Martin Luther and the Heidelberg Disputation

in this lecture we're going to be looking at Luther and Heidelberg and we're not just looking at Heidelberg disputation but rather we're seeing that the Heidelberg expectation is something of a pivot for Luther in his development of his theology in his public expression of his faith after the 95 theses in before he's put on trial at the diet of forms and we can begin by discussing what happens after the 95 theses that gives rise to the debate that carried Luther further and further into controversy and we ended our last lecture with Luther posting the 95 theses on October 31st and some scholars have doubted whether or not there was actually a posting or nailing of the theses in Luther's life he rarely talks about this instead he typically talks about what happens after the 95 theses but there are two things that propel Luther onto the public stage the first is that in January 1518 the theses are taken they're translated into German from Latin thus making them accessible to any layman who could read or more likely those who could read aloud would read it to those who couldn't in the German translation of the 95 theses were printed off in past and sent around throughout a significant portion of Germany now there's always been some debate as to the impulse behind this it doesn't seem necessarily as if Luther himself is pushing this down into the level of the populace he wrote the theses in Latin and if you did post them on the door which is probably likely in my view he attended it then to be part of the academic conversation within the university and not something for the everyman to sort of join in with but for whatever reason they're sent around in German and they are something of a smash hit with certain communities within the German world at the very least they create something of a buzz the second thing that happens though is that Luther is less concerned with raising up sort of a grassroots popular resistance to the issue of indulgences but instead he still playing the role of the defender of the papacy and the defender of the church takes the 95 theses writes something of an apology about them meaning a defense of them and he sends them to the R bishop of mites albert who as we saw in our last lecture is actually one of the men behind the sale of indulgences in germany now Luther does this on good faith he's not poking the bear you might say he's not attempting to rouse the anger of the archbishop you might say that he's going to Albert with hat in hand asking him to pay attention to what's going on with those who are sent out throughout Germany in other words he thinks Albert is more or less on his side and it's that move sending the 95 theses with a letter to the archbishop that propels Luther more aggressively onto the stage and draws the gaze of the Pope because what Albert does is he doesn't really look at the theses himself remember Albert is really not much of a scholar or theologian he got his office's due to political power and money but Albert has the theses examined by someone else someone in his entourage for theological heresy and when there are some question marks raised he then forwards it to the Pope to leave the tenth and the response from the papacy the response from Leo the tenth is actually rather ho-hum they don't initially an immediately crack down with warnings and condom nations and scoring's of Luther for his attempt to correct some of the understandings of indulgences sales in the power of the papacy and as I've said before in previous lectures that's actually pretty axiomatic for the Catholic Church historically speaking the Catholic Church doesn't tend historically to swoop in as fast as possible to shut people up often what happens in these cases at least in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period is the Pope will exert indirect pressure he himself won't write scornful letters or publicly condemn anyone but he will send an entourage of people sort of surreptitiously around to try to calm the person down and if there are threats it's usually the person in charge of the treblemaker well over the course of about a year that's exactly what Leo the tenth does and we're going to go through this chronologically but we just want to note it now Leigha the tense move for most of a year if not two years is to exert indirect influence on Luther to let him know that he's heard in some ways but that he needs to calm himself down when it comes to the authority of the Pope even if Luther has a theological leg to stand on historically that the Pope has never claimed certain rights over the issue of salvation that that always belongs to Christ and that papal authority extends over temporal jurisdiction of issues related to penance etc the Pope will not suffer long someone who wants to challenge his authority no matter how rightly placed that criticism might be from Luther but despite the coming firestorm between Luther and the papacy there were a number of people who found Luther's initial ideas compelling and it's this combination of a number of people both in the universities and at the wider popular level within Germany who find Luther compelling as well as the eventual firestorm from within the Magisterium and from the University of Leipzig as they attack Luther that twin pronged experience for Luther is the context that drives