. The meaning of this German
word is different from the meaning of the Hebrew-Greekskandalon.A ̈rgernisis derived
from the rootarg-, which means ‘‘evil’’ or simply ‘‘bad,’’ anda ̈rger, the comparative,
signifies ‘‘worse.’’ TheA ̈rgernis, the ‘‘worsening’’ of the world, heralds the ultimate divine
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