{"id":2463,"date":"2020-10-31T23:27:52","date_gmt":"2020-11-01T04:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/?p=2463"},"modified":"2021-01-23T22:01:07","modified_gmt":"2021-01-24T04:01:07","slug":"defy-everything-martin-luther-in-1520","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/2020\/10\/31\/defy-everything-martin-luther-in-1520\/","title":{"rendered":"Defy Everything: Martin Luther in 1520"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Let us…commit the affairs of men to God in faithful prayer, and be calm.\u00a0 What can they do? Will they kill [me]?\u00a0 Will they revive [me] again in order to kill [me] again? Will they brand me [me] a heretic?\u00a0 Christ was condemned with the wicked, with the seducers and the cursed men.\u00a0 Whenever I meditate on the Lord’s Passion, I really burn to think that my tribulation is not only considered to be ‘something’ by such prominent people, and so many, but even a most important ‘something,’ when it reality it is just nothing. We are completely unaccustomed to suffering and evil, that is, to the Christian life.\u00a0 Therefore let it be; the more powerfully they rise up, the more securely I laugh at them.\u00a0 I am determined to fear nothing in this and defy everything.” Martin Luther, Letter 50 to George Spalatin<\/em> (January 14, 1520), Luther’s Works 48:147-48.<\/p>\n

This statement displayed the beginning of a shift in Luther\u2019s attitude that would conclude in a theological turning point for the Western Christian world in 1520.\u00a0 In this year, Dr. Martin Luther published a number of significant texts that demonstrated that theologically he had turned a metaphorical corner and was not looking back.\u00a0 The papacy reopened Luther\u2019s case about the same time as he wrote that letter to Spalatin.\u00a0 Pope Leo X condemned 41 theological errors in Luther’s writings in the papal bull: Exsurge Domine<\/em> on June 15, 1520.\u00a0 After his reception of this document in early October, Martin Luther would have the choice to recent or face punishment as a heretic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By the time he received the papal bull, Luther had written two definitive works that demonstrated his decision to defy everything:\u00a0 \u00a0The first work, To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation<\/em>, appeared in August.\u00a0 It represented a definitive break with the late medieval papacy and a direct attack on the authority of the “Romanists,” as Luther now referred to his main theological opponents.\u00a0 The entire treatise was quite long and addressed theological, ecclesiastical, and social reform.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Martin Luther published the second work, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church<\/em>, in early October.\u00a0 Luther began the work with the bold assertion that the Church had only three sacraments: baptism, penance, and the Lord\u2019s Supper. And he stated at the end of the treatise that penance lacked a divinely-instituted sign.\u00a0 He rejected confirmation, marriage, ordination, and extreme unction as sacraments. To be clear, he did not reject these as practices, but he rejected them as divinely-ordained signs that give the forgiveness of sins.\u00a0 The Western Church had accepted seven sacraments since the 12th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 This was a momentous change.<\/p>\n

Luther followed his intention expressed in the letter to Spalatin.\u00a0 In 1520, he definitively and publicly rejected papal authority in the church and refined sacramental theology based on his study of Scripture.\u00a0 The papal bull arrived in Wittenberg in early October.\u00a0 While Luther agreed to write a conciliatory letter to the pope, he would never agree at this point to recent his teachings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On October 30, 1520, he wrote a letter to the young Duke John Frederick (later Elector of Saxony).\u00a0 In this letter he expressed the same attitude that he had in January.\u00a0 He explained in the following manner: “As the bull in no way frightened me, I intend to preach, lecture, and write in spite of it.”*\u00a0 Luther did exactly this until he went to the Diet of Worms in April 1521 to plead his case before Emperor Charles V.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*Letter 65 to Duke John Frederick, LW 48:183.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Let us…commit the affairs of men to God in faithful prayer, and be calm.\u00a0 What can they do? Will they kill [me]?\u00a0 Will they revive [me] again in order to kill [me] again? Will they brand me [me] a heretic?\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,129,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-martin-luther-history","category-reformation","category-theology","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2463"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2515,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2463\/revisions\/2515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}