him to develop a more consistent vocabulary and articulation of his understanding of the theology of the cross and justification by faith and so in April of 1518 Luther is actually invited by the University of Heidelberg to come and give a disputation or a live debate or live back and forth on the subject of indulgences and the things that he raised in the 95 theses now let's not get ahead of ourselves Luther being invited in at this point is not as radical as it might seem Luther has yet to come under serious public fire for his stance on indulgences at this point he is somewhat provocative but in some cases applauded for his stance on the subject of the controversial indulgences sales throughout Germany and so the invitation by Heidelberg to come in allows Luther a public setting to really sort of hash out and debate his ideas now again if you're a university trained professor the main place you do this is not in the quiet and solitude of your study but very often in the public forum of a debate where you dialogue back and forth and pass out more consistent vocabulary now we don't have the sort of blow-by-blow transcription the things Luther says at the Heidelberg disputation but we do know from eyewitness accounts that Luther's convictions in his perspective are becoming clearer as he is speaking publicly April 1518 again he goes to Heidelberg to do his disputation and this really is a pivot for him and one of the eyewitness accounts we have actually is a man who will become one of the most important reformers in all the sixteenth century and that man is Martin boots er boot sir is a man who will see later when we go through the life of Calvin but boots ER is a significant reformer in his own right who resides frankly somewhere between the Reformed position and the Lutheran position he is certainly on the reformed side of things but later in life as he refuses to become more reformed in the sense of becoming anti Lutheran there are some from within the city of Zurich who began to treat boots there's a bit of a traitor boots er is as we often say irenic that is to say he doesn't want to choose sides if he doesn't have to he wants a more generous perspective on Protestantism and to the day he died he was very appreciative of Luther even if that meant that some of his brothers in the reformed tradition found him a bit suspicious well the beginning of his fascination in his respect for Luther begins here at the Heidelberg disputation because in the audience is Martin Buser himself still Catholic yet because of Luther's force of his arguments really sees the beginning of his change from Catholic to Protestant as beginning here at the Heidelberg disputation in Boots er attends and he actually has a letter that he sends to a friend afterwards in which he writes that Luther responds with magnificent grace and he listens he says with insurmountable patience he presents an argument with the insight of the Apostle pol now this is certainly sort of effusive language he certainly loves Luther but it gives at least a little bit of an inkling as to Luther's persona up on that stage Luther from about this point and frankly all the way until the day he dies simply has this effect on people whenever they see him face to face people are just mesmerized by the way that he interacts and the sort of larger-than-life personality that he is in butcher wasn't the only one there who found Luther's ideas compelling what's important about the Heidelberg is mutation though and the reason why I'm choosing to call it kind of a pivot point is that Luther knew deep down that indulgences were not the only thing he really cared about in fact in a manner of speaking indulgences were a proxy war meaning that they are an attack on an element of the Catholic understanding of salvation and penance cetera but they're not the whole thing and what begins to happen in Luther's thinking and in his public expression of things from roughly Heidelberg on is that Luther transitions his language from being about indulgences per se to instead be more about the fundamental issues of the will and the ability of the Christian to perform good works and more fundamentally the power of the Pope itself now we saw all when we looked at the 95 theses that Luther is at least hinting at a restriction of papal power well over the course of 1518 he actually begins to push deeper into this subject it becomes a little more aggressive as time wears on about how uncertain he is frankly about the Pope's position in relationship to Scripture because the issue with indulgences and with some of the other practices that Luther is attacking with his theology of the Cross is that they are fundamentally based on the power of the papacy in the Magisterium to declare and to rule on these subjects and so increasingly as the debate sort of go on and as he gets some criticism and he has dialogue with a number of people Luther again and again and again realizes that his issue isn't so much indulgences per se but that he no longer believes that the Pope should be allowed to say these things or to enforce these things and this really is a vital point to understand when we look at the Reformation itself often it's said at a popular level that the Reformation was about the doctrines of grace that the Protestant faith is focused you might say exclusively on the issue of justification well that certainly is true in a material sense that is to say it is the subject of salvation and justification that causes the Reformation however from a doctrinal standpoint and from a historical standpoint the root cause of the crisis is not justification alone that is the problem but rather that Luther's criticism of the medieval understanding of salvation meant that he was led eventually into the conclusion that the Pope had no right to do these things that the Scriptures were somehow being placed under the authority of the Pope and that if the Pope was saying that he had the right to interpret Scripture and that his interpretation of Scripture was that indulgences and penance was the order for all Christians to perform well then what Luther was led to have believed eventually is that the Pope can be wrong that he has no right to rule on these subjects and therefore the fundamental sort of concrete bedrock issue amongst Protestants and Catholics from the very beginning is this issue of the authority of the papacy to rule on doctrine or to interpret Scripture and as the next sort of 12 to 18 months unfold for Luther the issue becomes less and less about indulgences and more and more about the authority of the Pope and in fact that issue in particular dawns in Luther's mind not so much because of his own self-awareness and his ability to sort of reason down to the foundation rather the issue of the authority of the papacy in Luther's eventual rejection of that authority comes about by Catholics challenging Luther on this very point and we can see this immediately following the Heidelberg disputation late of the tenth finds himself relatively unsuccessful at sort of the indirect method of putting pressure on Luther through some other means to get him to calm down and so Leo sends in sort of a pit bull to take the first salvo of Luther's doctrinal positions and that man is Sylvester pre arias pre arias was a Dominican and he lived in Rome where he was the master of the sacred Palace which means that he was on sort of the inner circle of the papal court itself in pre arias is brought in as something of a scholar and he's asked to offer the first major critique of Luther theologically in writing and pre arias does this examines Luther's ninety-five theses and some of his other pieces and he draws up a response to it and this is important because pre arias is the first to semi-official either not officially to refer to Luther as a heretic and pre arias is focus is specifically on the issue of the authority of the Pope he challenges Luther not with misunderstanding indulgences or with being curmudgeonly in complaining about abuses that he has no right to complain about rather pre arias takes a different tactic in which he says the Pope has allowed this the Pope has caused this and pushed this therefore Luther pre arias says in a nutshell shut up it's not your place the Pope has the right over this and if you challenge that you are a heretic the authority of the Pope is supreme again notice in this case and this is true in many places throughout history often a fundamental problem that looks to be a doctrinal problem becomes one of authority when dealing with the Magisterium Pope Leo is not done however he also enlists the help of another Cardinal by the name of kg Tom in kg Thanh is kind of one of these figures who should have seems to show up everywhere in the Reformation as sort of a voice or leader in the Catholic hierarchy is at Chicago Town for example who is sent up to England 13 years later when hinder the 8th is having his issue with his first wife Catherine of Aragon and he's asked the Pope to consider an annulment and it's Khajiit on who sent up at the Pope's urging to rule on this subject and cotton is the one who has to figure out a way of telling Henry no without telling him now and the story is sort of legendary he sits and hears the case and then rather than rule a verdict which was next to impossible because he couldn't rule in either case without angering some major magnate or King in Europe instead Khajiit on calls a halt to the meeting for summer break he then scary's back to Rome and never comes back and the rest is history for the formation of the Anglican Church when Henry the eighth kicks the Pope out of England but in this case Cayetana is enlisted to go after Luther in cotton and Leo do again a bit of an end-around they go to Frederick the wise the prince who has authority in jurisdiction over Luther because he has authority and jurisdiction over vit and Borg and over the University and they pressure Frederick to send Luther down to Rome and they push pretty hard on this alleging that Frederick is harboring a heretic even though Luther has yet to be officially condemned and they urge him to pack him up and send him on down to realm well it's at this point that one of the more curious realities of the Reformation sets in which is that Frederick is a Catholic again we've made note in previous lectures that the Vinton burg Castle has a staggering number of relics and things that could be part of a pilgrimage to the city of Wittenberg for the sake of penance and even for indulgences and Frederick does not himself ever come under full fire he's never tossed out of the Catholic Church for his role in the defending Luther but in this case Fredrik doesn't take the side of the papacy or of Khajiit on and it's hard to understand his mind here but one of the elements that seems to be going on with Fredrik as well as others is there's a real animosity to the idea that those in Rome would call one of their own a german-born man down to their midst when they knew full well that Luther would never come back so rather than say no what Frederick does is he makes a demand that a meeting between chitin and Luther happened on German soil and he makes a suggestion that it happened at the city of Augsburg the papacy in kg ton reluctantly agree and Khajiit on comes up to Germany to meet with Luther around the same time though the Pope does put together a papal bull in which he clarifies a couple of things related to indulgences and that bull is known as cumin Post clump now just a quick note on the naming of bulls and what these things are a bull is essentially an official proclamation by the papacy today these things often go by the name of encyclical or by other names whenever the Pope issues an official proclamation but a bull is something that has the full power of the Pope behind it and the way we name these things is usually we take the first two or three words in Latin from the text and we just sort of call the document after these words so in this case the document begins with the lad encompassed qualm and therefore this is the name of the document well this bull Kuhn Post qualm does two things first of all it does put an end to some of the abuses that Luther complained about in the 95 theses and this is sometimes overlooked by Protestants in particular the Pope does in sort of a quiet way put it into some of the things that were so scandalous about the sale of indulgences things like playing on the emotions of those in the audience whenever you're preaching an indulgence sale for example however this document is bull stands tall and does not back down at all on the issue of the Pope's authority to issue in indulgences and these things are binding in that they have an efficacious role in the Christian life for Luther though this bull was relatively irrelevant it doesn't actually come across as instead Khajiit on comes up to the city of Alex Burke in 1518 in October roughly a year since the posting of the 95 theses and Khajiit on and Luther meet and it does not go well at all in fact the two eventually descended to a shouting match and the situation is focused primarily on the subject of the Pope's Authority and it's at this point again Luther pushed and pressed asked again and again to buckle under because the Pope's Authority is supreme Luther again and again begins to say and he says it here to Khajiit on that he does not believe that the Pope can rule over Scripture that he can be the interpreter of Scripture that scripture is over the Pope and therefore if Luther finds a significant deviation from papal proclamation from what he believes to be the interpretation of Scripture then scripture wins in the Pope is not the interpreter of that text so a year after the posting of the 95 theses Luther is confronted again and again and again with the issue of the Pope's Authority and from pre arias Takashi tan Luther is forced and pushed and prodded to make further and further bold declarations about his understanding of the authority of Scripture over the Pope and Luther very nearly lost his life here in October of 1518 Khajiit on at some point notifies the authorities that they're going to meet again the following day and that if Luther remains recalcitrant and will not rescind his heresies that he is to be handed over and arrested then put on trial in the civil government and Luther slips away in the night and escapes well by and large 15:18 is the big push from the official response from Rome with pre areas and Khajiit on and leave the tent behind them pushing a line of attack against Luther in which they say that he is disobedient and that he is challenging papal Authority after this moment though after October 1518 the battle sort of transitions and what happens is is the main opponent for Luther following 1518 becomes lodged in a university squabble between the University of Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig Leipzig is a bastion of conservative Catholic thinking at this time and one of the leading lights one of the major figures when the major theologians of the University of Leipzig is a man by the name of Johann Eck and because Luther was a university professor and because Wittenberg and the other professors their rally behind Luther and become his biggest supporters what Eck does over in the University of Leipzig is he takes Leipzig out into the battlefield and makes Leipzig the counter-offensive from the university standpoint over against Luther and Eck is vitally important because what Eck will do is become in a manner of speaking Luther's nemesis Eck will be the one who will be there at Luther's trial and he'll be the voice condemning him as the prosecutor a neck throughout Luther's life becomes one of his biggest opponents and Luther later throughout most of his life we'll have lots of scathing things to say about that little dr. Eck as he called him well again after the pivot of Heidelberg and after Luther has confronted the official response from within the Magisterium from pre arias and Khajiit on acknow come to the forefront and on into the following year of 1519 Eck cooks up an idea that he wants to have a serious showdown between the leipzig faculty led by him in this case in the representatives of vit berg on these so-called new ideas about papal authority and indulgences and so in July 1519 you have the major summit over these issues and this meeting is known as the Leipzig disputation now in this case there is sort of a bit of a strange twist to it that most students don't quite get right all the gate and that is that the leipzig disputation when the University of Leipzig and Eck invite Vinton Berg in they in a manner of speaking can't invite Luther himself to be the primary speaker there were all kinds of rules to these debates etc and often you have to invite the senior person from the order or from the university to be sort of the lead chair of the eight and that's exactly what happens here one of Luther's colleagues and one of his closest friends is a man by the name of Andres Carlstadt in Carlstadt was a supporter of Luthor's views and so therefore when Leipzig and Eck invite in the Vinton burg faculty and they want to draw a Lutheran to say something about his views they actually invite Carl Stott to sort of share the vit and Berg side and Luther kind of has second chair you might say or he's the the backup but there's no escaping the fact that at Leipzig its Luthor versus akin a manner of speaking even though karlstad again has the first voice on the floor in the leipzig disputation is four sessions in July of 1519 that lasts for 18 days these are serious long ranging deep prodding debates over all kinds of issues but the three primary issues that they deal with are the issue of free will biblical arguments about the basis of indulgences or penance itself in thirdly papal authority as the bedrock of all the Catholic system and what Eck finally manages to do what others have not been able to get Luther to be publicly until this point is that when Luther is finally on the stage and he's defending his position over against Eck Eck primarily doesn't deal with the issue of indulgences instead when he has Luther in his sights he goes specifically after the issue of papal Authority and quite famously Eck pushes Luther into a corner you might say or if you don't want to make Luther sound weak you might say he pushes Luther to realize from within his own theological system that what he's saying is essentially that the Pope can air that church councils can be wrong they can err and that if scripture if Luther's interpretation of Scripture I should say goes over against either a council or a pope Luther has to admit that the church Magisterium can be wrong now again this is not quite so controversial in the 21st century but in Luther's day this is extraordinarily controversial because really only a matter of about a hundred years before in the early 1400s there was a man the name of yon hood who had done ministry in the city of Prague and who had said many of these same things as well he denied papal Authority he deny the infallibility of Pope or Council to rule on doctrine and in the early 1400s yon host had been burned at the stake in the city of Rome well what act does is really kind of a masterstroke from the Catholic side which is that he gets Luther to frankly admit to being a ha sight as they were called and there is something of an apocryphal moment here whether or not Luther said it and these words are not were not quite sure but at some point Luther essentially admits that he is a ha sight at least on this issue of papal authority that with HUS Luther admits the Pope can air a council can air and scripture alone is the thing that cannot air its interpretation must reign over our church well again in a manner speaking for active force Luther to come to the realization that his theology is essentially hussite or essentially schismatic on the issue of the authority of the Pope is with running the rest of being a bit hyperbolic it's the final nail on the coffin for Luther to avoid the title of being a heretic and so their July 15 19 year and a half after the posting the 95 theses after a lot of debating both positively at the University of Heidelberg and then negatively in private with people like Khajiit on and now publicly against the man who would become his nemesis Luther has now fully bloomed and blossomed you might say into his understanding of the theology of the cross and his understanding of justification that because the fundamental issue is that Luther doubts and then eventually condemns this idea of the authority of the papacy that it took this sort of pressure-cooker time after the controversy of the 95 theses for Luther to come to the bottom of only actual believes and what his theology actually implied in terms of his relationship with the papacy and so after Luther has made this proclamation and after he has not buckled under or caved under when both the official response team from Rome with pre arias and kakouton as well as the Leipzig University in the dispute ation of July 1519 when Luther does not cave from this point on Luther is heading quickly towards being condemned as a heretic to eventually being put on trial okay that's it we've now come to the point where Luther is Anna matter of speaking and open heretic and in our next lecture we're going to be looking at what happens to Luther as she is branded a heretic and put on trial at the diet of forms you