Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms

I met Dr. John Matsko last October when I had been invited to speak in Greenville at the Reformation Weekend for Faith Free Presbyterian Church. And he was also speaking and he presented two historical programs. One on the one we're going to hear this morning on Martin Luther and the Diet of Worms. And the other on the influence of the Bible on the whole subject of history.

Not just church history, but history as we know it today. That was a very fascinating program as well. Dr. Matsko first began to teach at BJU in Greenville in 1971. He went away for a while to Virginia, came back and has continued teaching there. He is a member of Faith Free Presbyterian Church in Greenville. He shares our love for the Reformation and for Reformed theology. And I've gotten to know him a little bit better just yesterday and it's been a delight to do that. And so Dr. John Matsko, if you will come now, thank you for coming and being with us today.

I feel very comfortable here. We share theological perspectives and musical perspectives. Your pastor and I were both in school together. Along with Joan Pinkston, who was the compiler of the hymn book.

I'm a personal friend. We had to wait for an extra week to get our hymn books at Faith Free. I have a long inscription in my copy of the book. I think I counted the number of tunes she wrote that are in the book and it's like 73.

Something like that. She's just fantastic and very, very humble person. And many physical problems over the years and just recently she's been able to come back and play the piano again at Faith Free. We have a lot of things that are similar between not only did your pastor and I, were we in school together, but also we're both cancer survivors.

And we're both past the age of retirement but not retired. So I'm very happy to be here today. I guess I should start by saying something about Martin Luther and A Mighty Fortress. If you ever see the German on that, the words, let goods and kindred go, it's a lot stronger in German.

When I saw it for the first time, I went whoa. Anyway, I won't go into that. Mighty Fortress is one of the few of Luther's hymns where we know for sure that he wrote both the words and music. For others, we're not quite sure if he wrote them.

He was quite gifted actually as an amateur in music. I can't think if there's anything else I wanted to say before I go on to what I planned this spring. I guess I ought to say that I'm a teacher by training rather than a preacher, so there's no application as such.

But I am willing to answer questions at the end and I'll try, if you're not afraid of me, to ask questions at the end, I'll give it a shot. I'll try not to say more than I know. I don't know if anybody here has ever heard of William Lyon Phelps. He was an English teacher at Yale and also a Baptist minister. Those two things don't sound like they go together.

A hundred years ago they could. Whether Phelps was a real Christian or not, you have to read his sermons, it's not really. But one of the things he said was, it's impossible for a man, no matter how self-aware he is, to stand up before an audience and not say more than he knows. So this is the 501st anniversary of the Diet of Worms. I guess the first thing is, we'll get the painful joke out of the way first. So a student once asked me, while I was standing in front of the class, if there was a connection between the word diet, meaning a meeting of political leaders, and the word diet as in eating less food.

And it was one of those things where you hate students to do this while you're standing in front of class and I said, I'll get back to you on that. So the answer is, sort of. The food kind of diet is how much food you eat per day. And the political kind of diet is a meeting that began on a particular day, like the day when the counselors of the Holy Roman Empire met together. So possibly, but not absolutely certainly, the medieval Latin word die ita comes from the classical Latin word dieus, or day.

If you know something about German, you know that that day business got into their word for a legislator too, the Bundestag, that day word is there. But there's absolutely no etymological connection between the city of Worms and the critters that crawl in the ground. And I guess I should say right here that I'm going to say Worms. If you say Worms, that's fine. The problem with trying to be too correct here is that the word diet in German is going to be pronounced diet.

And if I said diet, make everybody think of bug spray or something, so I'm not going to do that. But if I were giving a lecture on Richard Wagner and I said Richard Wagner, you'd all think I was ignorant, so that's why I'm going to say Worms. So when you look at this map, how many tiny states would you guess were part of the Holy Roman Empire in Luther's day? Well, roughly 300, although you can make any kind of guess you want. It just depends on what you count. But if you read it in books, they say 300.

So some are bigger than others, obviously. That's why the Holy Roman Empire had to hold diets. The empire was so loosely organized that it had no national legislature or even a capital, so the rulers of these mini-states or the representatives rotated around the larger towns of greater Germany. The emperor himself had a lot less clout than the title might seem to suggest. The emperor's job was more like trying to herd cats than it was being the kind of thing we think of as being an emperor today.

