Lecture 4: From the Ninety-five Theses to Worms: Here I Stand

The lecture, section by section

1. A notice on the community message board

   The Ninety-five Theses carried the unglamorous title of a disputation on the power and efficacy of indulgences: Latin theses inviting fellow academics to debate. The traditional date, October 31, matters because crowds would pass the Castle Church door on the eve of All Saints' Day, but posting there was standard practice, not vandalism. Someone translated the theses into German, the press did the rest, and within weeks all Germany was reading an article that questioned the pope's authority and stalled the indulgence trade.

2. What the theses actually say

   Selections from the document itself. The first: when Christ says repent, he means the believer's entire life is repentance, not the sacrament of penance. Number 27 fires straight at Tetzel's jingle about coins and springing souls. Number 32: those who trust letters of indulgence for salvation will be eternally damned along with their teachers. Numbers 36 and 37: the truly repentant Christian has full forgiveness and every benefit of Christ without any letter. Number 45: buy an indulgence while passing a person in need and you purchase God's displeasure. Number 51: the pope ought to give his own money to the poor, even if he had to sell St. Peter's to do it. Numbers 81 and 82 voice the laity's shrewd question: if the pope can empty purgatory, why not do it for love instead of money? Number 90: silencing these questions by force would only expose the church to ridicule. Tetzel answered with counter-theses of his own: obey the pope.

3. Not yet a Protestant charter

   The theses are aimed at one abuse, not at the whole system; they contain no five solas, and in places they still give the pope the benefit of the doubt. Luther had been converted only about two years and was still working out the implications. Zwingli's Sixty-seven Articles, which the course reaches later, read far more like a charter of Protestant doctrine. What made the Ninety-five Theses the catalyst was not their content so much as the firestorm God used them to ignite.

4. Leipzig, 1519: the real issue surfaces

   Johann Eck, Rome's most celebrated debater, met Luther in July 1519, and by then the question had shifted from indulgences to papal authority itself. Luther argued from the New Testament, from the church fathers, and from the plain fact of the Eastern church, a whole branch of Christendom that had never recognized papal supremacy, and Eck had no good answers. Eck's one victory was forcing Luther to admit his agreement with Jan Hus, condemned a century before, and he left convinced he had won by association. Among the listeners persuaded the other way was Martin Bucer, the future reformer of Strasbourg.

5. The bull and the bonfire

   In 1520 Pope Leo X issued a bull giving Luther sixty days to recant or face excommunication, and excommunication in a Europe with one church and no separation of church and state meant becoming an enemy of society itself, with flames the customary end for heretics. Luther took all sixty days, then marched to the center of Wittenberg with his students, built a bonfire, and burned the bull. In his written response he called the pope antichrist, in the general sense of 1 John, a usurper occupying Christ's place as head of the church, and described the Roman system in the harshest terms he could summon. Whatever transition remained in 1517 was finished by 1520; the formal excommunication came on January 3, 1521.

6. The theology of the cross against the theology of glory

   Luther framed the deepest difference in two phrases. The theology of the cross: human beings can do nothing to earn righteousness before God or add anything to the righteousness provided at the cross; whatever righteousness the believer has is alien, from outside, Christ's own, imputed. The theology of glory: some ability to achieve righteousness survives the fall, so free will cooperates with grace and God's righteousness plus mine gets me to heaven. That synergism remains the Roman position, and Luther saw the two theologies as mutually exclusive.

7. Worms, 1521: conscience captive to the word

   Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony and among the most powerful princes in the empire, secured from the young emperor Charles V a promise of safe conduct for Luther to the diet, an imperial rather than church council, at Worms. Luther went knowing what safe conduct had been worth to Hus. His prayer the morning before trial leans on the Psalms he had lectured through, asking God to stand by him and be his defense, his mighty fortress. Told to recant, he asked a day, then answered that unless convinced by Scripture and plain reason he could not accept popes and councils that contradict each other; his conscience was captive to the word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Whether he added the famous words about standing there, as his biographer Bainton argues he did, he said it all first in Latin, then repeated it in German so everyone present could understand.

8. Outlawed, kidnapped, translating

   Charles V honored the safe conduct out of respect for Frederick, but the Edict of Worms in May 1521 declared Luther a notorious heretic: his books banned, aiding him a crime, and anyone free to kill him without penalty. On the road home Luther was kidnapped by friendly soldiers on Frederick's orders and hidden in the Wartburg Castle under the name Junker Jorg, Squire George. There, in a matter of months, he translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek into German, a work that unified the German language much as Tyndale's line of translation shaped English. The inkwell-at-the-devil story belongs to legend, though tour guides still point at the wall.

9. Back to Wittenberg: the word must fight alone

   In Luther's absence his colleague Carlstadt pushed radical changes and the Zwickau prophets stirred upheaval. Luther returned, preached the Invocavit sermons, and expelled the radicals. His picture is unforgettable: the devil sits grinning behind the fires of hell when men spread the gospel by violence, but shudders when the word runs and contends alone on the battlefield. Here two Reformation approaches diverge: Luther's normative principle allows whatever Scripture does not forbid, so Lutheran churches keep much liturgy and imagery, while Zwingli and Calvin's regulative principle permits in worship only what the New Testament commands, a debate evangelical churches are still having.

10. A monk marries a nun

    The Reformation restored the pastor's family to Europe after centuries of mandatory celibacy, which Luther found irreconcilable with Paul's qualification that an overseer be the husband of one wife. Katharina von Bora was among the nuns Luther helped escape hidden in fish barrels. In 1524 he wrote that he would never marry, since he daily expected a heretic's death; within a year he and Katie were married. She ran the enormous former cloister as home, farm, and hostel, rose before dawn, and earned his nickname the morning star of Wittenberg. He called her his dear rib and teased her in letters to the end of his life. Six children, a real friendship, and, Busenitz insists, a lesson: ministry must never overshadow marriage.

11. The Peasants' War

    In 1525 radicals including Thomas Muntzer, whose proto-communism later earned him a statue in East Germany, stirred the peasants toward political revolution in the Reformation's name. Luther, determined that religious reformation never become armed revolt, wrote with characteristic ferocity against the murderous, thieving hordes: the government bears the sword and may put rebellion down by force. The believers of Acts 4 shared their own goods freely; the raging peasants, he observed, wanted other men's goods in common while keeping their own.

12. The dark year and the mighty fortress

    In 1527 the health Luther had wrecked through monastic self-punishment collapsed, the plague struck Wittenberg, and in a letter to Melanchthon he confessed a despair so deep he nearly abandoned his faith, the anguish of the darkest psalms in his own voice. It was worth noting who stayed when plague came: the wealthy fled first, and Protestant pastors remained to minister among the dying. Luther came through the other side, persuaded that only God's strength had held him, and out of that furnace wrote A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, perhaps the most famous hymn of Protestant history, its familiar words carrying more raw emotion than singers usually suspect.

1. Thesis 45 says that buying an indulgence while ignoring a person in need purchases God's displeasure. Where might religious spending or activity substitute for plain obedience today?

2. Luther said his conscience was captive to the word of God. What is the difference between that and the modern appeal to conscience as personal preference?

3. Luther teased that he would never marry because he expected a heretic's death, then married within the year. How do you hold plans loosely before God's providence without becoming passive?