Conscience Captive to the Word: Luther at Worms, the Wartburg and the German Bible

In 1521 the church of Western Europe was still one body under the pope, and the Holy Roman Empire was a patchwork of several hundred territories under princes, bishops and free cities. Its elected head was Charles V, a 21-year-old who also ruled Spain, the Netherlands, Naples and the Spanish lands across the Atlantic. In August 1521, four months after Worms, the army of Hernan Cortes and its indigenous allies took Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. He was at war with France, and the Ottoman sultan Suleiman took Belgrade in 1521, won at Mohacs in 1526 and besieged Vienna in 1529. An emperor who needed German princes for his armies could not simply crush a German monk.

Luther's quarrel with Rome had grown fast since the 95 Theses of 1517. He had debated Johann Eck at Leipzig in 1519 and had begun to doubt the authority of popes and councils. In June 1520 the pope issued the bull Exsurge Domine, which condemned forty-one statements from his writings. Luther burned a copy in December 1520, and in January 1521 he was excommunicated. Under the law of the time, the next step was to hand a condemned heretic to the secular power. His prince, Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, who had founded the University of Wittenberg in 1502, argued that a German subject should first be heard in Germany.

The printing press, in use in Germany since the 1450s, made Luther's pamphlets travel in days. German Bibles already existed, translated from the Latin Vulgate and printed in the century before him. Bible translation was not a Protestant invention: the Ethiopian church read Scripture in Ge'ez, and Armenian, Syriac, Coptic and Slavonic churches had read it in their own tongues for centuries. What was new in Luther's case was a single translator of great skill, a printing trade ready to sell it, and a political crisis that made the question of who has the last word on Scripture a matter of public order.

The question at Worms was who may say what the Bible means. The medieval church read Scripture in the Latin Vulgate, through the church fathers and the standing decisions of councils and popes. A bishop or theologian might explain a passage; he did not, by his own authority, set the church's teaching against that line of interpretation. Luther claimed that the plain sense of a text, read in its context and compared with other texts, could correct popes and councils, because they had contradicted one another. His model was Paul's praise of the Scriptures in 2 Timothy 3:15-17, where they are able to make one wise for salvation and equip the person of God, and the Bereans of Acts 17:11, who checked what they heard against the Scriptures.

The framing passage is Acts 5. When the Sanhedrin forbade the apostles to teach in Jesus' name, Peter and the apostles answered that they must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). Luther's supporters applied that line to the emperor and the pope. The same chapter also holds Gamaliel's counsel that if a work is of God it cannot be overthrown (Acts 5:38-39), and Luther and his supporters appealed to it. Catholic readers pointed to other verses: Paul's command to hold the traditions taught by word or by letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15), and Peter's remarks that Paul's letters contain things hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16) and that no prophecy of Scripture is of private interpretation (2 Peter 1:20-21).

The Reformers did not agree among themselves on how to read. Luther judged books by whether they 'present Christ' and doubted James, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation, placing them at the end of his New Testament. He kept a literal reading of 'This is my body' in Matthew 26:26. Zwingli read the same words as 'this signifies my body' and pointed to John 6:63, 'the flesh profiteth nothing'. Anabaptists read the New Testament as a pattern for a gathered church of believers and used the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19) and Acts 2:38 to argue that baptism follows faith.

Luther came to Worms in April 1521 under a promise of safe conduct, which the emperor had given for twenty-one days. On 17 April an official of the archbishop of Trier, Johann von der Ecken (not the Eck of Leipzig), set his books on a table and asked two questions: were they his, and would he retract them? Luther acknowledged the books and asked for time. The Diet gave him until the next day.

On 18 April he answered, first in German and then in Latin. He sorted his books into three kinds: plain Christian teaching, attacks on papal abuses, and polemics against persons. He could not retract the first without denying the faith, or the second without helping the tyranny that robbed Germans of their goods. Pressed again, he gave the answer that was recorded in the first printed report: unless he was shown wrong by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reasoning, he would not recant, because popes and councils had erred and contradicted themselves, and his conscience was bound by God's Word. To act against conscience, he said, was neither safe nor right. The earliest report ends with a short prayer: God help me. Amen.

The famous line 'Here I stand, I can do no other' is not in that early report. It first appears in later printed editions and is probably an addition. What is firmly attested is the appeal to Scripture and conscience. The next day the young emperor read out a statement in French. He said that a single monk who contradicted a thousand years of Christendom must be wrong, and that he would not change the faith of his ancestors. After days of fruitless talks, Luther left on 26 April. The Edict of Worms, signed on 26 May and dated 8 May, declared him an outlaw, ordered his arrest and banned the printing and reading of his works.

On 4 May, on the road home, horsemen sent by Frederick the Wise seized Luther and took him to the Wartburg castle near Eisenach. He lived there for about ten months under the name Junker Jorg,. In those months he began the German New Testament, working from the Greek text that Erasmus had printed in 1516 and revised since. By his own account he listened to ordinary speech in the market and at home, and Melanchthon helped with the Greek. The September Testament of 1522 appeared with woodcuts from the workshop of Lucas Cranach. It sold out and was reprinted again and again. The Old Testament came in parts from 1523, and the whole Bible was published in 1534, with Melanchthon and other colleagues helping. Luther placed the Old Testament books outside the Hebrew canon in a separate section, books not equal to Holy Scripture yet useful and good to read, as his heading said.

While he was away, Wittenberg went its own way. Andreas Karlstadt, a colleague, gave communion in both bread and wine at Christmas 1521 and married. Some students and townspeople, joined by men from Zwickau who claimed direct revelations from the Spirit, broke images in the churches in January 1522. Luther left the Wartburg without the elector's permission and in March 1522 preached eight sermons, called the Invocavit sermons, in which he argued for patience: the Word must work, not force. Karlstadt was expelled from Saxony in 1524 and died in Basel in 1541.

The Peasants' War of 1524-25 began in southwest Germany. Peasants, burdened by dues and serfdom, drew up the Twelve Articles in early 1525. They asked for the right to choose their pastors, an end to serfdom on the ground that Christ's blood had bought all, and relief from tithes, and they said they would withdraw any demand shown to contradict Scripture. Luther first wrote an Admonition to Peace, which blamed the princes for their cruelty and the peasants for using the gospel as cover for rebellion. In May 1525, as the rising turned violent in Thuringia, he published Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, calling on the princes to strike down the rebels like mad dogs. His case rested on Romans 13:1-7 and on his view that the Gospel does not abolish social order. Thomas Muntzer, a preacher who led the Thuringian bands, was beaten at Frankenhausen in mid-May and executed. Estimates of the dead run to about 100,000. The tract joined the Reformation to the force of the princes, and later Lutherans have had to answer for it.

On 13 June 1525 Luther married Katharina von Bora. She had left a convent in 1523, helped by a merchant who delivered fish to it. The couple lived in the Black Cloister, the former Augustinian house, which the elector gave them. They had six children; two died young. Katharina ran a farm, brewed beer and housed students and guests; Protestant pastors' homes later followed this pattern. After a visitation of Saxon churches in 1528 found pastors and people ignorant of the basics, Luther wrote the Small Catechism (1529), a short guide to the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, baptism, confession and the Lord's Supper. In October 1529, Landgrave Philip of Hesse hosted Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius and Bucer at Marburg. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles. They did not agree about the Supper. Luther is reported to have chalked 'This is my body' on the table and refused Zwingli's hand of fellowship.

