ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 14 CH2 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 1 800 825 7234 * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * * >> I read that Luther was not officially excommunicated until 1521. If he was already charged in 1518, why did it take so long to excommunicate him? >> That question gets back to this issue I raised earlier about the way papal power and papal politics became entwined with secular power and politics in the Middle Ages. And this is especially true about the relationship between the Pope and the emperor, and that's the issue that kept Luther from being condemned until 1521. In 1517 1518, everyone in the empire recognized that the emperor would die soon. And that would raise the issue of an imperial election. The Pope had a profound interest in who the next emperor would be. And he was especially interested when he found that Emperor Maximilian, the one who was on his death bed, wanted his grandson, Charles I of Spain, to become Holy Roman Emperor. Now, here we need to get into a little bit of geography and understand the boundaries of some of these kingdoms and empires. The reason the Pope would particularly oppose Charles of Spain was this: As king of Spain, he ruled not only Spain, but also much of southern Italy. The Holy Roman Emperor had nominal control over the empire and especially over parts of northern Italy. The papal states, the kingdom of the Pope, you might say, was in central Italy. And so the Pope had no desire to be wedged in between northern Italy and southern Italy, both controlled by Charles should he become Holy Roman Emperor. Now, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with Luther. Luther was a subject of Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony. That title Elector meant that Frederick was one of seven rulers in the empire, three bishops and four secular rulers, who elected the Holy Roman Emperor. They were responsible for choosing who the next emperor would be. So even while Maximilian was alive, those who wished to be emperor and those who had an interest in who the next emperor was were busy campaigning for votes among the seven Electors. And in good late Medieval fashion, you can read campaigning as offering bribes. Now, Frederick was one of the few Electors that couldn't be bought off that easily. He was, by all accounts, a man of integrity and someone who had to be convinced that his vote was being cast for the good of the empire and not simply in response to whoever had paid him last. So the Pope had to be very careful about how he dealt with Frederick the Wise. That meant when Luther was condemned in 1518 and when he was summoned to Rome, and Frederick the Wise responded, "I'm not going to send my theologian to Rome," he knew that bad things usually happen to people accused of heresy who went to Rome. What it meant is that the Pope had to take seriously Frederick's request that Luther be interviewed elsewhere than Rome. And so that's what happened in 1518. Instead of going to Rome, Luther met with Cardinal Cajetan, the papal representative in Augsburg. Cajetan was there for a meeting of the empire that he was attending as papal legate. So in this first phase where Luther is condemned to Rome, he's summoned to Rome but doesn't go, it has everything to do with this imperial election and the politics between the Pope and emperor. Now, this meeting with Cajetan in 1518 certainly didn't go the way the Pope wanted it to go. The instructions Cajetan received were, "Don't debate with Luther. You are simply to ask him to recant." Well, Luther had no intention of recanting without a fight. And so he did engage Cajetan in a debate over the matter of indulgences, over papal authority. And by Luther's own account of this, Cajetan left rather frustrated that Luther would simply not recant. Now the imperial election actually took place in 1519. And, yet, even at that point, both the Pope and the emperor had to be very careful how they proceeded against Luther. As long as Luther had the support of the Elector of Saxony, it was not an easy matter to simply condemn him as a heretic. The Elector of Saxony was one of the most powerful men in the empire. And the Holy Roman Emperor, especially this new emperor, Charles V, had to be careful how he dealt with these princes, because by the beginning of the 16th Century, the princes of Germany, especially the large land owning princes were far more powerful, really, than the emperor. The emperor had a really hard time exercising direct control over them. His was really more a power of persuasion. So he could not simply go into Saxony and require that Frederick hand Luther over for judgment. Nor did he really want to do that. Because Charles was an outsider to the empire. He had been raised in Spain. He spoke Spanish rather than German. And he really had to be careful how he dealt with these German princes, especially this early in his reign. So even in 1519 and into 1520, the emperor has to be careful about how he deals with Frederick and what he requests in terms of the Luther affair. And the Pope, as well, has to be careful how he deals with this, for the emperor's sake and to a certain extent for his own. It's best not to do something that will alienate all of the princes of the empire. So the Pope was willing to negotiate until, really, later in 1520. And, in fact, the both threatening the excommunicating of Luther had been proclaimed in Rome in about the middle of 1520 when the Pope was still sending an embassy to Wittenberg to Luther and Frederick to try and negotiate a final solution, a final peace between the two parties. As we know, that didn't work. And Luther ultimately was excommunicated. Luther's response to this was typically dramatic. He had been served with a bull threatening his excommunication, and it expired on December 10th of 1520. On that day, since the Pope was threatening to burn Luther's books, the university students in Wittenberg gathered to burn some of their least favorite papal books. And it was Melanchthon who wrote the invitation. And it's rather interesting. It gives you a sense of how people felt at this time in Wittenberg. Melanchthon posted this about the proposed book burning. He said, "Let all those that are bound to the study of the Gospel of truth be present at 9:00 o'clock at the Chapel of the Holy Cross outside the walls. In conformity with ancient apostolic usage, the impious books of scholastic theology and pontifical law will be burnt. For the enemies of the Gospel have been so audacious as to burn the truly evangelical books of Luther. Come, faithful and studious young men, do not miss this sacred spectacle. Perhaps the hour has come for unmasking the antichrist." You see there how the students, at least, in Wittenberg felt about the Pope at that time and the kind of support that Luther enjoyed. And this was the moment that you may have heard of where Luther walked up to this fire, upon which students were throwing books, took out his own copy of the papal bull threatening excommunication, and threw it into the fire. It was a very dramatic gesture and showed that the breach between Luther and the Pope was threatening to become quite permanent at this time. Even before the papal excommunication became official, in January of 1521, Luther had written so much against the Papacy, and the Pope had shown so little willingness to really negotiate, that this was really almost inevitable by this point, that Luther should be excommunicated and be forced to go his own way from the Pope. Now, as I like to point out, as kind of an interesting tangent on this point, Luther had this very dramatic gesture of burning the papal bull. But because he was Luther, he couldn't resist writing about it, as well. And so we have this document called "Why the Books of the Pope and His Disciples Were Burned by Dr. Martin Luther." And, again, an example of the way Luther gets his message out through printing. We'll have more to say about that later. But the printing press is incredibly important for the way the reformation message spread and important for Luther on this occasion to explain why he was doing what he was doing in relation to the Pope. * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * *