The leaders of the Holy Roman Empire would be meeting in Germany a few short weeks after Pope Leo X had excommunicated Luther. Emperor Charles V, the twenty-year-old who had just begun his reign in Germany in October 1520, arrived in Worms in early January 1521. Elector Frederick of Saxony, whose territory included Wittenberg, met with the emperor privately to request that Luther be given a hearing. Along with many other German electors, Frederick the Wise considered it inappropriate for Luther to be condemned without a hearing from impartial scholars. In fact, even before Leo had published the bull excommunicating Luther, Frederick had written to the emperor on December 20, 1520, asking him to “do nothing against Luther before he is heard, so that the truth whether he has erred in his writings might be established.”[1] Frederick was not, with his request, stating his personal agreement with Luther’s doctrinal position. Rather, he was insisting, as Schilling says, that this “was a matter of procedure and the procedure to be followed should be as determined by the law and constitution of the Holy Roman Empire and the privileges of the German estates, not by Roman ecclesiastical law.”[2] From Frederick’s perspective, peace and unity in Germany could only be preserved by following the established process, not by submitting to a unilateral mandate from Rome.
The German electors rejected a proposal to fall in line with the papal bull and ban Luther’s writings. They suggested, probably not inaccurately, that the common people might revolt if Luther, their hero,[3] didn’t receive a hearing at the diet. The electors’ plea for a hearing should not be understood, however, as an expression of agreement with, and support for, the Wittenberg professor’s theological positions.[4] What the electors had in common with Luther was this: they were concerned about papal authority and desirous of reform. It wasn’t, however, because they were convinced that the pope’s teachings contradicted the Scriptures and deprived God’s people of comfort. Instead, the electors had political and financial concerns. They believed the Roman Curia had abused its authority and taken advantage of the German churches. During the early weeks of the diet, which began in late January and concluded in early May, a committee outlined for the emperor 102 abuses that the church in Rome had perpetrated on the German church.[5] Those grievances needed to come before the diet, and one way to ensure that they did was to agitate for Luther to appear at Worms.[6] Though there were many important items on the agenda for Charles V’s first imperial diet, the German electors believed that Luther must receive a hearing.
The Roman church, predictably, held an entirely different opinion. The pope had already spoken on the Luther matter, and decisively, when he excommunicated Luther. Jerome Aleander, the papal ambassador, gave a three-hour speech in which he painted Luther as one intent on destroying the peace and unity of the church. If the emperor were to give Luther a hearing, Aleander argued, he would be giving credence to teachings that the pope himself had declared heretical. Most importantly, the secular authorities should “stay in their lane” and leave doctrinal matters to those who had the calling of doctrinal oversight. The Roman church was convinced, as Timothy Lull and Derek Nelson point out, that “only mischief could come from this kind of group—many of them laity, for that matter—dabbling in theological matters where they had neither jurisdiction nor competence.”[7] The emperor would provide a great service both to empire and church by supporting the church’s declaration and refusing to re-examine the rationale for the excommunication.[8]
Emperor Charles V, inexperienced both as a man and as a ruler, faced a difficult decision. He was, and desired to be, a faithful Roman Catholic, supportive of the church. Declaring Luther an outlaw without any hearing would have suited him fine. That was apparent, for instance, by his approach in those lands in which he had clear and obvious authority, where he ordered that Luther’s books be burned.[9] In November 1520, in a letter to Elector Frederick, Charles V acknowledged that he would like to have Luther’s books “burned here and everywhere in the Holy Empire,”[10] for the sake of preserving unity. At the same time, the emperor needed the support of the German aristocrats, including Elector Frederick, so that he could strengthen his position as the Holy Roman Emperor. Without German support, he would have difficulty supporting his military campaigns against the Turks. In the end, as Scott Hendrix aptly observes, “the political risk of condemning Luther without a hearing was too great”[11] for Charles. On March 6, he extended an official invitation to Luther. In deference to Elector Frederick, who had expressed concern in December 1520 about having the professor travel to Worms because of what might happen to him,[12] the emperor included with that invitation a letter of safe conduct. He threatened to use the empire’s power to punish any who might injure Luther either on the way to Worms or back to Wittenberg.[13]
In the invitation, which reached the professor in the final days of March 1521, Charles V asked “our dear and pious Dr. Martin Luther” to come to Worms because “the Estates of the Holy Empire, here assembled, have undertaken and decreed to obtain information about certain doctrines and certain books which formerly originated with you.”[14] The invitation must have sounded promising to Luther. At the very least, it sounded different than the “invitation” Pope Leo X issued in June 1520. The pope offered no opportunity for discussion, insisting only that Luther recant perpetually what he had been teaching. The emperor, however, made no mention of recantation. By all appearances, Charles was following through on his initial proposal to Elector Frederick in November 1520, when the emperor mentioned inviting Luther to Worms where he could be “sufficiently examined by learned and wise persons.”[15] Since the emperor and the estates summoned him “to obtain information” about his teaching, Luther must have surmised that he would have the chance to demonstrate that he drew his teachings solely from the Scriptures.
[1]. Luther’s Correspondence, 429–30.
[2]. Schilling, 169.
[3]. A woodcut from the time by Hans Holbein the Younger depicted Luther as the “German Hercules.” Luther’s countrymen considered him a hero because, as Larry Mansch explains, “he alone had the courage to take on the Roman Catholic Church on behalf of the German people.” Larry D. Mansch and Curtis H. Peters, Martin Luther: The Life and Lessons (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016), 107.
[4]. Scott H. Hendrix, Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 101. “Delegates to the Diet who wanted to hear Luther out sympathized with his criticism of Rome more than with his theology.”
[5]. De Lamar Jensen, Confrontation at Worms: Martin Luther and the Diet of Worms (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1973), 40.
[6]. Augustus Graebner goes so far as to say, “What was foremost in the minds of the many were not the articles of faith, but the grievances of the nation, and if it had not been for these, Luther would never have been summoned to appear before the Diet.” Augustus L. Graebner, “Luther’s Conduct at Worms,” Theological Quarterly 4:1 (January 1900), 32.
[7]. Lull and Nelson, 120.
[8]. Bainton, 169.
[9]. Schilling, 167–68.
[10]. Luther’s Correspondence, 398.
[11]. Hendrix, 101.
[12]. Luther’s Correspondence, 430.
[13]. Luther’s Correspondence, 483–84.
[14]. Luther’s Correspondence, 482.
[15]. Luther’s Correspondence, 399.