In 1530 Charles V called a Diet at Augsburg. Luther was still an outlaw and waited at Coburg. Melanchthon wrote the Confession, in 28 articles, and on 25 June the Saxon chancellor read it aloud in German before the emperor. The first 21 articles state the teaching; the last 7 name abuses that Lutherans had corrected. Catholic theologians answered in a Confutation read on 3 August; Melanchthon replied in his Apology (1531). Luther died on 18 February 1546 at Eisleben, where he had gone to mediate a dispute among the counts of Mansfeld. A note found on him ended with the words that we are beggars. War broke out the same year. The Peace of Augsburg of September 1555 let each ruler choose Catholic or Lutheran faith for his land, and permitted dissenters to emigrate. Calvinists and Anabaptists were not included.

At the center of the dispute was the authority of the Bible against the authority of the church's teaching office. Luther's formulation, later called sola scriptura, meant that Scripture alone is the norm by which all teaching is judged; it did not mean that each person should read in isolation. He used the creeds and the church fathers freely and kept infant baptism, the Trinity and the creeds of the early councils. Catholic theology, as the Council of Trent stated it in 1546, held that the gospel is contained in written books and in unwritten traditions from Christ and the apostles, and that the church, through its bishops and the pope, interprets Scripture authoritatively. Orthodox theology puts the difference another way: Scripture lives inside the Tradition of the church, in its worship, the seven ecumenical councils and the fathers, and the church as a whole, guided by the Spirit, is its right reader. Each side cites Scripture. Protestants cite 2 Timothy 3:16-17; Catholics and Orthodox cite 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and 1 Timothy 3:15, which calls the church the pillar of the truth.

The Protestant churches then divided over what follows from the principle. Lutherans keep whatever Scripture does not forbid, so they retained crucifixes, altars and much of the liturgy. They teach the real presence in the Supper (1 Corinthians 10:16; 11:23-26) and baptize infants. The Reformed, following Zwingli and then Calvin, keep only what Scripture commands in worship, removed images and stressed the spiritual presence of Christ. Anabaptists, such as the Swiss Brethren who began adult baptism in Zurich in January 1525, held that Scripture shows a church of believers, baptized after faith, outside state control. Zwingli's Zurich drowned Felix Manz in 1527 and many were later executed in Catholic and Protestant lands. Luther, who had once opposed killing for heresy, later agreed that the state could punish Anabaptists.

Other questions were bound up with the Bible. Justification by faith (Romans 3:28; Ephesians 2:8-9) was the doctrine Luther treated as the heart of Scripture, and the Augsburg Confession puts it in Article 4. Clerical marriage was defended by 1 Timothy 3:2 and 1 Corinthians 7:2, against the western rule of celibacy, which Catholic teaching grounded in Matthew 19:12 and 1 Corinthians 7:8. On rulers, Luther held that the state is God's instrument (Romans 13:1-7); the peasants answered with Scripture on the freedom Christ bought (1 Peter 1:18-19).

Luther described his reading of the whole Bible as a search for Christ. Law and promise, he said, are two ways the Word speaks, and the promise is Christ given for sinners. Worms is remembered for conscience, but his answer was not about freedom of opinion. It was that the Word of God which binds the conscience points to Christ, and that no human office can add to or take from the gift of forgiveness in him. The Small Catechism makes Christ the center in its explanation of the Creed: Christ has redeemed the lost person, not with silver or gold but with his own blood (compare 1 Peter 1:18-19). The Augsburg Confession opens by affirming the Nicene faith about the Trinity and the Son of God, before it turns to the disputes.

The record is mixed, and Luther's own witness is part of it. A reformer who preached grace also called for the killing of rebel peasants, and the same Luther wrote against Jews in 1543, calling for their synagogues to be burned and their books taken. Lutheran churches in the twentieth century and since have formally repudiated those writings. The drowning of Anabaptists and the executions of Protestants under Catholic rulers were done in the name of the same Christ. Acts 5:29 was quoted by people who then did not allow others to say it.

The German Bible is the plainest evidence that Christ was set before ordinary people. The Small Catechism asked heads of households to teach it to their households (Deuteronomy 6:7; Ephesians 6:4). That aim, the Word in the hearer's own language, was later shared by Catholic and Orthodox translators in many lands, though they did not always put it in the hands of every layperson.