When I studied the Reformation in my college history class I can remember one of my professors claiming that Luther did not actually nail his 95 theses to the wall in act of defiance to the Church. Furthermore, Luther was not actually anti-Catholic Church, but rather a rising intellectual star in the Church who had been tasked to write what amounted to an internal memo detailing things he thought that could be done to improve the Church, like the banning of indulgences.
This memo was then somehow leaked and got into the hands of a local printer. Being early on in the history of printing, there was generally a lack of content to print, and, the printer, who also must have realized what he had his hands on, immediately printed and distributed copies on his own accord.
Professor went on to say that Luther was actually mortified that the theses got out to the general public, who were never the intended audience and was actually against the ensuing Peasants' War, but eventually came around to embracing the revolutionary views that his 95 theses contributed to.
Do any sources back this up?
When I studied the Reformation in my college history class I can remember one of my professors claiming that Luther did not actually nail his 95 theses to the wall in act of defiance to the Church.
It is not immediately clear from this sentence what your former professor was denying. Did Luther nail the theses to the door of the Wittenberg? Almost certainly not. Rather than nails, he would have used paste, or some other adhesive; nailing things to a door repeatedly was not great for its conservation. Did he post them at all to the door? The current consensus on this is unsettled. A great article was published last year in The Lutheran Quarterly where two scholars, Volker Leppin and Timothy J. Wengert, each argued one side of the case. It is brief and can read online here: link. To summarize, accounts of Luther dramatically posting the theses only come after his death. From Luther's correspondence and our knowledge of the academic culture at the time, there is good reason to think that he initiated a public discussion (which would entail posting them as is customary for a disputation) and that he intended their discussion to be private (which would mean not posting them). There is good evidence that Luther was hesitant to have them circulated in German. The Ninety-Five Theses were not the first time Luther took up the issue of indulgences, and some of those earlier works were already in German and much better suited to communicating his views than a mere list of theses.
On the question of whether or not "Luther was actually mortified that the theses got out to the general public" as well as the larger question of whether "Luther was not actually anti-Catholic Church" we can find a clearer answer. Whether or not Luther posted the theses or supported their translation into German, he was not mortified that these issues got out to the public. The goal of the theses, as part of his larger campaign against indulgences, was to raise awareness to the abuses and draw the church's attention to the lack of clear teaching on the issue (at this time, there was no official doctrine of indulgences in the catholic church). As Leppin and Wengert note in the above article, "The most important thing that concerned Luther was to show that he was ready to be corrected and that he only wanted to be true to his responsibility as a theological teacher and son of the church." (p.390) Luther was an up-and-coming academic, and like others at his time, he understood that position as one which entailed a responsibility to the church. As a doctor of the church, he saw writing on indulgences as doing what he was trained and given authority to do.
As to the "revolutionary" aspects of Luther's nature, he certainly was not willing to compromise what he saw as true for the sake of political expediency, as evidenced by his famous "stand" before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms. He was, however, against what we might call "radical" or "revolutionary" attempts at reform. He opposed the iconoclasm (destruction of sacred images) and forced full-participation in the Eucharist (that is, taking of both bread and wine by the laity) of Andreas Karlstadt's program of reform, administered in Wittenberg during Luther's period of absence while in hiding following Worms. Likewise, though the rebelling peasants appealed to Luther's writings and asked Luther to mediate with the princes on their behalf, Luther opposed the rebellion of the peasants sternly, too sternly in the judgment of most historians. His second treatise on the uprising, Against the Murderous Thieving Hordes of Peasants, accuses the peasants of blasphemy in erroneously attaching Christ's name to their cause, and thus explicitly gives the princes full authority to use violence in suppressing them. The war would ultimately claim the lives of over one hundred thousand peasants, and the Lutheran reform from then on would be a magisterial (i.e. supported by rulers) reform rather than a populist reform; hardly revolutionary in the modern sense of the word.
Sources / Further Reading