Even though the emperor at this moment was so important, he was the Habsburg ruler, Charles V. Well, he controlled more of Europe than anyone else in the thousand years between Charlemagne and Napoleon. Maybe back in your day you remember in classes they had maps that were on stands or they had maps that pulled down on a big roller like some of you older folks remember. They don't make those maps anymore.

Some of the maps are still around, but they don't make them anymore because everybody uses this. But there were three maps in my map set when I taught European history that were named after people. One of them was Charlemagne. One of them was Napoleon.

And you see that there's a thousand years between Charlemagne and Napoleon. And the third one was Europe at the time of Charles V. So that's how important Charles V was. So Charles V controlled all of Europe that you see here on the map. That includes Spain, part of Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, and then within the dotted line is the Holy Roman Empire.

Plus, you all sort of remember starting in grade school about hearing about Cortez and Pizarro and the Aztecs and the Incas and all those guys and you remember that the Spanish at this point had conquered Latin America, central and part of South America. So on the right side of the map you see those parts of the New World also are part of Charles V's empire. Territory-wise, he controlled more territory in theory than did Charlemagne or Napoleon.

So that's how important, in theory, how important he is. Don't you think Charles looks a little strange? I mean, that strange triangular face. It includes what's sometimes called the Habsburg jaw, which was the result of centuries of inbreeding among the Habsburg royalty. This inbreeding eventually got the dynasty and even the whole European balance of power in trouble. Maybe, again, some of you older folks remember studying in school something called the War of the Spanish Succession. And the reason why there was a War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the 18th century was that one of the Habsburgs was so inbred, that is, they kept intermarrying in the same family for so long that the guy was, he was completely unable to reproduce and also he was not mentally sharp. So this war was triggered by the Habsburgs. Anyway, one of the problems with Habsburgs is they had this physical malady. This, the last guy that I mentioned, Charles II of Spain, his jaw was so out of line that he couldn't actually chew his food. But the fellow that we're talking about now, Charles V, eventually grew a beard and he also got artists that could paint more flattering portraits of him. And there was nothing wrong with him intellectually.

Intellectually he was no dummy at all. Into the early modern world of Charles V came Martin Luther who was born in 1483. Curiously, he was born, he and Bob Jones Sr. were born almost exactly the same 400 years apart.

I don't think anybody knows that except me. And here are Luther's parents. Wonderful pictures. Why do we have pictures of Luther's parents? And the answer is, one of the reasons is that one of the best artists in Germany at the time, Lucas Cranach, lived in their area. And Luther was so young that his parents were still alive when he was famous. So that's why we have this wonderful pair of portraits. So here's Luther also painted by Cranach.

Mansfeld is Luther's boyhood home. On this map, I don't know if you can see, it's numbered but the numbers are going to be pretty small for you. I don't know if you can see it.

So let's see. So this here, number one is right here. This is where his boyhood home is.

And number three is right next to the church. So that's where he went to school. There's nothing especially anti-Catholic about the area that he came from or his hometown. Some people have suggested that maybe the reason why Luther was the way he was was because his parents were overly harsh and disciplined. Well, it was an era in which, you know, if you didn't spare the rod, you spoiled the child.

So the discipline was harsh all the way. But there's nothing about Luther's background that points to him being raised in any unusual way. Then when Luther was a teenager, he attended what we call secondary school and he was very good at it. Martin Luther was a very smart guy, talented in many, many ways.

Not only in things that we would expect like rhetoric but also in things like poetry. And he had a wonderful singing voice. And you might expect, being the kind of guy that you think Luther was, that he must have had this Dr. Pinozian kind of voice. But he had a sweet tenor voice. And he played the lute.

So he accompanied himself. Here's a picture of Luther as a teenager. You might wonder how we could have a picture of Luther as a teenager. The answer is it's not a real picture. It was drawn in 1971, so it's a conjecture.

But it feels right to me. Luther's father had risen from being sort of an upper level peasant to becoming highly skilled as a miner. He invested in mines. And so Luther's father was able to send Luther to college, which normally would not have been what people could do unless they were in the nobility before that time. So he went to the University of Erfurt, which was a big town, about 20,000 people. Luther graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1502. And received a Master's degree in 1505 and enrolled in the School of Law. Now his dad wanted him to be a lawyer. That was the next step up. There was some mobility at the end of the Middle Ages. So how do you get to the next level?

