The Leipzig debate raged for twenty-three days, which was somewhat unusual. Typically disputations—theological or academic debates—lasted anywhere from a few hours to a few days, although some lasted much longer (the Disputation of Tortosa, between the Christians and the Jews in fifteenth-century Spain, for example, continued off and on for more than a year).27 At Leipzig, Luther argued for the authority of Scripture alone over doctrine, papal primacy, and even the Church itself. The Church required a leader, Luther agreed with Eck, but that leader was Christ, not the pope.28 Luther insisted that his aim was not to overthrow or even to undermine the papacy, but simply to suggest that the pope was human—that he could, in fact, be wrong.
Then Luther took his argument one giant step forward: he stated that true doctrine was not that which the general council of the Roman Catholic Church deemed to be true (as had been the case up to this point in the history of the Church), but what the masses of Christians—the priesthood of all believers—deemed to be true. According to Luther, Scripture could, and did, contradict Church doctrine and well-established traditions, which made the Church wrong. Christ alone was the key to salvation.29 In short, Luther argued, God speaks to all people through his Word; no mediator or intercessor is necessary between God and man except Christ himself, and Christ speaks “not to an institution but to the heart.”30
At the end of the three weeks Eck declared himself the winner of the debate. As he gloated over his victory and boasted about the stag Duke George had sent him as a reward, Luther quietly retreated to strategize a fresh tactical approach.31 Disappointed by the outcome of the debate and exhausted from the verbal jousting, Luther decided to turn his energy from speaking to writing. With the help of the printers, he aimed to broaden the reach of his reforms and address not just the stodgy theologians but the masses—the people he hoped would rally behind his convictions and help carry his message forward.32
One year later, Luther put the ideas he’d expressed during the Leipzig debate into three powerful treatises. In his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian State, The Babylonian Captivity, and Freedom of a Christian, all published in 1520, the Reformer not only declared war against the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church, he also began to formulate his views on clerical celibacy and marriage.33 Up to this point, Luther had dealt mainly with lofty theological matters that riled church authorities but had little impact on ordinary citizens. His reforms concerning marriage and clerical celibacy, however, were about to change that. Little by little, as printers churned out copies of his treatises and Luther’s words made their way into the hands of the common people, his radical ideas began to spread. Before long, they began to reach even those most removed from everyday society: the men and women living behind the cloister walls.
6
Hear This, O Pope!
On the morning of December 10, 1520, Luther gathered a small group of students and friends and proceeded to a location just outside Wittenberg’s gates. Earlier, in a note he had posted on the door of the town church, he had invited “all friends of evangelical truth” to assist in the burning of “godless books of papal law and scholastic theology.”1 Outside the gate that cold morning, the group built a pyre, piled it with volumes of canon law and an assortment of books written by Luther’s enemies, and then stood by to watch the tomes burn. As the fire raged, Luther stepped forward and, without fanfare, quietly dropped a document into the flames, reportedly pronouncing a few brief words in Latin as he did so: “May this fire destroy you, because you have obstructed God’s truth.”2
It was a quiet gathering; too quiet, in fact, to satisfy the university students, who, since the Leipzig debate, had come to be some of Luther’s most fervent supporters. After breakfast that same morning, a larger group of students processed through town following a carriage decorated with antipapal placards, shouting and cheering and gathering more writings by Luther’s foes as fuel for their own bonfire. The atmosphere sizzled with energy and anticipation. Trumpets blasted and the crowd roared as onlookers tossed a cloth effigy of Pope Leo X into the flames.
Luther was appalled by the carnivalesque display, and he told the students exactly that in a lecture the next day. This was a grave matter, he insisted, speaking in German rather than the academic Latin so as to be absolutely clear, and one that presented only two options: martyrdom or hell. Martyrdom, he informed the students, could be expected of all who joined the fight against the papacy. Hell, on the other hand, would be the fate of those who chose to side with the antichrist, the pope. Luther had made his choice. Which would they choose, Luther asked the now-somber group?
Racing against the Bull
The document Luther dropped into the bonfire on the morning of December 10 was an important one: an official copy of a papal bull, written principally by Johann Eck and threatening Luther’s excommunication. The bull had been issued in Rome on June 15, 1520, and it listed and condemned as heretical forty-one points Luther had claimed during the Leipzig debate. Three copies of the bull, all inscribed on parchment with the papal seal, or “bull,” attached at the bottom, were distributed: one to Duke George of Saxony; one to Pope Leo X, who was on vacation, hunting wild boar outside of Rome; and the third to Frederick the Wise, who forwarded it to Luther.
The bull stated that Luther had sixty days to recant all forty-one articles or be excommunicated from the church.3 Luther interpreted this to mean that he had sixty days to produce and disseminate as many of his views in writing as possible. Gone was the debonair, bouquet-sniffing monk who had appeared on the podium in Leipzig. Once he began to dismantle the notion of papal primacy and the Roman Catholic Church itself, Luther was relentlessly ruthless on the page, his words snapping with indignation and rage.
“Hear this, O pope,” he fumed in the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian State, “not of all men the holiest but of all men the most sinful! O that God from heaven would soon destroy your throne and sink it in the abyss of hell!”4 Luther was horrified by the rampant corruption he observed among the clergy in Rome, from excessive materialism—like the specially embroidered bishop’s cape that cost 30,000 Gulden (Gulden is German for “gold coin”; to put it into context, Luther’s annual salary at the time was about 100 Gulden) to the papal officials who traveled around Germany dissolving contracts, including marriages, for a fee. He condemned the funding of masses said for the living and the dead as good works and demanded that no dues be paid to Rome. “Cut down the creeping, crawling swarm of vermin at Rome, so that the pope’s household can be supported out of the pope’s own pocket,”5 he raged.
He also criticized what he considered to be worship of the pope, advocating that Christians cease kissing the pope’s feet and driving him about like an idol.6 “What Christian heart can or ought to take pleasure in seeing that when the pope wishes to receive communion, he sits quietly like a gracious lord and has the sacrament brought to him on a golden rod by a bowing cardinal on bended knee,” Luther scoffed. “As though the holy sacrament were not worthy enough for the pope, a poor, stinking sinner, to rise and show respect to his God.”7 The pope, Luther insisted, should be treated not like God but like a man, flawed and fallible like everyone else.
In the Babylonian Captivity Luther took on the sacraments, dismantling the ones that didn’t originate with a direct command from Christ in the New Testament. Under his new rubric, only three of the original seven sacraments qualified—baptism, the Eucharist, and confession. (Luther emphasized personal, private confession between two laypeople or even between a person and God himself, rather than the more formal ritual of confessing to God through a priest. Later the reformers abandoned confession as a sacrament altogether, leaving only two.) Confirmation, ordination, marriage, and extreme unction (or last rites) went to the chopping block. He also reiterated his earlier claim that the pope was the antichrist, the ruler of Babylon, and restated his belief in the priesthood of
all believers. All Christians were priests, he argued, differing only in the roles they held. Finally, in the Babylonian Captivity, as well as in an earlier essay titled A Sermon on the Estate of Marriage (published in 1519), Luther began to lay the groundwork for his views on marriage.
In A Treatise on the Freedom of a Christian, which appeared in November 1520 but was backdated to September to make it appear as though it had been written and published before the Babylonian Captivity, Luther’s tone was more subtle. He had heard rumors that Pope Leo’s attitude toward him was softening, and the thought, at least among Luther’s confidants and advisors, was that perhaps he could retract the Babylonian Captivity, or even deny it had been written by him, should Pope Leo show signs of canceling the bull.8 Pressured by Frederick the Wise to write an apology, Luther penned Freedom of a Christian, which on the surface seemed conciliatory but in actuality was simply a more savvy declaration against the pope and the Church. The tone of the letter was friendly and gracious—Luther reminded Pope Leo that he had never attacked him personally but, instead, had aimed his vitriol against the papacy in general—but the overall message was consistent with his earlier essays. He suggested that Pope Leo give up his title, retire to a parish, live on the income of a priest, and accept all the doctrinal changes Luther had outlined in his previous treatises. Then, Luther proposed, Leo could help him reform the church. In other words, Luther suggested that peace could be possible between them if Leo helped him destroy the papacy.9 Not exactly the apology Frederick the Wise had in mind. Not surprisingly, Pope Leo was not swayed.
In addition to insulting the pope further, Freedom of a Christian also unpacked an important question, one consistently posed by Luther’s detractors: If we can’t earn salvation through doing our own good works, then why bother doing good works at all? Why not eat, drink, and be merry, living our lives contentedly and assuredly in God’s good grace? Luther argued that freedom from sin through Christ’s grace encouraged and inspired Christians to perform good works out of immense gratitude and love for Christ: “The works themselves do not justify him [man] before God, but he does the works out of spontaneous love in obedience to God.”10 Not only that, Luther argued, but the true Christian, inspired by his love for and gratitude toward Christ, should take that love one step further and apply it to his relationship with his neighbor. “A man does not live for himself alone in this mortal body to work for it alone, but he lives also for all men on earth,” Luther wrote. “Rather, he lives only for others and not for himself. To this end he brings his body into subjection that he may the more sincerely and freely serve others.”11
Luther believed this selfless, sacrificial love for one’s neighbor was the hallmark of a true Christian. Christians did good works because of the way Christ loved them and had transformed them by his love. “Although the Christian is thus free from all works,” Luther wrote, “he ought in this liberty to empty himself, take upon himself the form of a servant and to serve, help and in every way deal with his neighbor as he sees that God through Christ has dealt and still deals with him.”12 As we will see, Luther will be challenged by his own words when, five years after the publication of Freedom of a Christian, he will begin to grapple with the question of whether or not to marry a destitute nun.
