Episode 242 – A Drunken German Lights a Fire 

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Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 242: A Drunken German Lights a Fire

“I have heard some bad rumors about me Most Holy Father. I understand that some “good friends” have made my name foul with you, claiming that I have tried to do away with the reputation and the power of the keys as well as of the Pontiff. I am accused a heretic, apostate, and false believer, besides being branded with six hundred additional calumnious epithets. My ears are horrified and my eyes amazed, but my innocent and pure conscience still remains the bulwark of my confidence.” So wrote Martin Luther to Pope Leo X in May 1518.

Was he already a heretic then? He sure as purgatory was one later. But was he already at that point in time? Luther was no habitual liar, so he most likely did see himself as a dutiful son of the church.

And even if he was a heretic, did it matter? Well, I think it mattered a whole lot. Because had he been an obvious heretic, much of what came to pass would instead have passed as dust under a Tiber bridge.

Let’s go and find out.

But before we start, a quick reminder that the collection boxes for the History of the Germans podcast remain open. This show, as you probably know or at least have noticed, is advertising-free. No rapid pressing of the 30-second forward button followed by mild swearing and equally frantic pressing of the 15-second backward button is required. All that works because some exceedingly generous souls regularly drop their hard-earned ducats at historyofthegermans.com/support, generous souls like Tyll Selhorst, Barbara van der Marel-Versluijs, Jan B., Colin M., Haakon E., Dennis D., Adalsteeinn E, Lucas, Vann P. and Ola B. Why don’t you join them now?

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Albrecht’s reaction

As we mentioned last time, Luther had sent his 95 theses with an accompanying letter to Albrecht of Brandenburg. Albrecht was the archbishop of Mainz and therefore the most senior prelate in the German lands. He was also the commissioner of the St. Peter’s indulgence, making him the boss of Johann Tetzel, whose preaching had irritated Luther so much.

We cannot say for a fact what Luther intended to achieve with this letter, but on the face of it, it was a simple complaint. He was informing Albrecht that Tetzel was going well beyond his authority and was making outrageous claims about the effectiveness of his indulgences. Luther explicitly said that he assumed Albrecht knew nothing about these excesses and would never condone such behaviour. Hence all he, a miserable little monk, requested was that these abuses be stopped.

There is some ambiguity here, because Luther distributed not only the theses but also his letter to Albrecht amongst his friends and correspondents. If he really just wanted Albrecht to know about Tetzel’s misdeeds, why send it around and risk it being published more widely?

In any event, Albrecht did receive the letter, though he probably did not read it in full or engage with the theses, since he wasn’t a theologian. What he did was send it on to the University of Mainz for an opinion, assuming that if they found some heresy, he could order this irritating friar to be quiet.

But here is the thing. All his learned men wrote back was, quote: We find that they [the 95 theses] restrict the power of the pope and the apostolic see and contradict therefore, the opinions of many blessed and venerable doctors. That was not what Albrecht had expected.

As far as Albrecht was concerned, indulgences were a major part of the church’s arsenal of grace and of its money-generating machinery. After all, they had been issued every few years and had collected vast quantities of money. If this obnoxious monk from Wittenberg said they were no good, he must be a heretic just for saying it. But seemingly his university professors did not want to go down this route. All they pointed out was disobedience, and disobedience to the pope, not the archbishop, so nothing for us to do here.

The Content of the 95 Theses

And why that was gets us to the true genius of the 95 theses. Luther never intended them to be the first shot in a battle to destroy the papacy, but if someone had sat down and war-gamed the ideal opening salvo in such a war, he could not have done much better than that.

First up, the 95 theses may have been challenging, but they were not obvious heresy and hence could not be forbidden outright, whilst at the same time they pulled the rug from under one of the main funding mechanisms of the Roman Curia.

The reason they weren’t obvious heresy was, for one, that they were theses, not statements of belief. Luther did not say that the pope could not grant relief from purgatory; he said he wanted to discuss with fellow academics the possibility that the pope might not be able to. Big difference. Stating such theses and debating them was a key component of the scholastic method and commonplace in universities all across Christian Europe. Academics were given a lot of leeway in formulating such theses, on the assumption that they would withdraw them once they had been shown to be misguided. Luther, as an academic inviting people to an academic discussion, enjoyed this privilege.