And the answer is you become a lawyer and then you become a judge. So that was his dad's idea. In 1505, Luther was already thinking seriously about spiritual things. A friend of his had died suddenly, and then he was caught in a terrible thunderstorm, and he thought he was going to be killed. And he took refuge under a tree, which was not the sensible thing to do, and prayed to Saint Anne, who was the patron saint of miners. He promised that if she would spare his life that he would enter a monastery.

His father was very unhappy. So Luther entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt in 1505. And the monastery was noted both for the exemplary life of the people who lived there and its emphasis on learning. So this was not the typical medieval thing like the Friar Tuck business, where we eat, drink, and be merry, and have a good old time, and pretend we're being religious.

These people took religion seriously. And by the way, the picture does show Erfurt, the monastery where Luther actually entered. So it really looks like a monastery.

It looks like some generic picture, but this is the real place. And his vicar general was Johannes Staupitz von Staupitz. Luther said of Staupitz, if it hadn't been for Staupitz, I would have gone to hell. And Staupitz is a fascinating character because he never left the Catholic Church. But he understood Luther enough. He understood the gospel of grace enough.

I think we're going to see Staupitz in heaven. So Luther became a priest in 1507. Luther's father showed up at the first Mass bringing a wagon load of food to serve because they had a ceremony there afterwards. But he made it clear that he did not like Luther being a priest.

And he actually said, maybe it was a joke, maybe it wasn't, but he said right then, you know, the Bible says you should honor your father and mother. And Luther was the kind of person that took this really seriously. So according to the Catholic notion of monastic baptism, he was supposed to have received remission of both the guilt and punishment for his sins when he took his monastic vows. But Luther was greatly troubled in spirit.

It's really hard for me to express how Luther felt about spiritual things. I mean, he went to confession and it was typical for Catholics to go to confession, but he would confess, it's hard for me to believe this, but I'm telling you what everybody says, which I assume is true, that he sometimes confessed for six hours about the sins that he had committed. He practiced all sorts of mortification of the flesh to try to relieve the guilt of his sin. He fasted sometimes for three days in a row without eating a crumb. He spent monumental amounts of times in vigils and prayers. He threw off blankets that the monastery allowed him to have and nearly froze to death in the bone-chilling cold. There's a great story, but I was afraid to put it here in my slides because I'm not quite sure.

It's one of those tales that he actually went out and tried to sleep in the snow and the brothers went out and grabbed him and dragged him back in so he wouldn't freeze to death. Of course, none of this did anything to alleviate Luther's sense of guilt. But it probably damaged his health for the rest of his life. Luther said, I was a good monk. I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.

If I had kept on it any longer, I should have killed myself. Meanwhile, Luther said later he had no love for God. He had no love for God whose righteousness was continually judging the unrighteousness of men. There seems to have been a place where Luther was willing to accept the fact that he was going to hell. He just couldn't see any way that God could have saved him. And so he said it was up to him to try to thank God for condemning him.

I did not love, indeed I hated this just God who punished sinners. Luther's guilt and terror of God was so profound and so intense that even his superior Staupitz, who was something of a mystic, couldn't understand it. But Staupitz had an idea about how he might quiet Luther's tormented spirit. Staupitz ordered Luther to study for his doctor's degree and then become a professor of the Bible. That meant that Luther had to actually study the Bible rather than continue to bend his intellect around all the theological nonsense required of educated clergymen in the Middle Ages.

It's really unusual for people to actually read the Bible. So that was a wonderful thing that Staupitz did for Luther. Then in 1510, Luther was sent on a mission for his Augustinian order to Rome. And so for the first time he went to the capital of Christendom and there he saw the church in all of its worldliness and he also went to this place which is still there, the Scala Sancta, the holy steps, there are 28 steps there. You can't, I've been there, I don't know how many of you have been there, but you're not allowed to walk up on your feet. If you're going to go up, you've got to go up on your knees. And when I was there 40 years ago, they had a big sign telling you how many days you had out of purgatory for doing this. So I don't know if that sign's still there in our enlightened day, but that's, so of course Luther climbed, like everybody else, he climbed up on the stairs. Here's a picture of him going up the steps on his knees in a film.

And when he got to the top, theoretically, the story goes that he said, well, I hope it's true, you know. So shortly before Luther received his doctorate in 1512, Staupitz transferred him to the monastery at Viteberg, which is a tiny town of 3,000 with a new university that had been founded in 1502. So you can see how far east Viteberg is.

It's the former, it's in the former East Germany. While Luther lectured on the Bible at the university and preached in the city church, he came to understand that justification came not through works that man could do, but through the merits of Christ, appropriated by faith alone. But the question is, when did Luther make this discovery? It'd be pleasant to think that Luther really understood the doctrines of grace in 1517 when he protested papal intelligences and sparked the Reformation.

But I don't think so. I don't think he had yet arrived at a complete understanding of Sola Fides, only faith, in 1517. I'm pretty sure it wasn't because he said himself, Luther said himself, I wish I had known what I know now when I got this whole thing started. If he had understood, he would have described his opposition to indulgences differently in 1517. Certainly Luther wasn't one to be shy about expressing his beliefs once he was convinced that he knew what the Bible taught. So I think if he had known, he wouldn't have been hesitant to tell everybody.

So now we've got to back up a little bit. You probably remember that the Pope, Leo X, approved a scheme whereby the Catholic Church could raise a lot of money from ordinary people in those little German principalities by selling them indulgences. One of the reasons why you want to sell it in Germany is there's no strong leadership there.

It's not like Spain or France where you have a king who can call the shots and say, get out of my territory, you can't raise money here, go someplace else. Germany was so divided that it was easy for the Pope and the Pope's minions to go there and raise money. So theoretically the money that was going to be raised was supposed to be used to build a new St. Peter's Cathedral on the spot where recent Popes had pulled down the old St. Peter's. And this slide shows old St. Peter's. I mean, the building was a thousand years old.

Can you imagine? It just shows you what these Renaissance Popes were like. They were willing to pull down a thousand-year-old building to put up something new without the money to put up the new thing first.

Amazing stuff. Now, the theory that went behind this business was that Christ and the saints had done more than enough good works to get them into heaven. Of course, Christ was God. But the saints had done extra good works. So they didn't need those extra good works. And it seems a shame to waste all the good works if you don't need them to go to heaven. So the theory was that these extra good works were stored up in like a treasury. And the Pope could draw on the treasury and he could take the saints in Christ. Of course, all the ones that Christ did were, you know, Christ was God, so he didn't need any good works to get in heaven. And they could take all those extra good works and give them to you for a price.

That was the idea. So that's the idea, that there was this treasury of merit out there. To hawk these indulgences, the Pope sent to Germany a Dominican monk, Johann Tetzel, who would have made a great used car salesman. Tetzel preached that not only could you buy a remission of your own sins, but you could also buy release of the souls of the departed loved ones, of your departed loved ones from purgatory.

He even had a sales jingle. As soon as the coin and coffer rings, so soon the soul to heaven springs. If you can read that German Fraktor down here, you can see him all of heaven and spring, so it's a pretty good translation of what he's actually saying here. When Luther told some of his parishioners to leave their sinful ways, they showed him Tetzel's indulgences. Some even threatened to report him to the church authorities for failure to recognize the indulgences as being good enough. So Luther was outraged, especially when some of these, apparently some of the people who showed him the indulgences were still under the effects of alcohol at the time.

So Luther decided he was going to argue against indulgences. And we all know about this posting of the 95 Theses on October 31, 1517 is the day that we celebrate the beginning of the Reformation. So the question is, I mean, everybody believes this happened. I'm not going to spend time arguing about this, but I just want to let you know that although you all think that you know what's true here, there's actually very little historical confirmation that this actually happened.

I mean, he wrote the Theses, but did he post them on the church door on October 31? And that's a different story. The story was not told until he was dead. He had been dead for 40 years, and it was told by somebody, a friend of his, Phil Melanchthon, who wasn't there at the time. So it's one of those things. The date's pretty good.

The question is, was he posting them? This is a more contemporary. So now the door of the church looks like it's a college bulletin board, which looks more foreign. It's just such a wonderful mental picture.

I mean, the idea of him getting up there with a big hammer, boom, boom. It's like all of Europe hears this echo. So this is the 95 Theses. One of the things that you say, well, why would you post them on the door, is that nobody could read them because they were in Latin. So they weren't in German. They were translated pretty soon afterwards.

But if he posted them in Latin, there weren't very few people that could read it, except for obviously the people in college. So by 1517, Luther was well on the way to understanding the gospel of grace. He attacked indulgences from a remarkably Catholic perspective. It had never been Catholic doctrine that you could buy your salvation. Certainly not for people who were already dead and in purgatory. If it were true that money thrown into the chest sent souls flying into heavenly rest, what did that say about the value of the whole sacramental system of the Catholic church, like masses and confessions, said the priest?

Understand why this is a problem? I mean, like, well, here's some money. Take my money. I'm not going to come to mass. I'm not going to do confession. I'm going to go to heaven just by giving this money.

Obviously, there's going to be a problem down the line here. There are plenty of educated people, both inside and outside the clergy, who understood that the sale of indulgences was a sort of pseudo-pious scam concocted by the papacy to separate naive Germans from their money. There was nothing necessarily Protestant about Luther's attack on indulgences. Other clergymen had said similar things before. When Luther wrote a treatise defending the 95 Theses, he dedicated it to the pope.

But because of the first information superhighway, the miracle of movable type printing, adopted in Europe shortly before Luther's birth, the arguments raised by Luther were quickly circulated throughout Germany and beyond. Plus, there were plenty of ordinary Germans around who weren't as stupid as the pope thought they were. At first, Leo X seemed to be baffled about what was going on in Germany. He said, maybe it's just some kind of monastic squabble. In fact, he's supposed to have said, when they get the beer out of them, they'll be fine. It's like, I'm clueless.

I don't know. Someone said of Leo that he would have made a good pope if he had only been a little religious. When the sale of indulgences virtually ceased, Leo, okay, now I understand.

Leo felt compelled to act. But the only problem for Leo was that the Catholic Church had never spelled out what the doctrine of indulgences were. So obviously, it's hard to convict somebody of being a heretic until you tell them what orthodoxy is. So you have to come up and say, this is our doctrine.

Then you can say, you're heretic for not believing it. So that needed to be done. If Leo X had quickly defined the doctrine of indulgences in a way that the Catholic Church actually did during the next few years, at least excluding sending dead people from purgatory to heaven on the basis of a cash payment, it's possible he could have nipped the reformation in the bud. Another possibility is if Luther could have gotten his hands on Luther and had him killed or imprisoned, that might have ended the reformation before it got a fair start too. And of course, that sort of thing had certainly happened before.

On the left-hand side is the burning of Hus at the end of the 15th century and Tyndale in the 16th century on the right. But try as he might to snag Luther, Leo was frustrated by a complicated political situation. And this is one of those things where how much politics do I need to talk about?

And the answer is as little as I can get away with. I'm just going to say the situation was very complex and for political reasons, Leo couldn't get Luther into his hands. Meanwhile, Luther continued to study the Bible and to take note of the practical consequences of the doctrine of grace in the process of becoming a true Protestant in doctrine. In 1518, Luther realized that the Greek word translated due penance in the Latin vulgar actually meant repent. In 1519, Luther declared that the Pope was fallible, that church councils could err, and that the ultimate divine authority was scripture. In 1520, he asserted that there were only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper. Also in 1520, he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, that the substance of the bread and wine and the Lord's Supper became the body and blood of Christ during the mass. To early modern Europeans, Luther's assault on the Catholic sacraments was a really big deal.

The people were burned. They were executed for saying that Christ's real presence wasn't in the bread and wine. The Dutch humanist Erasmus hoped to find a middle ground between Luther and the Pope, but he thought Luther's attack on the sacraments made the breach irreparable. One of the things, if you read about the Reformation, that's really striking to me is how many people, long after Luther had the Reformation started, were really trying hard to get the Catholic Church and the Protestants back together again. I mean, it went on for 25 years, where there was really serious, let's call an ecumenical council and we'll all talk this thing out. And there were lots and lots of people out there who thought that the church could be reunited again. But Erasmus, who was prescient, he really said, I think the sacraments are the big deal.

I think that's going to make the breach irreparable. Papal representatives who debated with Luther between the 95 Theses and the Diet of Worms hardly talked about indulgences at all. Once Luther had called the Pope an antichrist, indulgences seemed pretty small potatoes by comparison. After Luther debated the Catholic Cardinal Caetan in 1518, Caetan asked Staupitz to try to get Luther to recant. Staupitz said, I've often tried, but I'm not equal to him in ability and command of scripture. You're the Pope's representative.

