Turning Points in Church History: The Diet of Worms
Pastor Rod Thompson
Midland SDA Church
April 21, 2018
1 Corinthians Martin Luther was born in Eisleben Germany in 1483. His parents gave him the best education they could afford, in hopes that he would become a lawyer and then perhaps a prosperous town councilor. But by the time his university career came to an end, realities of the unseen world pressed harder upon Luther than material ambition.
In 1505, to the consternation of his father, Luther entered the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. Here he took on the life of a monastic monk. As such he was involved in a daily schedule of prayer and work. The monks would nurse the sick, assist the poor, dispense advice to others and devote themselves to following the ways of Jesus.
Twenty years later Luther would repudiate his monastic vows, but it was a remarkable bridge that God would use to bring him to the place where he would become the first protestant of the reformation.
Of special importance for Luther’s personal and theological development was the wise counsel of Johann Von Staupitz
Johann von Staupitz, was a Roman Catholic theologian, university preacher, and Vicar General of the Augustinian friars in Germany, he supervised Martin Luther during a critical period in his spiritual life. Martin Luther himself remarked, "If it had not been for Dr. Staupitz, I should have sunk in hell.
When Luther besieged Staupitz with recitals of his own inadequacy before God, Staupitz urged Luther to Study the Scriptures. Staupitz also arranged for Luther to take an advanced degree in theology so that, as a practical antidote to his spirtiual depression, he could become a university professor and put his great energies to a profitable use.
Just before he turned 30 Luther began his lifelong job as a professor in Sacred Scripture at the University of Wittenberg.
The demands of the monastery and his teaching gave Luther more than enough to do, but they were not enough to satisfy his personal quest for holiness
Luther eventually left the monastery, not because he neglected monastic discipline, but because he took that discipline as seriously as humanly possible.
His sense of sin was great and caused him much distress. Even more distress was caused by the fearsome image of God as the perfectly righteous judge who sent His Son to show humanity the full and terrible reality of divine righteousness.
Concerning this righteousness. Luther pondered, labored, studied, strove, and pondered some more.
And the verse that stunned him the most was
Romans 1: 17 For in it (gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”
He wondered, how could the revelation of God’s righteousness, which forces humans to see how unworthy they are when set against the perfections of divine holiness, ever constitute a gospel message of good news?
How could reconciliation with God possibly come from a display of God’s righteousness?
Finally, after several years of intense struggle over such questions he discovered the answer in Psalm 31
Read Slide Psalm 31:1 In you, O Lord, I put my trust; Let me never be ashamed; deliver me in your righteousness.
With that insight Luther could make sense of his discovery in Romans 1:17 concerning a righteousness that is by faith from first to last and hear (with relief) that the righteous shall live by faith.
The Key, as Luther would put it many years later, was that in Christ the sinner could receive the righteousness of God as a gift.
I’d like you to notice what Luther himself said about this discovery:
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, He who through faith is righteous shall live. “
There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith.
And this is the meaning: The righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith. In other words he who through faith is righteous – He shall live.
Luther goes on to say, “here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally “other face” of the entire scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which He makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.
None of Luther’s inner theological turmoil or his hard-won breakthroughs in understanding scripture caused even a ripple on the ecclesiastical seas. In fact, Luther later concluded that his own journey resembled the paths taken by many others in the church’s earlier history, like Augustine’s in the fourth century, the Bohemian reformer John Hus in the early fifteenth century, or the Dutch preacher John Wessel of Gansfort.
It was only when Luther began to protest against current church practices, which he thought obscured the free gift of grace to be found through faith in Christ, that his private discoveries led to public antagonism.
As a prime example – the protest of his 95 theses against the selling of indulgences in 1517 made him a figure of intense controversy, not so much because of the theology underlying the theses, but because important church officials, including the Pope, received a share on monies raised by indulgence sales.
Soon however, ecclesiastical resistance to Luther’s increasingly public appeals for reform moved beyond debate over abuses to serious wrestling with basic theological issues.
Growing public controversy revealed a Luther who was prolific in published debate as he was earnest in private theological reflection. The theological disputes that flourished in the wake of the 95 theses represented the first full scale exploitation of the printing press in European history. The torrent of words that flowed from Luther’s pen represented a marvel in his age and became a treasure for study thereafter, especially in the twentieth century as more complete editions of Luther’s work have become more readily available.
The remarkable nature of Luther’s literary productivity is shown especially by what he published in 1520.
His Treatise (dissertation) on Good Works claimed to show how faith in Christ was the only good work that God expected from repentant sinners and the work of faith was something humans could perform only by grace because faith itself was gift of God
The Papacy of Rome – Intimated that the Pope should be called antichrist because, although he was supposed to be the Vicar of Christ, he actually kept people from understanding and heeding the message of the gospel.
His Address to the Christian nobility of the German Nation was a rousing appeal to leaders north of the Alps to throw off the tyranny – economic and political as well as spiritual chains that bound them to Rome.
His Babylonian Captivity of the Church presented a searching examination of the churches sevenfold system of sacraments. By claiming to find only Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and perhaps confession, as sacraments authorized by Christ in the New Testament – and by arguing that the Catholic Church’s domination of sacramental practice had turned them into works of self-righteousness – Luther threatened the very foundations of Christendom as it had grown up around the sacramental system.
The Freedom of a Christian, was a more peaceful effort to explain how a believer, redeemed entirely by divine grace, would nevertheless naturally be active in doing good works.