Secondly, the main theological message was that indulgences were only a small component of the overall sacrament of penance, better known as the sacrament of confession. Being absolved of one’s sins followed a three-step process. First, the sinner had to feel contrition: he had to genuinely repent his sin, or at a minimum be sufficiently afraid of the Last Judgement to want to repent. Secondly, the sinner had to articulate his or her contrition to a priest, the actual act of confession. It was at this point that the priest absolved the sinner, based on the apostolic authority given to St. Peter. Once the priest had said ego te absolvo, the sinner was pretty much done. What followed was the order to provide satisfaction, i.e. the bit where the sinner was asked to say a set number of prayers, undergo some fasting regime, give a certain amount of alms or go on a pilgrimage. This satisfaction was not a condition of spiritual absolution, but a temporal punishment imposed by the church in this world.

Indulgences only affected this very last part of the process, the satisfaction. In earlier centuries the penance required had been extremely harsh: years of exclusion from the sacraments, banishment etc. What indulgences did was commute these punishments into more manageable good works. The church could do this because all the saints, the Virgin and Christ himself had created so much goodness in the world that could be deployed to obtain mercy. And the church was in charge of this treasury of merit. Hence it could say that instead of having to suffer seven years of excommunication, you could give 5 gulden to the pilgrims’ hospital and the difference would be made up by the grace of the saints. Indulgences came in all sorts of shapes. They could be associated with pilgrimages, contributions to the building of roads and bridges, the decoration of churches, the veneration of relics and, crucially, the financing of the rebuilding of St. Peter’s in Rome.

But what they could not do was offer full release from purgatory, give free passes to heaven or remit any sin without contrition and confession. Much of the detail was vague, as indulgences had seen a lot more practice than theological scrutiny.

That is pretty much the theological core of Luther’s 95 theses. He argued that indulgences had only a small remit: they were limited to the temporal punishment, not the spiritual absolution, and hence were, simply speaking, just not that powerful or important. All well within the range of acceptable opinion. There had indeed been many, many writers who had railed against indulgences before, and who had been even more explicit in their criticism, for example of the cult of relics.

That is why the University of Mainz avoided calling his theses obviously heretical and punted them down to Rome.

So, if the 95 theses were nothing but a tweaking of existing doctrine, what was all the fuss about?

That is where Luther’s true genius showed through. Because mixed in between the learned hypotheses about what an indulgence was and what it could do, there were some very explicit, often coarse polemics.

#43 Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons;

#50 Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church burns down to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep.

#66 The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men.

#75 To think the papal pardons so great that they could absolve a man even if he had committed an impossible sin and violated the Mother of God — this is madness

#82 “Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Church?”

#86 “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”

Being polemical and rude is just that, rud

e, but not heresy. So once again, on purely legal grounds, he should have got away with it. But at the same time he tapped straight into a long-smoldering anger over the way the church behaved in the German lands.

As we discussed last time, the Gravamina, the complaints of the German Nation, had been going round and round, accusing the pope of fleecing his sheep for his nefarious projects whilst calling them uncouth barbarians. One of the specific complaints was about indulgences, in particular the constant demands to help fund crusades against the Turks. These crusades never happened, but at the same time papal nephews built stunning palaces and papal armies fought imperial forces in Emilia-Romagna. Having a friar from an observant branch of his order, a man of known devotion and sincerity, singing from the same hymn sheet was absolute catnip for the imperial reform movement.

And by not being obviously heretical, Luther’s theses could circulate freely, and for long enough that they had spread all the way from the North Sea shore to the Alpine passes before the pope intervened.

The Sermon on Indulgences

But that was only one component that accounted for the massive impact the 95 theses had. The other was down to a very particular set of skills, skills that made him a nightmare for people like Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg and Pope Leo X. Let me explain.

The 95 theses had been written in Latin. Luther had sent this Latin version, probably in printed form, to a number of his friends and correspondents across Germany. Some of them took the text to their printers and asked them to produce more copies. These printers quickly saw that there was interest in the market for this content and produced further copies on their own account. And as those travelled across the land, another group of printers got hold of the content and printed it too.

By the end of 1517, a German version had emerged, which spread even faster. This version had been neither written nor sanctioned by Luther himself. People were reading and distributing this version, and not just academics. Common people, merchants, lawyers, even literate artisans bought copies. Often those who could read would read them to those who could not.

This process of Chinese whispers bore a huge risk of misunderstandings and overreactions. So Luther decided to produce his own German version. Not just a translation of the academic text, but a handbook summarising and simplifying his views. He called it a Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, even though it may never have been delivered as a sermon[1]. This Sermon on Indulgences is where Luther first appeared as a great German writer. He had written things in German before, but these early texts had been terribly wooden and stilted.

