MARTIN LUTHER PART 2 with ALEC RYRIE

so over the next two plus years a series of set-piece encounters take place between luther and his various opponents in which luther to his intense frustration repeatedly attempts to have this conversation this argument about the nature of salvation about what it means to be a justified sinner and in which his opponents repeatedly refused to have that argument because they now insist that this is a matter not of theology but of obedience that the church has commanded him with its full authority to submit and he is refusing to do so and until he's willing to show himself an obedient son of the church it's impossible to talk about anything else and so luther finds himself led down this argument which initially he has no wish to follow the crux comes in the summer of 1519 a year and a half into this this controversy when he has won maybe the most important of these great set piece confrontations at leipzig in saxony up against probably the most able theological opponent he ever faces johannes ek ek comes to leipzig well aware of what luther has been arguing and of what he needs to do ideally of course what he wants is to obtain a full recantation from luther to get him to conform to the church but it's already becoming clear that luther has titanic reserves of stubbornness uh and that this is not what's likely to happen and so his next best option would be to persuade that to force luther to out himself to make it clear that he really is a heretic in the full sense of somebody who has chosen his own opinions heresy derives from the greek word for choice someone who has chosen his own opinions rather than obediently accepting what the church teaches in other words that he is a self-willed man rather than an obedient son an ex technique to achieve this is to use a previous heretic johann yan huss the the bohemian heretic who'd been condemned at the council of constance um more than a century earlier in 1415 and burned so what he does is ago it goes in to prove that some of luther's views are those which had already been condemned as as hussite more than a century earlier and he successfully backs luther into a corner on this and forces luther to take maybe the most extraordinary decisive step of his life which is to say that if his beliefs had already authoritatively been condemned by the entire church as represented by the bodily body of the council of constance well then the church must be wrong and he luther must be right luther seems to take this step almost without fully realizing quite what a radical decision he's taking that he's throwing over not simply the authority of a particular papal bull or even the authority of the papacy as such he's throwing over the authority of an ecumenical council of the church the council of constance and is in effect appealing to no human authority other than bear scripture as interpreted by his own conscience so the argument about obedience which his opponents have wanted to have have wanted been wanting to have all the way along has forced him to this point where he's had to enunciate a doctrine of authority which goes radically against anything that the church had previously accepted unsurprisingly this leads to his formal condemnation as a heretic the papal bull condemning him is published in 1520. now of course normally what happens when somebody publicly out themselves as a heretic and is then condemned is that arrest trial and if appropriate execution follow and you might expect that this is how the luther affair would have ended it's how the luther affair should have ended there is a well-oiled machinery for policing heresy within the church and it should all have been brought to bear on luther and possibly if the timing had been slightly different it would have been but at the same time as the luther affair is unfolding the holy roman emperor emperor maximilian the first is gravely ill maximilian is an unconscionably long time being gravely ill for the last five years he goes around taking his coffin with him wherever he goes he seems convinced that he's on the point of death but it's clear that whether it's weeks or months maximilian doesn't have a great deal longer to go which means that soon there's going to be an imperial election the holy roman emperor is an elected prince the premier prince of europe and it just so happens that one of the seven princes who will elect him is the elector frederick of saxony who is luther's local prince and the founder of luther's university of wittenberg and frederick although no great sympathizer with luther's theological ideas to the extent that he ever even really seems to understand them is certainly keen to protect the independence of his university and he's particularly keen to protect his star theologian who has put his new institution on the map and this is a point where nobody is willing to antagonize one of the electors of the empire by forcing the point so in some ways you can see this is a political fluke that it's that accident or providence of the of of the the timing of the of the upcoming imperial election which gives luther the breathing space he needs i think it's more than just an accident it's the fact of luther's celebrity the success that his print campaign has had and the flood of pamphlets which he's producing which give him that value which make the elector that the frederick want to protect him and it's certainly true that while the machinery of papal and imperial justice is slowly grinding its way against him he is enormously active in writing over the the last 30 years of his life that is from the beginning of his public career in 1517 to his death luther produces something in the order of one book every three weeks averaged out across the course of his life of course most of these are rather short books some of them are not but he is a tremendously productive writer and the sheer quantity of these which circulate in print in germany in the the late 1510s and the first half of the 1520s especially absolutely overwhelms anything that had that had been produced before he dominates the reforming movement there are plenty of others in alliance with him but luther's work circulate in far greater numbers than all of his principal allies put together i don't think there is a single example in human history actually of a mass movement which has been so dominated by one voice as as the early reformation in germany is by luther's and so by the time the papal condemnation comes through he is a celebrity on an enormous scale once the papal condemnation has has come through though and he's now begun to express his own mature theology and i'll be coming back to what the substance of that is in a few minutes that there's by now a new emperor being elected in the end unanimously the the king of spain um king charles of spain has been elected as the emperor charles v and this teenage earnest emperor is very keen to show his loyalty to rome and to enforce the condemnation of this the upstart heretic that's that's been made in his midst and so luther is summoned to an imperial diet um an imperial parliament at the city of worms in the spring of 1521 very uncertain as to whether he should

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Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2013