Here I Stand
Luther dropped the papal bull into the fire on December 10, 1520, for a reason. It was exactly sixty days after the bull had been served to him; his grace period—the two months he was given to recant—was over. Excommunication was imminent. Shortly after, he received his summons to testify in his own defense at a hearing before the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The only small piece of good news was that the hearing would take place on German soil, at the Diet of Worms, rather than in Rome.
Luther was now officially living the perilous life of a heretic. Even traveling the three hundred miles from Wittenberg to Worms was to take his life in his hands. Although Luther had been guaranteed protection during the journey, he undoubtedly recalled the fate of reformer Jan Hus who, more than one hundred years earlier, had been arrested en route to his trial, imprisoned, and later burned at the stake as a heretic. “I would by all means come, if called, in so far as it would be up to me, even if I could not come by my own power and instead would have to be driven there as a sick man,” Luther wrote to his friend George Spalatin on December 29, 1520. “For it would not be right to doubt that I am called by the Lord if the Emperor summons. No one’s danger, no one’s safety can be considered here. We must rather take care that we do not expose the gospel (which we have finally begun to promote) to the derision of the godless and thus give our enemies a reason for boasting over us because we do not dare confess what we have taught and are afraid to shed our blood for it.”13
Luther survived the journey to Worms. He entered the city at ten o’clock on the morning of April 16. Led by eight knights on horseback, his arrival was announced with a triumphant fanfare of trumpets from the watchtower and steeples, a signal reserved for the most distinguished guests. More than two thousand fans mobbed Luther’s small horse-drawn cart, and it took him more than an hour to travel from the city gates to the inn where he would stay during the hearing. Papal officials were disgusted by the fawning crowds. “When he alighted a priest threw his arms round him, touched his garments three times with his hand, and went away exulting as if he had handled a relic of the greatest of saints,” complained Girolamo Aleandro, one of the pope’s assistants. “I expect it will soon be said he works miracles!”14 For someone so critical of what he considered to be idolatry of the pope, Luther didn’t seem to mind the attention when it was directed at him.
When he appeared in a meeting room in the bishop’s palace the next morning, Luther came face-to-face with a towering stack of his books, pamphlets, and essays. The monk, who was dressed in his normal Augustinian habit, his tonsure recently shaven, was asked whether the books were authored by him and, if so, if he wished to retract any of them. Surprisingly, Luther did not offer an answer right away, but instead asked for time to consider, despite the fact that he had known about the hearing for weeks.
One wonders if the request for extra time was indicative of cold feet. Perhaps Luther had second thoughts about the immense decision he was about to make. Considering what a tormented monk he had been, always second-guessing himself, always fearing he was doing the wrong thing, one would assume there was something woven into his psychology that would have allowed for the shadow of a doubt, especially in the case of excommunication when the consequence—eternal damnation, according to the Church—was so high. On the other hand, perhaps Luther’s request for more time was simply a tactical strategy aimed at heightening the drama and suspense of the moment. We can’t know for sure what Luther’s thoughts were that day or why he delayed answering the question he’d known was coming. What we do know is that twenty-four hours later, Luther entered the hearing room, stood before the crowd, and stated his answer with conviction.
The room that day was oppressively hot and packed so full only the emperor was allowed a seat. Luther later recalled that he and everyone else were sweating so profusely and were so uncomfortable that someone suggested he answer the questions in German only, to abbreviate the proceedings, but Luther insisted on replying in both Latin and German. Johann von der Ecken, who was leading the hearing, reiterated the question he had asked Luther the morning prior: Did he or did he not retract his writings, and please, he urged Luther, answer succinctly, “without horns or teeth.”15 Luther replied:
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me, Amen.16
In a word, no, Luther would not retract a sing
le sentence. Neither the pope nor the Church nor the threat of eternal damnation could convince him otherwise. Luther would stake both his earthly and his eternal life on sola gratia—on grace alone.
The crowd erupted in chaos. A member of the emperor’s staff reported that as he left the room, Luther “turned to his friends [and] raised his two arms in the gesture of a victorious knight.”17 He also noted that a group of Spanish courtiers in the room jeered, “To the fire! To the fire!” as Luther exited.18 The next morning Luther received written confirmation from Charles V. “It is certain that a single friar errs in his opinion which is against all of Christendom,” the emperor wrote. “I regret having delayed so long to proceed against this Luther and his false doctrine. I am determined to proceed against him as a notorious heretic.”19
The emperor made a valid point. Think, for a moment, about the monumental step Luther took in single-handedly attempting to subvert and overthrow one thousand years of Christian history. It was, literally, one man standing against all of Christendom. One can hardly begin to fathom the nerve required to stand firm behind those eight simple but radical words: “I cannot and I will not retract anything.” Who was Martin Luther to think he could take on the institution of the Roman Catholic Church? Who was Martin Luther to think he was the one person, in the entire history of the Church, to interpret the Word of God correctly, to conclude that those before him had erred? Depending on how you look at it, it was either an act of astounding arrogance . . . or of great faith. Or perhaps a combination of both.
Katharina and Martin Luther Page 8