Luther had the ability to bring out the paradox of the Christian Life. He said this.
“A Christian is a perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none. AND a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”
These works form 1520 raised the challenge to which the ecclesiastical and political powers of his time were outraged and it resulted in -----
A Major turning point in church history and the diet of worms
At six 0’clock in the early evening of April 18, 1521, the hour had arrived for Martin Luther. The scene was an improvised imperial hall in Worms, a modest city of roughly 7,000 inhabitants located down the Rhine River from Strasburg Germany and just a little south of Mainz.
Luther, at 37 years of age, had been a monk for over 15 years. He was appearing before Charles V, a (and therefore a successor to Charlemagne). A Young man of only 21 who, besides serving as King of Spain, had been elected Germany’s Holy Emperor
The imperial diet (which simply means formal assembly) that convened at Worms was assembled so that the King and the Pope could hear testimony against Luther.
The day before, on April 17, Luther had appeared in the emperor’s presence for the first time. Spread out on a table in the imperial chambers were Luther’s writings. There was such a pile of them that Charles and his aids, when they first came into the chamber had expressed doubt that any single person could have written so much.
Luther had been summoned to Worms to recant. He was being asked to confess publically to his mistakes in what he had written about the gospel, the nature of the church, and the current state of Christendom.
When asked on the previous day if he would recant, Luther responded that the works where of several different kinds, and he requested another day to ponder his reply.
The imperial secretary was not pleased, for as he reminded Luther and the assembled onlookers that he had had plenty of time to prepare. Nonetheless, because of the emperor’s innate clemency Luther was granted his request.
But now he could delay no longer and the charge came once again.
“Come then; answer the question of his majesty, whose kindness you have experienced in seeking a time for thought. Do you wish to defend all your acknowledged books, or to retract some?”
Luther, who had obviously considered his reply carefully, responded that his books were of three kinds
1. Works of simple piety which no Christian ruler or church official could possibly want withdrawn
2. Works directed against the papacy and the affairs of the papists who by their doctrines and very wicked examples had laid waste the Christian world with evil that affects the spirit and the body
And how he didn’t think anyone would defend the evils that those books attacked
3. Luther conceded, did contain some things that were overly harsh, which he was willing to consider retracting, but only on one very important condition.
And at this point Luther laid down the condition –
“I ask by the mercy of God, may your most serene majesty, most illustrious lordships, or anyone at all who is able, either high or low, bear witness, expose my errors, overthrowing them by the writings of the prophets and the evangelists. Once I have been taught I shall be quite ready to renounce every error, and I shall be first to cast my books in the fire.”
Of course he was not explicit enough for the court so the emperor’s spokesman pressed him again.
Would he recant or not?
Then Luther spoke words that augured one of the most momentous changes in the history of Europe, and one of the most significant in the history of the church.
“Since then your serene majesty and lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”
But why regard Luther and what he wrote as a turning point in the history of Christianity? Efforts to answer that question lead - at first - to troubling conclusions - that is, if we take the historical shape of Luther’s life seriously.
First Luther could never be considered a model of Christian decorum
History shows that he was blunt, sometimes crude, a writer who would sometimes embarrass his supporters and protectors. He was constantly beset by internal struggles, doubts, and depression. He had rapid shifts in mood and was a hypochondriac.
Luther was also manifestly a sinner, especially proven by the standards that he himself proclaimed from the scriptures
You may remember your history--that Luther called upon the rulers of Germany to drive the Jews out of their land, take most of their wealth, and forbid their Rabbis to teach.
In short, what made Luther’s teaching an important turning point were not his impeccable spiritual credentials.
To be sure, he could be compassionate, deeply loving, and unexpectedly humble, and he had many extraordinary gifts.
But it was much more the vision of God that gripped Luther, and which he communicated through sermons, tracts, and dissertations, that made a mark on the history of Christianity.
His vision of God, which shattered many of the religious conventions of his day, first broke through to the depths of his own being and then forced the west as a whole to pay attention.
We can sense the heart of Luther’s concern about God if we begin with his public efforts at reform – With the 95 theses that he displayed in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. The first of the 95 says simply
“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, repent, He willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
92. Away then with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, ‘peace, peace,’ and there is no peace!
93. Blessed be all those prophets who say to the people of Christ, ‘cross, cross,’ and there is no cross!
94. Christians should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ, their head, through penalties, death and hell;
95. And thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations rather than through the false security of peace.
Luther’s hard won understanding of God that had come through arduous meditation upon the first chapter of romans is here beginning to emerge.
Religion as personal reassurance gives way before religion defined by a crucified Savior.
The crucial element in Luther’s idea of god was again a paradox: to understand the power that made heaven and earth, it was necessary to know the powerlessness that hung on a Roman gallows. To conceive the moral perfection of deity, it was necessary to understand the scandal, the shame, the pain, and the sordidness of a criminal’s execution. For Luther, in short, to find God was to find the cross.
Read 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25
To Luther, Christianity begins with Christ dying for sinners. But it doesn’t end there. Christianity becomes a reality in human lives when men and women enter into Christ’s death by suffering the destruction of the own pretensions as they stand in the very presence of God.
As life is then transformed and we surrender more and more to Him our religion becomes a reality.
We are empowered by the indwelling Christ to live for Him.
Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
And what does that look like in your life?
Romans 1:17 “The just shall live by faith.”