This one was an entirely different kettle of fish. Sharp, to the point, easy to understand and written in a language that people actually spoke. There were no long words or academic niceties here. This was from the calling-a-spade-a-spade school of writing. It was the style that Luther would employ for the rest of his career and that would make him famous. 

It came in the form of a small booklet roughly the width and height of a modern paperback, not the big A3 poster that the 95 theses had been. A front page with a nice woodcut and an elegant title set in a triangular shape was followed by just six pages, with three or four paragraphs on each page. Short and sweet. And whilst the 95 theses were an academic critique, the sermon was more of a consumer advice booklet.

The key point was that indulgences were nowhere near as effective as claimed. Don’t trust the advertising. They cannot release your parents or loved ones from purgatory, they cannot do away with your sins unless you truly repent, and if you do repent, why not do some real good works as satisfaction? Help your neighbour, give to the poor. That will stand you in better stead at the Last Judgement than wasting money on a prestige project that the pope could easily pay for out of his own pocket.

It is hard to exaggerate how innovative this was. Before 1518 there were two separate markets for printed works. One was for expensive editions of mostly Latin texts written for an intellectual and economic elite – bibles and lots and lots of religious texts. There were also some German works like the Ship of Fools and the Theuerdank, also in luxury editions with elaborate woodcuts. The other market was for practical papers: almanacs, calendars, schoolbooks, textbooks, indulgence forms etc.

Luther’s sermon was neither of those. It was six pages of cutting-edge theology, written like a pamphlet. It sold like hot cakes. And remember, there was no such thing as copyright in the early 16^th century. So if a printer got his hands on a copy of the Sermon and saw a huge demand for it in his region, he would just print a couple of hundred, even a thousand, and sell them. And so did the next, and the next, and the next. Very much like viral internet memes, Luther’s texts multiplied whenever they hit another node in the network.

Fourteen editions appeared in Wittenberg, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Augsburg and Basel within the first year, and another nine in the following one. The Ship of Fools, the most famous German-language book of the time, took 50 years, not two, to amass this number of editions.

Whether Luther planned it or just stumbled upon this innovation, what he created was not just a new publishing market but a forum where the general population, not just a small elite, could express itself through buying and occasionally writing books, pamphlets and, later, newspapers. A process that has dominated discourse for 500 years, basically until the advent of the internet.

And by changing the format, Luther also changed the content. These were no longer proposals for debate; they were affirmations of his opinions. Which meant he could no longer hide behind academic privilege. What he acquired in its stead was the protection that comes with fame and public support. Of all the bold moves Luther made, this must have been one of the most audacious – leaving behind the protection of academia for something nobody knew even existed.

Reactions of the Dominicans

Since there was not much Albrecht could do about the 95 theses, given his university’s reluctance to condemn Luther, he had passed the whole matter on to Rome. The letter he must have sent to Pope Leo X together with the documentation has not survived. But I would not be surprised if it included some choice words about the predictability of the mess that had now materialised.

Whilst Albrecht was mildly concerned about the fallout, Johann Tetzel and his fellow Dominicans were seriously rattled. They had been managing much of the indulgence business across Europe, and they could see that wherever Luther’s theses spread, their business collapsed. They had to push back.

They published 106 theses refuting Luther’s 95 theses. They staged an actual academic debate at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder. However, they could not write like Luther, nor did anyone like their message. In March 1518, students from Wittenberg took 800 copies of these counter-theses and burned them. The despicable habit of book burning had been gaining ground ever since Jan Hus saw his books thrown onto the pyre in 1410, and it had continued with Savonarola. To Luther’s credit, he was very upset about this behaviour and remonstrated with his students.

This might have been the end of this storyline, had it not been for a reaction from an unexpected corner. A fellow academic, a man Luther respected and even called a friend, had received the 95 theses and taken strongly against them. That man was Johannes Eck. Luther was seriously taken aback by Eck’s reaction, having thought he would be in his corner, or at least neutral. But as most of you probably know, Eck was to become Luther’s nemesis.

Reaction of Pope Leo X

Through Albrecht and the Dominicans, the matter had now reached the Holy Father, the Medici pope Leo X. In the older literature it is said that his initial reaction was: “Luther is a drunk German, he will change his mind when he is sober”. There is no evidence that Leo ever said anything of the sort. The story is still interesting, inasmuch as it tells us something about what the Germans – who presumably made it up – thought about the pope, the Italians and their own place in the world.

