Luther refused to recant because he believed it was neither safe nor right to go against conscience. If we think of conscience the way many understand it today, we will miss the point. Luther was not a twenty-first century citizen of the United States demanding the freedom to believe whatever he felt was right. He was not insisting that no one had the right to question his personal perspective on things or compel him to act contrary to his private views. When Luther spoke of conscience, he had in mind, as Robert Kolb says, “his entire disposition or orientation toward God and life”[1] based on what he had heard about the righteousness of Christ in the Scriptures. From his study of the Bible, Luther knew what the Savior-God wanted to be taught and preached, for the glory of his name and the salvation of sinners. As Luther confessed, his “conscience was captive to the Word[2] of God.”
Again, the language grabs our attention. The Scriptures through which the Spirit had granted him the righteousness that avails on the Last Day had taken his conscience captive. James Nestingen builds on Kolb’s definition of conscience when he writes, “Luther was a sinner who had been so grasped by grace that his whole sense of himself in relation to God and others was captive by the word of God.”[3] He could not escape what God taught, whether he found the Scriptures’ doctrine convenient and pleasing or not. In other words, Luther was not saying that his conscience was the final authority. The Word of God held that position, because the Word informed his conscience. Metaxas rightly observes that Luther was not “asserting the freedom of the individual to do as he pleased. He was asserting the freedom of the individual to do as God pleased.”[4] To act contrary to the Lord’s commands or believe something that the Scriptures condemns is not freedom, but slavery.[5] The conscience is only free, as Oberman says, “once God has freed and ‘captured’ it”[6] through the Scriptures. The Reformer could not recant what he had written without going against the Scriptures and therefore, also, against his conscience, unless he could be shown from the Scriptures where he had erred.
After declaring that he could not and would not recant without being shown his errors from Scripture, he spoke the words from which this convention got its theme: “I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me. Amen.” There is significant debate among scholars about which of those words Luther spoke. The individuals who prepared the official transcript of the meeting did not include “I cannot do otherwise, here I stand.” The Weimar edition of Luther’s Works has Luther’s address entirely in Latin, save for the words, “I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, God help me. Amen,” which are written in German, indicating that they may have been a later addition.[7] Only one account of the meeting, the one published in Wittenberg, includes the words. Schilling intimates that publishers in Wittenberg may have “ingeniously sharpened and extended” the record of Luther’s speech, so that “this defiant version became indelibly associated with Luther”[8] as it was read throughout Germany. At the same time, the Wittenberg edition was prepared by Spalatin, likely with the assistance of Luther, which would argue for seeing the account as accurate. It could be that Luther said the words, but only a few heard them because of the uproar following his refusal to recant. Lull and Nelson contend that Luther probably spoke the words, but that early editors chose “to omit so brazen a comment made by a mere friar.”[9] In the end, it does not really matter if he spoke those words. He decidedly took a stand on the Scriptures. [10] Doing otherwise was not an option because the Word of God had seized his heart and captured his conscience.
[1]. Kolb, Martin Luther as He Lived and Breathed, 85.
[2]. Theodor Dieter catches the plural Luther used to speak of the Scriptures when he writes, “He refused to recant because his conscience was ‘caught’ in the words (plural!) of God.” Theodor Dieter, “Another Quincentennial: The Diet and Edict of Worms (1521),” Lutheran Quarterly 35 (2021), 4.
[3]. James A. Nestingen, Martin Luther: A Life (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2003), 46.
[4]. Metaxas, 221.
[5]. As Jesus says in John 8:34 (NIV), “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”
[6]. Oberman, 204.
[7]. At the same time, nearly all scholars and biographers of Luther agree that he did say the words, “God help me. Amen.”
[8]. Schilling, 184.
[9]. Lull and Nelson, 130, note 35.
[10]. Kolb, 85: “Accounts of the time, including Luther’s own, do not mention the words ‘here I stand, I cannot do anything else,’ although that phrase captures what the Wittenberg professor was actually doing.” Metaxas, 215: “Even if Luther did not speak them, they nonetheless perfectly encapsulate his position, which is surely why they have stuck.” Roper, 172: “If he did not say these words, this was the phrase that soon became famous. It certainly encapsulated the spirit of his appearance.”