It's up to you. Caetan replied, I'm not going to talk with him anymore. His eyes are as deep as a lake and there are amazing speculations in his head. Meanwhile, the Pope had to behave warily. He needed German military assistance to check the power of both Francis I, the King of France, and research in Islam under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Here's why I have to say something about politics. Both these guys were important aspects of the Reformation. Suleiman was knocking on the door of Europe. He defeated the Hungarians. He had sieged the city of Vienna. He made it no secret that he wanted to conquer Europe. So it's hard for us to imagine Muslims being so strong that it looked like they might take over Europe. In fact, he should have taken Vienna, but they had a real, a whole lot of rain when they were sieging Vienna.

And he couldn't bring up his heavy artillery to batter the walls down. So anyway, Charles V had to be careful because he needed military power in order to stave off attacks to his kingdom on either side. Furthermore, in 1518, the current Holy Roman Emperor, Emperor Maximilian I, was dying.

Note, by the way, the Habsburg jaw maybe even played down a bit by the artist. In this circumstance, Luther's own ruler and protector, Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, temporarily had a great deal of influence. In fact, he was even named as a possible new emperor, although he refused to do that. Only after Maximilian's grandson, Charles V, the King of Spain, was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1520, did it look like the empire might be able to take a hard line against Luther. Charles took the advice of the Pope's representative, a man named Oleander, to order the burning of Luther's books in the Low Countries, Charles's home territory. So Charles came from the Low Countries, his first language was French, and he was King of Spain, and he learned Spanish. And then, of course, now he's going to be the Holy Roman Emperor, so he's going to have all these Germans. So he was no dummy.

Yeah, he's on French. However, when Oleander suggested that Charles do the same thing in Germany, Charles was reluctant to cross Frederick the Wise. Frederick urged that Luther be given a hearing at the emperor's first diet, a meeting at Worms in January 1521.

Oleander was unhappy. Why should this heretic be given an opportunity to speak before the German princes? And Charles V, he wasn't happy either, but he had already promised that if he became emperor, he would not turn over any Germans to the Pope without letting them have a say.

So that's why. The whole business was a church matter that shouldn't have anything to do with the states at Oleander. Why should this German body have any say at all?

I mean, if you think about it, it's so odd. This is a time when the church and state was combined. But you can imagine, for instance, say Steve Pettit, the president of Bob Jones University, suppose somebody said he's a heretic. So what are we going to do about this? We'll call the board of trustees and we'll talk to Steve and see what he has to say about this. And then Steve Pettit said, why appeal to the South Carolina state legislature? And everybody goes, what?

What is that? So that's where we are here. Why should he appeal to a political body when this is a religious affair? Eventually Charles summoned Luther to the forums but provided him with no right to argue on behalf of the contents of his books. However, along with the summons to appear at the Diet, Charles did give Luther a letter of safe conduct to and from Wittenberg. So that the top part of this slide shows the summons to appear and the bottom part of it with all that flourishy stuff at the top is the safe conduct.

And the idea was that we will allow you to come to forums and we'll allow you to leave. Now, in the past, you may know that they did the same thing to Huss a hundred years before. And when they convicted him in Constance of being a heretic, they said, well, we don't have to pay any attention to the safe conduct because heretics don't deserve to be treated. It doesn't have any authority anymore, so we'll just burn you instead. And there were people who said to Luther, you can't go there.

They're not going to take this letter of safe conduct and give credence to it if they convict you of being a heretic. So Luther is supposed to have said, I have to go to forums even if there are as many devils in forums as there are roof tiles. Now an even more unhappy Aleander published an edict against Luther's books in the name of the emperor.

Fittenberg to forums is a pretty long trip. It's about 320 miles, which Luther traveled in a three-horse carriage with four or five other men. Large groups of people gathered to see Luther, a man who had dared to defy the pope.

And I think if I were going to write this as a scholarly paper, I'd be more careful about this, but I think nobody's ever told me otherwise. I think he's probably the first celebrity in world history to be created by his writings alone. In other words, people had gone out to meet great kings or conquerors and all that, but I think Luther is the first one that people went out to see because he was a writer. He had written something and people went to see him because of books and pamphlets that he had written. Aleander complained that handbills pictured Luther with a halo and a dove above his head. The people kissed these pictures, he said.

Such a quantity had been sold that I was not able to obtain one. So here's one of them that shows the dove above Luther's head, like a saint. When Luther was first brought before the Diet on April 17, 1521, he was asked whether the books on the table were his.

This gigantic pile. And Luther said yes, almost inaudibly. And I have written more. So then he was asked whether he would reject part of them. And he said, this touches God and his word.

I beg you, give me time to think about it. And everybody there was just like, say what? You mean you traveled 300 miles and you don't know what we're going to ask? And so, okay, okay. 24 hours.

He'll give you 24 hours and come back and tell us the answer to this. So the upshot was that on the following day, so many people wanted to hear Luther's answer that they had to get a larger hall. And that place was so crowded that almost nobody but the emperor got to sit down. It was a standing room only crowd.

And it's never portrayed this way. In all the portrayals of the Diet, everybody's sitting down except for Luther. But everybody wanted to hear what was going on. So this is a three minute YouTube video. And the words that Luther says here are really the words he said translated into English, of course. But he said a lot more.

Obviously, the audience isn't going to listen to the whole thing because they wouldn't understand exactly what's going on. But these are, this is a good three minutes worth of, and gives you the kernel of what Luther said on that occasion on April 18th, 1517. I ask. Your most serene majesty. And your lordships. May deign to note that my books are not all of the same kind. But there are some in which I have discussed religious faith and morals simply. So that even my enemies themselves are compelled to admit that these are useful. Even the bull, although harsh and cruel, admits that some of my books are inoffensive. Allowing them to be condemned is utterly monstrous. Thus. If I should begin to disavow them. I ask you.

What would I be doing? Would not I, alone of all men, be condemning the very truth upon which friends and enemies equally agree? I have written another book against some distinguished individuals, those namely who strive to preserve the Roman tyranny. Against these, I confess, I have been more violent than my religion or profession demands.

But then. I do not set myself up as a saint. Therefore, your most serene majesty. Expose my errors.

Overthrow them by the writings of the prophets and the evangelists. If I am shown my errors, I will be the first to throw my books on the fire. I commend myself to your majesty. Humbly asking that I not be allowed, through the agitation of mine enemies, to be made hateful to you. I have spoken.

Since you desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other. Unless I am convinced by scripture or clear reason, 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.

May God help me. Amen. In real life, the drama was lessened a bit by the fact that after Luther, who had been speaking in German, was asked to repeat the whole thing again in Latin. Obviously, people were there who didn't know German. And Luther was, of course, very emotional.

He was sweating at the time. But he managed to go through the whole thing again in Latin. Is anything missing from this recounting of Luther's speech?

Usually, Luther's picture is, you know, here I stand, God help me, I can do no other kind of thing. The problem is that there were all kinds of people there taking notes. And none of the contemporary people who were taking notes did those words appear. But when the transcript appeared in print, those words were there. So I really think that he probably said something like that.

Maybe he said it in one language and not the other. But regardless of what he said, I don't think he said it with this business of, I think it was like, God help me, I can't do anything else. In any case, Charles V, in part using material prepared by Aleander, waited until the supporters of Luther had left the Diet of Worms for home and had those who remained condemn Luther and finally backdated the resulting Edict of Worms to May 6 to make it appear that it had been approved by the whole body.

Of course, we're in May right now. This is the actual month, this is the actual 501st anniversary of this decree. And so here's what he said in the Edict of Worms. He has sullied marriage, disparaged confession, denied the body and blood of our Lord. He is pagan in his denial of free will.

The devil in the habit of a monk has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle and has invented new ones. When the time is up, no one is to harbor him. His followers are also to be condemned. His books are to be eradicated from the memory of man. As an outlaw, anyone who captured or killed Luther would be rewarded by the government authorities for doing a good work.

There was no mention of indulgences at all. By the way, some of you might, if you're sharp and you know, you looked over at the actual document and realized that this is not Latin, this is French. This is actually Charles V's personal copy.

And as I said, he thought in French, so he wrote it out in French. But Charles V desperately wanted to get rid of Luther at this point. He wasn't strong enough to violate his own safe conduct and seize and execute Luther.

He had to let him go. But when Luther headed back to Wittenberg, he was waylaid by a party of supporters who pretended to be highwaymen sent by Frederick the Wise, his patron. And they hid Luther in the Vortborg Castle, which was within walking distance of where he had gone to school in Eisenach.

And today with Google Maps, I walked through Google Maps from the castle to where he went to school, and it's about three miles. At the castle, Luther grew a beard and posed as a knight, spending his time translating the New Testament into German, and in the process creating a standard German language. So there's more, Luther molded the German language even more greatly than the King James Bible did the English language.

And again, you notice that even though he grew a beard while he was doing this, it's a beard here because it's just not a good artistic representation. For the next few years, Luther was endangered of being captured and killed by Charles V, but it never happened. And again, the reasons are political and would take me too long to explain why, but every time it looked like Charles was going to catch up to Luther, there was some problem. At one point, it looked for sure that he had him, and Solomon made a move, and he had to go. It's like Saul going after David.

He had David surrounded, and all of a sudden, the messenger came and said, the Philistines have invaded, and Saul had to give up, and that's exactly what happened here. As soon as Charles V subdued one of his enemies, others popped up, and he was never able to crush the Protestants. In 1556, at the age of 55, Charles, the most powerful man in the world, the ruler of the global Spanish empire, gave it all up.

He abdicated all his offices and retired to a Spanish monastery. Incapacitated by various elements, in particular, gout caused by immoderate eating, and so riddled by pain that he had to be carried in sedan chairs or on litters, he finally died in 1558. So, what's the importance of the Diodiforms? Well, always continue to memorialize October 31, 1517 as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. But in some sense, the Diodiforms in 1521 marks the true beginning of the Reformation. By 1521, Luther had a clear understanding of the doctrines of grace. By 1521, the pope and the institutional church had missed its best chance for squelching the Reformation. In 1521, Luther was excommunicated by the church, and he was outlawed by the emperor, and so therefore he was compelled to appeal directly to the people of Germany. Luther initially thought his condemnation at the Diodiforms would be the end of his life and the end of the Reformation.

But ultimately, it proved to be merely the end of the beginning. So... Would you like to ask some questions? We've got a few minutes here before we go eat. I promise not to take too long here. Anybody would like to ask me something?

Yes, sir? What was the doctrine of transubstantiation? I probably assumed that you understood transubstantiation more than... I mean, I probably took it for granted, but the idea was that when the priest elevated the host in front of the congregation at the mass, Hocus Corpus Maum, this is my body, when he said the magic words, that bread turned into the actual body of Christ. So we get the word hocus pocus in English from Hocus Corpus Maum.

That's the magic words. So to deny that, people died. People died for saying that Christ was not really there.

If you know any Lutherans, you know that Lutherans have a very complicated view of the Lord's Supper, and the distinction between what the Catholics believe and what Lutherans believe is... Only a Lutheran theologian can really explain it. That's consubstantiation. Yeah, they call it consubstantiation.

It's there, but it's not there at the same time. Yes, sir? We're reading Psalm 100 this morning, the last verse.

Yes, sir? Luther said lots and lots of stuff, and there's a wonderful book called Table Talk, which one of the things he and his wife had, they had children of their own, but they also took in boarders, students who were students at the university. The Elector Frederick had turned over the monastery to him and used it kind of like a hostel, and so these students would come to dinner with Luther, and they would take notes of every gem and every claw that came out of his mouth, and they would write it down. After his death, they compiled a book called Table Talk, to which they added a woodcut of Luther and his family at the table. His wife was kind of irritated at this because he was always the center of attention, and at one point she said, Doctor, would you just eat? So Luther was ruminating about lots of things, and the best thing to do, if you're interested, Table Talk is just a fantastic book to look at. Everything from popes to pregnancies to the frogs and the elb he covered in those table talks. So yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Luther said that. The big problem for Luther was that once the Reformation got started, and you said the scripture is where we have to look at the scripture, there's no authority but scripture, then people said, well, my view of scripture is just as good as your view of scripture, and there was no authority, there was no pope and no church council to say this is what orthodoxy is. So one of the problems is going to be you have this splintering, and so there were all kinds of wacko people running around, and Luther was very conscious that this was going to be the end of him and the end of the movement unless he went slow about some things. Good. Pastor?