The image of Luther as a drunken German fed directly into the massive chip on the shoulder that the inhabitants of the empire carried around with them. Part of it was due to the political weakness of the empire compared to the vigour and strength of the French, Spanish and English monarchies, with their splendid capitals, courts, palaces and massive armies. They felt scorned as savages by the sophisticated Renaissance Italians, and increasingly by the French: uncouth peasants with bad table manners, unsuitable for polite company and devoid of intellectual capabilities. And they reacted in the typical German manner. They pointed to their engineering prowess. Jakob Wimpfeling, a humanist, wrote in 1515: Is not Rome indebted to us? Have not two skilful men from Strassburg and Mainz invented the noble art of printing, which makes it possible to propagate the correct doctrines of faith and morals throughout the world in all languages?

Ironic as that statement turned out to be in hindsight, it shows that the Germans of the time expected the pope to treat German concerns with derision, whether he actually did or not.

Whether or not these attitudes shaped Leo X’s reaction, he did not take the matter terribly seriously. He had other matters to deal with, like the previous year’s attempt by a group of senior cardinals to kill him with a poisoned bandage to be placed on his anal fistula.

So he tried to keep things in-house. He called on the recently appointed General of the Augustinian order and told him to get his wayward friar back in line.

The Augustinian chapter in Heidelberg

And there was a good opportunity to do that. The observant Augustinians in Germany were to hold their triennial meeting in Heidelberg. Luther, as the district vicar of the Augustinians in Saxony and Thuringia, was expected to take part.

It was now April 1518. His 95 theses had spread beyond the borders of the empire. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most respected public intellectual in Europe, had read them and sent them on to Thomas More, another leading light of humanism. Luther’s Sermon on Indulgences was spreading like wildfire amongst the common people.

Meanwhile, the Dominicans were publicly calling for him to be burned, and Johannes Eck was writing against his theses. Practically overnight he had become a celebrity. Not many people knew what he looked like; that came later. But his name was known. Some saw him as a lead into a better future; others wanted him dead.

Travelling on foot from town to town with just one other friar for company – as the Augustinian rule required – was therefore dangerous. If his enemies knew he was coming, they could easily set up an ambush. And that would have been the end of this affair.

Still, Luther decided to go on foot, trying to stay incognito. He got lucky. No ambush. After about ten days he and his companion arrived safely at the Augustinian friary in Heidelberg.

A letter from the General of the Augustinian order asking Brother Martin to recant and stay silent from then on may or may not have been read out. If it was, no one took any notice. In fact, the exact opposite happened.

Luther was given the opportunity to dispute his theses in an open forum at the university – one of the oldest and best endowed academic institutions in the empire. This was a huge stage, the largest he had yet appeared on.

Luther decided not to talk about indulgences. This was not the audience for that. The Augustinians had no truck with indulgence selling and they did not need a crash course in the basics of the sacrament of penance.

What he did here was much more audacious. Once again he came up with theses, a total of 40: 28 theological and 12 philosophical. And this time he did not leave them standing on their own; they came with detailed explanations, sources and proofs.

The gist of what he said here was that whatever man does, even if well intended, splendid and seemingly good, it can be sinful, whilst whatever God does, even if it appears evil or unseemly, it is always full of immortal merit. Which in conclusion means all good works – not just indulgences, but prayers, fasting, alms and pilgrimages – may all be futile. You cannot work your way into heaven.

His second point was that you cannot figure out the nature of God using reason or observation. God is unfathomable, only accessible through suffering and the cross. All the theorizing, the application of Aristotelian concepts to Christian belief, was basically one ginormous error. We are just specks of dirt before the divinity.

This led him to one of his most controversial conclusions – that there is no true free will. Sure, he said, we can decide whom to marry, which business to go into or where we want to live, but since our expulsion from paradise, our free will drives us invariably towards selfishness. Meaning that if we decide, of our own free will, to be good, we don’t do it for the right reasons but out of selfishness, and that again is a sin. All we can do is recognize our utter inability to drive events before we can receive God’s grace. End of.

Now with that he left orthodoxy well behind. St. Augustine had had some ideas in the same direction, and Erasmus had laid some groundwork, but what Luther said went well beyond them and was truly shocking.

Throwing Aristotle and reason overboard meant burying the entire scholastic tradition, including the greatest of the Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas. Luther was certainly not the first to criticize the scholastics; Bernard of Clairvaux had been fiercely opposed to them. But St. Bernard had not denied their right to exist. Luther argued that their whole intellectual construct was a sin, that they were theologians of glory who were leading souls away from God.

Moreover, by saying that good works were not only no way to gain salvation but actually a sin in themselves, he was knocking out the entire underpinning of the church economy. All these prayer factories would fall silent if paying some monk to say mass on your behalf was no longer a means to ease the passage to heaven. If these theses held, hundreds of thousands of people could lose their jobs.

As one listener said to Luther after the disputation: don’t let the peasants hear this, or they will stone you.

This critic, however, was in the minority. Many of his listeners, particularly amongst the Augustinians but also other students and even the odd Dominican, were amazed by what they heard. Martin Bucer, the future reformer of Strassburg and at the time a young Dominican friar in the audience, wrote to a friend, quote:

  “Luther has a marvelous graciousness in response and unconquerable patience in listening. In argument he shows the acumen of the apostle Paul. That which Erasmus insinuates he speaks openly and freely.”

I personally struggle with the idea that we have no free will, but I can understand why it resonated so strongly with Luther’s audience in Heidelberg, with the monks and friars. Many of them had gone through the same kind of spiritual crisis that Luther had faced and was at that point still dealing with. All the efforts they had made to gain the love of God – the incessant fasting, praying and other mortifications of the flesh – had not yielded the sense of peace and fulfilment many of them hankered after. And so they had either given up or redoubled their efforts to the point of total exhaustion. And here was Luther saying: no, it is not your fault. God is not punishing you for not doing enough good works. There is no amount of good works you could do, because all these good works are ultimately sinful, because this world and everything in it is shot through with sin. Get off this hamster wheel and focus on what you came for, your faith. Relinquish your free will that never really existed in the first place, and fall back into the arms of a forgiving God.

The Heidelberg disputation had been a great success for the professor from Wittenberg. The academic world was listening to his audacious ideas. His Augustinian colleagues offered him a place in their comfortable carriages for the journey back, so he did not have to make the perilous trip on foot again.

Wherever he went, people wanted to see him, hear him preach, have conversations with him. The journey had turned into a triumphal procession. He commented later that “He went out on foot and returned in a wagon”.  

Preaching about the Ban

Travelling in a wagon was of course nice, but it must have dawned on him that he was going down a dangerous path. The Dominicans had already demanded that he should burn, long before he called for their beloved Aquinas to be put on the scrapheap of history. His superiors in the Augustinian order had asked him to take it down a notch, and he was well aware that a case was pending in Rome that could see him travelling south of the Alps in chains, never to return.

Shortly after his return he wrote a letter directly to Pope Leo, the letter we heard at the top of the episode. In it he laid out why his 95 theses were in line with doctrine: that they were theses, not statements of his own convictions, and that he would be happy to be instructed in his errors, if indeed they were errors.

But did he really mean it? The letter had gone through multiple drafts and had been agreed with his superior in the order, Staupitz, and with the Bishop of Brandenburg. But by the time it was sent, it was already obsolete. He had published the Sermon on Indulgences and had held the Heidelberg disputation. Neither is mentioned in the letter.

He would later say that he ran down this road like a blinkered horse, not looking left or right, just forward, from one logical conclusion to the next. And in this process he did not care, or perhaps did not even notice, where he bumped up against existing doctrine or whom he offended along the way. He had already seen Johannes Eck, once a man he thought of as a supporter, turn against him. He would soon find out that his views on free will would cost him the support of many humanists, including the great Erasmus of Rotterdam.

And the next stop on his dashing ride down the road to perdition or salvation, depending on your perspective, was another sermon, this time on the ban, aka excommunication. His point was that – once again – the pope could only exclude a man from participation in the church in this world; his power did not reach into the afterlife. It was up to Christ to decide whether someone was a sinner or a righteous man, irrespective of what a mere human – and the pope was, after all, just a mere human – had decided.

Whilst the Heidelberg theses were a bit too complex to become a bestseller like the Sermon on Indulgences, the sermon on the ban was another massive hit. Public opinion, the creature he had just nurtured, loved it, and for good reason. The church had turned excommunication into a weapon in its perennial disputes with the temporal authorities, and even with individuals. Peasants who were late in paying their dues, artisans who were too aggressive in their demands for pay, clergy who were late in paying their annates, alms not paid as agreed in penance – all these could be reasons for excommunication. And excommunication was usually followed by the ban, which made the person an outlaw whose property was free for anyone to take. Victims of this kind of justice could be seen begging on roads everywhere.

Prierias’s Dialogue

Now the Roman church could no longer ignore what was going on. This friar from the wilds of the east had become a serious nuisance. The attempt to shut him up using internal channels had failed. It was time to bring out the big guns.

Pope Leo X asked his Master of the Sacred Palace, aka his chief theologian, a Dominican by the name of Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio, commonly referred to as Prierias, to write up a theological opinion on Luther’s writings.

Prierias took a mere three days to write his paper, and it shows. Roland Bainton summarises it beautifully, quote:

Prierias declared that the universal Church is virtually the Roman Church. The Roman Church consists representatively in the cardinals, but virtually in the pope. Just as the universal Church cannot err on faith and morals, nor can a true council, neither can the Roman Church nor the pope when speaking in his official capacity. Whoever does not accept the doctrine of the Roman Church and of the Roman pontiff as the infallible rule of faith from which sacred Scripture derives strength and authority is a heretic, and he who declares that in the matter of indulgences the Roman Church cannot do what actually it does is a heretic. Then Prierias proceeded to refute Luther’s errors, describing him on the way as a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron.[2]

It came with a summons to appear before the curia in Rome within 60 days of receipt, to either recant or be treated as a heretic.

What did Luther do? He took the document to the nearest printer and published it with a brief comment, which was barely necessary. What Prierias had written was enough to make most of Germany, even those who opposed Luther’s theology, line up behind him.

As we discussed last time, the German leadership was absolutely convinced that the papacy was ripping them off. Here is an unknown German clergyman writing in 1451, quote: It is the pope and the cardinals who daily commit the most fearful transgressions and abuses, carrying on a cursed and detestable simoniac trade in ecclesiastical benefices as though they were taking pigs and cows to market. Such wicked transactions bring a hoard of gold and silver to Rome, and the pope, in his haste to fill his money bag is heedless of what the rest of us know, namely that the higher a man’s place, the graver his sins” end quote.

With his immensely arrogant declaration that the pope was always right and that whoever said anything against him should burn, Prierias had thrown another barrel of oil onto a fire that was already blazing brightly. And on top of all that, by not saying that Luther’s theses and ideas were heretical, he had left the door open for people to join him on his journey. If the curia thought this would put a stop to it, it was mistaken.

But what about the subject of this summons, Friar Martin? Luther was of course aware that his case was pending before the curia, and that he had stepped out of the protection of academia and, with the Heidelberg disputation and the sermon on the ban, had also left orthodoxy behind. So a citation was not certain, but exceedingly likely. He had written to Pope Leo earlier that year specifically to forestall one. So it wasn’t a surprise.

What shocked him, though, was the line of argument the church had taken. Prierias had not addressed any of his actual theses on indulgences, let alone addressed his emerging theology that he had laid out in the Heidelberg disputation. And that meant that, if there was a trial, he would not get a chance to present his arguments. And that was what mattered to him.

As we said at the very beginning of this season, Luther was, above all else, a man of religion. He saw life from the perspective of the afterlife. What mattered to him was the final judgement, not any judgement made by a human; he cared not about his physical body, only about his immortal soul. That is not to say he did not fear death. Of course he did. But what he feared more than death was condemnation.

And as he progressed in both his internal struggle to find his God and the external struggle with the authorities, he had come to believe that he was on a mission from God to reform the church. And if that mission was to succeed, he needed a public forum where he could present his ideas, plant the seed for others to tend, or by some miracle even convert the pope and the bishops to the life of the apostles. What he wanted, more than survival, was his day in court. If that was to cost him his life, so be it.

What Prierias had done with his line of argument, whether deliberately or not, was deny Luther that public appearance. As we will see next time, Prierias and Pope Leo X would not be able to prevent Luther from getting his moment in the limelight – and we will also see how that panned out for him.

I hope you will join us again. And in the meantime, if you feel compelled to help keep this show advertising-free, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up as a member.

[1] Taylor Editions / Editions / Ein Sermon von Ablass und Gnade: a digital edition

[2] HERE I STAND ALIFE OF MARTIN LUTHER : ROLAND H.BAINTON : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive