Mad, Bad, Dangerous To Know (part 2) - The Life Of Martin Luther

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Mad, Bad, Dangerous To Know (part 3) - The Life Of Martin Luther

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Okay, we got to the point where the Emperor Maximilian had died and this meant that nothing could be done by the
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Empire about Luther for the next few months until the election of the new
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Emperor. Various exciting things happened during this time. Luther starts the Reformation of the university in Wittenberg, introduces and makes central to the curriculum the study of biblical languages, convinced of course that the
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Bible is the word of God given in Greek and Hebrew. He wants those studying to be ministers of the word of God to be able to get access to the
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Bible in its original form and that remains with us to this day in certain seminaries that the biblical languages are extremely important for that very reason.
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Luther is also challenged at this point to a debate at the University of Leipzig by somebody who was once his friend and now a deadly enemy, a man called
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John Eck. So Luther makes his way in June to the
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University of Leipzig in order to debate this new enemy that he has. Luther arrives, it's a moment of high drama in the
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Reformation, Luther makes his way to Leipzig with an armed band of students to protect him.
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Whether he was in physical danger or not, it certainly made for great theater and created the impression that Luther was an extremely important person.
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It's at the Leipzig debate that Luther first challenges explicitly the authority of the papacy.
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In a sermon before the debate, he expounds upon the keys in Matthew 16 and argues that the keys belong to the church as a whole, that this isn't some power given specifically to the pope and cardinals that they can use in a rather arbitrary way against people they don't like, but the keys actually belong to the church as a whole.
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That is described by his opponent John Eck as a completely bohemian position.
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Now if I were to say to you, what does bohemian mean to you, you might remember that great Queen song from 1978,
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Bohemian Rhapsody, or you might say, well bohemian, it's a bit like being in the village in New York, a sort of bohemian lifestyle.
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Bohemia of course was a territory in Europe at the time, as the territory in which one would find the city of Prague, so it's kind of like the modern
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Czech Republic. And the Bohemians had actually had their own sort of reformation a hundred years earlier, when a man called
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John Huss had challenged the authority of the papacy, and to defend his views had traveled under an imperial safe conduct to a council in the city of Constance.
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And when he got to the city of Constance, they'd torn up his imperial safe conduct, tried him and burned him at the stake.
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And the legend was that as Huss died, he said, today you burn a goose,
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Huss apparently sounds very much like the Czech word for goose, but a hundred years from now, a swan will arise.
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And that's why if you go into a Lutheran church, the pulpit or the lectern is often in the shape of a swan.
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And this was because Luther really liked the idea that he was the fulfillment of Huss's prophecy, and saw himself as the swan that Huss had talked about.
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The problem with Huss, of course, is Huss has already been condemned as a heretic. So if Luther's found to agree with Huss, you can just execute him straight away.
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Anyway, the debate takes place and Luther once again leaves safely.
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And late in 1519, the new emperor is appointed,
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Charles V. Charles V will become the emperor.
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He's a relatively young man when he's appointed. He will ultimately abdicate as emperor.
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His entire life will be dominated by the political and military problems created by Lutheranism.
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It's important to remember that in the 16th century, theology was politics.
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If you know anything about Geneva, you'll know that Calvin wanted the communion to take place every week.
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He wanted weekly communion. But the town council would only allow him to have communion four times a year.
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Why? Well, the answer is Geneva was trapped between the
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Catholic house of Savoy and the Protestant city of Bern. And it needed military support from one or the other.
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And when Geneva went Protestant, it needed a military alliance with the city of Bern.
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And to have a military alliance with the city of Bern meant that you had to have the same kind of liturgical practices as the city of Bern.
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It's weird to us now. It would be hard to imagine, well, Britain and America, we can have a military alliance in the
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Middle East, but we have to have the same prayer book used in our churches on a
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Sunday. That's very weird to us today. But that just shows that we think very differently from the 16th century.
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In the 16th century, it was standard that if you have a political alliance, there has to be some theological and liturgical rapprochement as well.
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So Charles V's entire career as emperor will be dominated by the
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Protestant problem. The emperor, and it will be indeed in 1547, the year after Luther's death,
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Luther by this point has such personal authority that the emperor can't move against Luther while he's alive.
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When Luther dies, the emperor decides to take on the Lutheran princes who are bounded together in what they call the
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Schmalkaldic League, and he declares war, and he marches into the Lutheran territories. And he arrives in Wittenberg, and he marches into the little church there in the castle church.
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And if you ever get the chance to go to Wittenberg, you go down the front, and there's Luther's grave. And it's a tiny chap.
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It's a very, very tiny little grave, maybe five foot four or something like that. It's a tiny little grave.
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And apparently, when the emperor came in in 1547, there was a portrait of Luther that hung over this tomb.
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And the emperor's Spanish aide de camp, who was with him, drew his sword and slashed the painting, and then turned to the emperor and said, let's dig him up and burn him at the stake.
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It was actually sort of standard practice. If you couldn't get the heretic when they were alive, you dug him up after they were dead, and you burned them at the stake.
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And it's a bit like the lollipop guild in Wizard of Oz. You know, by that point, they weren't simply merely dead.
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They were really most sincerely dead. But the emperor turns to his aide de camp, and with withering contempt, he says,
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I make no war on dead men. And he walks out of the church. And you just get this idea that he's so exhausted by the struggles with Lutheranism, he can't even be bothered to dig him up and burn him.
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So Charles V becomes emperor, and his entire life will be dominated by the
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Protestant question. Luther spends 1520 writing three great treaties.
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The Babylonian captivity of the church, when he shaves down the number of sacraments from seven to three.
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I always challenge the students to name me the seven sacraments, and if they can't name them, they have to name the actors who played the
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Magnificent Seven. Brad Dexter and Horse Bacolts. Those are the two that always catch them.
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Yul Brynner's easy. James Coburn's easy. Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, they're easy.
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Brad Dexter and Horse Bacolts, they're more challenging. He takes the number of sacraments down to three, the mass, baptism, and penance.
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It's a bit odd on penance in that in the text of the Babylonian captivity, he tells us it's a sacrament, and then in the conclusion, he says it isn't a sacrament.
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He can't seem to make up his mind. Penance for Luther was one -on -one confession, and Luther actually maintained the practice throughout his entire life.
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He felt it should not be compulsory as it was in the Catholic church, but he really did feel that it was useful for, as he said, particularly tender consciences to confess sins to others and to receive words of absolution from them.
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Not necessarily a priest, just another Christian. All Christians have the keys, Luther would say. So he really saw there was an advantage that if you were really struggling with a sin or with doubts, in talking one -to -one with somebody and having them press upon you particularly relevant parts of scripture.
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So we might call it today a biblical counseling. We tend to shy away. Penance and confession sounds a bit
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Roman Catholic. But if you think of it as sort of biblical counseling, I think we'd find it sort of less offensive as an idea.
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He also writes a book entitled The Freedom of the Christian Man, in which he argues that because Christians have everything they need in Christ, therefore they're free to serve others.
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It's the logic of the cross being applied to Christian ethics. He begins this treatise with this dramatic and rather paradoxical statement.
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A Christian is a perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
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The cross, you see, turns vocabulary on its head. What does the cross do? Think about strength.
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Well, how do you think about strength? You think of the strongest and most powerful person you know. You know, perhaps the
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President of the United States, the man with his finger on the nuclear button. That's how we think about power.
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Luther says it's a big mistake if you come to God and think about God in those terms. If you want to understand
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God's power, look at the cross. See how power has been manifested and perfected through weakness.
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So if you want to know what does righteousness look like, well, who is the most perfectly righteous man who ever lived?
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The Lord Jesus Christ. Hanging on a cross. Looks like a filthy criminal.
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If you go to the cross with modern, well, with typical cultural logic, you see, he's defeated, he's crushed.
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If he isn't guilty, he's pretty unfortunate. More than likely, he's guilty of some horrendous sin.
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They didn't crucify just anybody in the Roman Empire. In actual fact, of course, he's the only righteous man who ever lived.
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Your vocabulary is turned on its head. Same applies to the language of lordship and slavery.
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For Luther, Christians are lords of all. And how do they demonstrate that lordship? By serving their brothers and sisters.
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By giving themselves to their neighbors as Christ gave himself to his neighbors. So Luther and the freedom of the
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Christian man really lays out there a basis for Christian ethics and Christian practice rooted in his new understanding of justification.
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That you are declared to be righteous. You do not work your way towards being righteous.
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And central to this, Luther sees preaching. I said last night that preaching is not just communication. Preaching for Luther and for Protestantism in general takes its cue from Old Testament prophets.
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Preaching is the means by which God is present and confronts people. How is Christ present in this church?
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Through the preaching of his word. The third treatise, and I'll spend a little bit more time on this because it's of cultural interest.
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His third treatise is his address to the German nobility.
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Luther by 1520, he'd initially hoped that the church would reform itself. Luther has no vested interest in getting rid of the
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Pope initially. He thinks that when the Pope realizes what's going on with indulgences, he'll act to clean the church up.
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He really does. By 1520, there are rumors that he's going to be excommunicated and the
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Pope isn't going to act. The Pope is going to be retrenching, if you like. So Luther's mind goes to, well, who's going to carry the
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Reformation forward? And he comes up with the idea, he said, well, one of the major problems in the
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Middle Ages is this. That the church has taken on too much worldly power and ambition.
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And therefore, he said, I need to address the nobility. The nobles need to take back the power that is rightly theirs.
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And he begins to see, he says, the world is made up of two kingdoms. There's the kingdom of the word, where the gospel is preached and the sacraments are administered.
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That's dealing with people's souls. And there's the kingdom of the world, where the Lord has established the civil magistrate to bear the sword, to protect the innocent.
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And so he writes this treatise, and really arguing that the German nobility need to take back secular power from the church.
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They need to reduce the church. And he says, at the heart of the problem with the church, he says, is the church has created this unbiblical hierarchy.
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And the church has carved itself territory by making this dramatic distinction between sacred callings and secular callings.
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That if you're a monk or a priest or a cardinal or a pope or a nun, you're engaged in something that is intrinsically more godly than everything else.
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And Luther says, no, we need to reconfigure our minds. We need to think of our callings, not in terms of what we do.
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Is it a godly calling? Is it what we do? But in terms of how we do it. What makes a calling godly,
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Luther says, is that it's done to the glory of Christ. You're employed as a street sweeper.
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Sweep the streets to the glory of Christ. This has dramatic cultural implications.
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I don't know how many of you, Dutch Golden Age painting, the 17th century. Some of the greatest artworks of the
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Western world are the Dutch Golden Age paintings. And one of the greatest of the
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Dutch Golden Age painters is a man called Vermeer, Jan Vermeer. There was a
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Vermeer display in the London, National Gallery in London. Like in Washington, it's a free gallery to get into.
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I tried to get in a few years ago. The lines went around Trafalgar Square. You go away for hours to get in to see
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Vermeer. And I didn't want to see it that badly because I don't know that much about art. So I can look the pictures up in books and get pretty much everything
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I need to know. But Vermeer has a wonderful painting of a milkmaid.
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And this is just an ordinary girl walking through an arch carrying a pail of milk. Vermeer was a
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Catholic, but he paints with a remarkable Protestant sensibility. The question is, what is so special about Vermeer's painting of the milkmaid?
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And the answer is, he's found something sacred and beautiful there that was never found by anyone in the
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Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, medieval art is what? It's sacred art. It's devoted to sacred themes.
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Later in the Middle Ages, you get the emergence of individual portraiture. There's people, you know, nobles and merchants have money they can dispose of.
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They have portraits painted of themselves so they won't be forgotten after they die. But beyond portraiture, essentially medieval painting is sacred painting.
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It's crucifixions. It's, you know, the Annunciation to the Virgin. It's saints doing cool and amazing things.
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By the time you get to the 17th century, you're starting to get paintings of what we would describe as secular scenes.
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But they're done often with a very beautiful sensibility. Well, Vermeer could not have painted the milkmaid the way he did.
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He probably wouldn't have even bothered painting the milkmaid unless he was working against the background of a culture that felt one could find something intrinsically worthwhile in the work that a milkmaid did.
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And that goes back to 1520 and to Martin Luther's scrapping of the sacred -secular divide.
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I sometimes think we see an emergence of the old Luther, the old sacred -secular divide today in the most unexpected of places.
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It always interests me the conferences you get on the Christian mind. And they're almost always run by, and I speak as a middle -class person myself, but I'm going to say this rather disparagingly.
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They always seem to be run by middle -class intellectuals for middle -class intellectuals. If you read books on the
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Christian mind, by and large they're talking about, you know, Christian approach to movies or art or music.
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Nobody talks about the Christian approach to toilet cleaning or road sweeping. Well, the question comes down, is there no
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Christian approach to these things? Of course there is. Christians do these jobs. The Christian approach is doing them with humility and to the glory of God.
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And that is something that Martin Luther, I think, lays out. I think that is a more consistently biblical view of the
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Christian mind. The only description, explicit description of the Christian mind we have in the New Testament is
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Philippians 2. Let this mind be in you. And it's all about humility and nothing to do with, you know, spotting the
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Redeemer figure in The Expendables 2 or something like that. Mike, have you seen
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The Expendables 2? I imagine I've not seen it. I imagine it's a movie with no artistic merit whatsoever.
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So, anyway, those are the three great treatises of 1520. The Papal Bull, dated 15th of June, 1520.
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Ex Sergei Domine. Papal Bulls take their name from the first word or two of the
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Latin. They're always written in Latin. Ex Sergei Domine is promulgated and proclaimed in July.
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It's dated in June, proclaimed in July. And it starts to make its way up through the empire towards Wittenberg.
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Our old friend Tetzel proclaiming it as it goes.
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September 1520 goes through Germany. Eck takes it through Germany.
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Eck doesn't go into electoral Saxony. He's too scared. Luther is just too popular by now in electoral
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Saxony. He's too scared to go into electoral Saxony. And so he gets it delivered by the
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Leipzig Militia. It arrives on the 10th of October. On the 11th of October, Luther writes to Spallatin, Frederick the
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Wise's secretary, to tell him that the Bull of Excommunication has come. Frederick the
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Wise writes back through Spallatin asking Luther to write him a pamphlet on the
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Bull so that he can understand it. Luther does this. And then in December, 60 days after the
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Bull has been delivered, the time in which the Lutherans should have responded to the
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Bull, Luther and his friend, his young assistant Melanchthon, lead a procession out into the town square.
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And they burn the papal bull and the books of canon law. It's not censorship burning.
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It's powerfully symbolic burning. It's essentially a demonstration that they no longer acknowledge the authority of the
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Roman Curia. All kinds of chaos is going on in the empire at this point relative to Rome.
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Frederick the Wise is invited in September of that year to go to Charles V's coronation in Aachen.
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And he tactfully stays away for health reasons. So Frederick the Wise makes sure there's nobody in the emperor's entourage who can grab hold of him and put pressure on him.
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Reminds me, I think it was in 1979 or 1980, General Tito dies.
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And I remember Jimmy Carter couldn't make it to the funeral. And yeah, it would be a bit bad for an American president to turn up at the funeral of a communist leader, even though this communist leader had been a sort of good guy.
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And had kept the Muscovites at bay. Frederick the Wise does what leaders have done throughout history.
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And that's made excuses not to be in places where he would find himself embarrassed.
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The papal bull's been burned. This now leaves the church with a huge problem. And the huge problem is this.
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They've done everything they can and it's made no difference. Have you ever been in one of those situations where you fired somebody, but they don't go away?
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It happens with remarkable frequency. And it raises a question, what do I do?
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The usual technique for getting rid of somebody is called firing them. I've done it and there doesn't seem to be any kind of process after that, whereby
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I can address it further. More complicated, of course, is once you've fired somebody, they sort of cease to be a person in that context.
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And therefore, you know, you can't get at them because they have no official existence. Well, that's the problem that now faces the church.
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They've done everything they can. They've excommunicated Luther. He's legally a non -person and he's still there.
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There's nothing they seem able to do to get hold of him. So, it's obvious to the emperor, though, that something's got to be done.
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Something has to be done to deal with Luther. And so, the church and the empire decide that they'll kind of pretend that Luther hasn't been excommunicated.
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And will summon him to an imperial diet in the city of Worms that is to take place in April 1521, known, of course, throughout history to dozens of schoolboys as the
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Diet of Worms. You should really pronounce it as Worms. It's more fun to say Worms, of course.
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So, Luther is to be summoned to this imperial diet to face his trial. It will be the great moment of drama in the
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Luther story. I have a beer growler in my office at Westminster. I'm not allowed to have alcohol on Westminster premises.
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It's always empty. But it's this great porcelain beer growler with a portrait of Luther standing at the
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Diet of Worms on it. It's a magnificent thing. It's in my office because I bought it on eBay. And I knew my wife would kill me if she knew
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I'd wasted money buying a beer growler with Luther on it. So, I hid it in my office. And unfortunately, when my wife was visiting the office recently,
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I'd forgotten to hide it. So, she sort of picks it up and says, Oh, this is interesting. Where did you get this from? And then I had to confess that I had bought this thing.
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Anyway, it will be the magnificent moment of drama in Luther's story.
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There is great concern into the build -up to the Diet of Worms about Luther's popular appeal. Luther is taking on massive public significance now.
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He really is becoming a hero figure. The Venetian ambassador to the court of the emperor actually advises him not to do this.
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Don't summon him to Worms. He's just too popular. And Aleander, who was the papal representative before the emperor, a man called
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Aleander, says this to the emperor in February, and I quote, All of Germany is in an utter uproar.
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Nine -tenths of the people are shouting Luther. And the other tenth, if Luther is of no consequence to them, at least have death to the
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Roman court as their slogan. But all of them have inscribed on their banners the demand for a council that is to meet in Germany.
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And it's at this point when Luther summons to Worms that we also have this amazing explosion in German pamphlets in support of Luther and posters of Luther.
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I think Luther is the first modern pin -up. I do. That's a serious comment.
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I think he is the first modern poster boy. I joke at the seminary.
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I only have two sons, so I never have to worry about this. But imagine if you have daughters. Your greatest fear is that you go into their bedroom and you find some sort of picture of a long -haired or even nowadays, sorry,
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Mike, but very short -haired rock star. That's your dread. In the 16th century, your dread would have been that your daughter sticks up a poster of this notorious heretic on her bedroom wall.
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Luther posters start to be published. And a very interesting change in Luther's own demeanor takes place at this point.
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Privately, he starts to become more moderate in his statements, in his published statements. Publicly, he's going on and on and on about how he will not recount.
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And the nearest analogy, I'm a, or was until I just lost track of which title is legitimate.
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I was a huge boxing fan at one time. Of course, one of the greater boxing fights of all time is the fight in Kinshasa between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.
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George Foreman is now this, he's everybody's granddad. He advertises Meineke tires.
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And he's a sort of pep talk self -help guru. And he went back into the ring as an older guy to get money for his church youth club.
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And he advertises grills. He's a really lovely fellow. But in the early 70s, he was the Mike Tyson of his day.
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He was the killer thug. If you see the video of him fighting
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Joe Frazier, he lifts Joe Frazier off the ground. I met Joe Frazier when I went to Philadelphia. I bumped into Joe Frazier at a
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YMCA. It's about my height, but he's a big guy. He shook my hand and his fingers are the width of two of mine.
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Massive coal shovels of hands. Yeah, this is completely irrelevant, but I love telling the story. He asked me if I got my two little boys with me.
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And I'd always wonder, you know, what do you say to Joe Frazier when you meet him? And the answer is you call him Mr. Frazier, sir.
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And he says to me, do your two boys ever give you any grief? And I say, oh, sometimes, Mr. Frazier, sir.
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And he says, well, do this to them. And he grabs hold of my arm and he wrenches it like that. And I get like this bruise the size of a thumb on my arm.
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And I'm so proud of this bruise. Everywhere I go for the next couple of weeks, I'm rolling up my sleeves saying, look what
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Joe Frazier did to me at the YMCA. I phone my dad up and I say, you know, hey dad, what have Karl Truman and Muhammad Ali got in common?
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We've both been bruised by Joe Frazier. And anyway,
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Foreman's this terrifying figure. Well, if you know anything about the build up to the fight in Zaire, you know, it's when
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Muhammad Ali's trash talk really takes off. And Norman Mailer, the writer, was a journalist at the fight.
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And he said that each day he'd walk in with Ali and they'd go past where Foreman was training.
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And Foreman would be pounding the heavy bag. I don't know if you ever hit a heavy bag, but it's difficult to make a dent on a heavy bag.
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He said Foreman would hit the heavy bag and he would leave a hole in the heavy bag the size of half a melon. So this guy, he could punch so powerfully that he could punch you in the stomach and break your back.
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And Mailer said it was interesting that for all the trash talk that Ali was engaged in, he never looked at Foreman as he walked through the gym.
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He clearly didn't want to see what was coming his way. And at the end of round one of the fight,
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Mailer is down ringside by Ali's corner. And he says, when
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Ali came back at the end of round one, I looked up into his eyes and I saw something I'd never seen there before.
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He was frightened. I could tell he was frightened that he'd hit this guy as hard as he could in round one and it had made absolutely no difference whatsoever.
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I think there's a similar psychology as Luther's going to the Diet of Worms. We get this incredible trash talk with this nuancing in private going on.
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Luther's frightened at this point. I think he's genuinely frightened. His life is really on the line as he goes to the
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Diet of Worms. If he's taken into custody there, he's a dead man. And I think he's frightened about it.
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So Luther arrives in April the 16th. On April the 16th, he's immediately sought out by the great and the good for advice.
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A man called, who will play a role in Luther's story, Landgrave Philip of Hesse is a young man having marital problems.
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He asks if he can divorce his wife and Luther tells him no. Philip will continue to have marital problems and eventually
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Luther will give him the contentious advice, this is some years later, just marry a second wife.
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But don't tell anybody about it. Three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead.
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That's too good a secret to keep. Word gets out that Luther's given this advice and it's one of the real sort of black marks against him in his later life.
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But he's being sought out by the great and the good for advice on all kinds of things. The hearing, the hearing takes place.
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Luther is brought out and if you can imagine the room, the room would probably have been a similar size to this one maybe.
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And at the front of the room on a great throne would have sat the young emperor. And then in the room would have been all of the princes and the great and the good of the empire.
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You've got a man here until four years ago was an unknown academic in a very minor university in Europe.
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Now he's in the context of facing the most powerful men in Europe. Men who could have him taken outside and burned at the stake as they'd done just over a hundred years previously with the figure of John Eck.
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Luther comes before them. At the front there is a table laid out in front of the emperor. On the table are all of Luther's books.
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And then Luther is asked a question to which he gives an answer that is one of the great mysteries of the
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Reformation. Luther is asked by a man called John Eck but not, you know, there are two
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John Ecks in the Luther story. It's a different John Eck. He's asked if these are his books and if he will stand by their content.
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That is not a question out of left field. That is the obvious question. Luther must know that this question is coming.
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Luther answers first in German and then in Latin. He's making a point. This is a German issue first and a
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European issue second. Latin is the lingua franca of Europe, if you like, the intelligentsia of Europe.
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But Luther speaks first to the Germans and then to the wider European context.
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Luther says, I'm very inexperienced. My manners are not those of a courtier.
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And then he says, and I need time to consider my answer to your question. Nobody has ever known why
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Luther gives that answer because he must have known that question was coming. Was it part of some grand electoral
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Saxony strategy to wrong foot the opposition? Was that the idea, to throw them off balance?
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We just don't know. More than likely, I think, the sheer overwhelming nature of the situation got to Luther.
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And he realized, my life's at stake here. I wouldn't mind another day to think about how I answer this question.
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So Luther is led away. He returns the following day, Thursday, the 18th of April.
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And the question is then repeated to him. Are these your books?
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Do you stand by their content? And Luther gives a threefold answer. He says, well, some of my writings deal with piety and morals.
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Even my opponents have liked those. Secondly, some of my writings are against the papacy. The papacy has destroyed and tortured so many souls that I couldn't possibly retract those.
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And then he does a very clever move. And he says, oh, and by the way, one of the reasons that the diet of worms has been summonsed is, we all know the papacy is corrupt and you're trying to reform it.
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So it would be bad of you to prosecute me for doing something that your own status of existence here itself speaks to.
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And thirdly, he says, I've written against individuals who defended the Roman tyranny. I stand by those, though sometimes
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I've been a bit over the top in my criticism of others. I'm not endangering the unity of the church.
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I'm trying to save the church. Eck responds, will you recant? And then
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Luther gives his famous speech. Unless I'm convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the
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Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves.
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I am bound by scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of God.
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I cannot and I will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.
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May God help me, amen. And later versions have, of course, him saying, here I stand,
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I can do no other. The whole place descends into chaos at this point. The Spanish delegates cry out for him to be taken outside and immediately burned.
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The emperor expresses his regret that he'd not had Luther seized at an earlier date.
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But Luther gets away safely. Again, something unusual and unexpected happens at this point.
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That night, posters appear around the town of Worms. Posters that have a simple peasant's shoe painted on them.
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A peasant's shoe, that doesn't sound particularly sinister to us. That is the symbol of a group called the
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Bundschuh. The Bundschuh were what we would now call a peasant terrorist organization.
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And a signal is being sent that representatives of this organization have infiltrated the empire at the highest levels and they're present in Worms.
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And so the Diet of Worms ends with a whimper rather than a bang as the men head away.
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Luther leaves Worms and is riding back to Wittenberg.
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And then something very, very strange happens. Luther finds himself surrounded by a group of masked men and kidnapped.
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The masked men are actually men hired or men of the household of Frederick the
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Wise. Frederick the Wise, imperial protector, has arranged to have him kidnapped.
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And he is whisked away to a castle, the Wartburg Castle, which stands high on a mountaintop above the
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German town of Eisenach. If you ever get a chance to do a Reformation tour, Eisenach's a great place to go.
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Not only do you have this magnificent medieval German castle where Luther was kept prisoner, well, not kept prisoner, but was kept in protective custody.
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Eisenach was also the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach. So you have down in the town, you've got all this great
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Bach stuff, and up on the mountain, you've got all the great Luther stuff. It really is a two -for -one deal when you go to Eisenach.
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Luther will spend the next year, year and a half in the
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Wartburg where he will begin his major project of translating the
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Bible into German. You can still visit the little study there where he worked on, turning with the
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New Testament, really, he was getting to this point in time, worked on translating the
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New Testament into German. Vernacular scripture was going to be very important. Now, you have to remember, of course, that in the empire at this time, literacy rates were very low, probably less than 5%.
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So most people would hear Protestantism with their ears. It depended upon people speaking.
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How did people learn the Bible? They learned the Bible by hearing people read it in church. There was a very corporate aspect to the
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Reformation. You couldn't really have had a quiet time in the 16th century. Quiet time is a pretty modern invention in many ways because you've got to have cheap prints, you've got to be able to read, and you've got to have private space to go to.
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Most Christians throughout most history didn't have those three things. If you were going to learn your
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Bible in the 16th century, you needed somebody to read it to you. By and large, that would be the minister. Or maybe there'd be somebody in your household who could read.
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You'd gather together and you'd hear the Bible read. But you needed the Bible in German. There were earlier German translations, but they were based upon the
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Latin Vulgate, the Mantel translation of 1466, based upon the
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Vulgate. What Luther does, of course, is he's building his translation on the Greek and the
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Hebrew. And there are certain key differences, there are certain things lost in translation in the Latin that are vital in the
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Reformation, particularly the translation of Dikaio, the Greek word for I declare righteous.
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It's translated as justifico in Latin, which means I make righteous. And that's quite a difference.
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There are connotations in the one that you don't find in the other. There are also some great stories of Luther during his time in the
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Wartburg. He would go, he grew a beard. He was known as Sir George.
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He grew a beard and he dressed like a knight. And he would carry the knight's sword. And he would go incognito down into the town and into Germany and travel around to find out what was going on.
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And there's a great story of two young men who are on their way to study in Wittenberg in late 1521.
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And they arrive at a tavern. And they're sitting in the tavern, eating and drinking.
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And they look and over in the corner, they see a very tough -looking knight with his sword.
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And he's reading a book. And they notice that the book is the Psalms in Hebrew.
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And this is unusual. Knights, generally speaking, not Hebrew scholars. So they go over and strike up a conversation with him because they're on their way to Wittenberg to train for the ministry.
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And the knight, not only is he reading in Hebrew, but he starts to open up the Psalms to them and show them how
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Christ is present in the Psalms. So he's a very theologically astute knight. And after he leaves, they get up to leave and he's gone.
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And they find that he's paid their tab. He's covered their bill for them. And off they go into the night.
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And then some months later, their students in Wittenberg, in Luther by this point, has returned from the Wartburg.
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And they're in the lecture, waiting for their first lecture with the great Dr. Martin. And who should walk in but the knight?
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He's clean -shaven now. But they recognize him as this man that they met in the tavern.
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I mean, that's a great story and shows, you know, Luther lived a life really quite exciting.
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So anyway, he's in the Wartburg. And the leadership of the Wittenberg Reformation passes to a man called
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Karlstadt. Karlstadt's friend, a man called Zwilling. And Luther's young acolyte,
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Philip Melanchthon. Reformation proceeds apace. The clergy start to marry.
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We'll come to Luther's own marriage in the third lecture. And then they start to smash images.
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And this is where it starts to get difficult. Iconoclastic riots start in Wittenberg. This is dangerous territory.
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It's dangerous because Frederick the Wise is very happy to allow the Reformation to proceed, as long as it's going peacefully.
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And the emperor, the emperor's always going to make, one of the questions I get at Westminster every year is, why doesn't the emperor just invade and crush
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Frederick and get rid of Luther? Well, the answer is, of course, that war is always more complicated than that.
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War takes time, money, and manpower. You don't just go to war at your first opportunity because you can.
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You've got to calculate, you know, it's what we call in rugby a percentage gain. You know, the percentage loss versus percentage gain.
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You've got to decide, is it worth it? Well, as long as the Reformation is peaceful and relatively localized, it's really not worth declaring civil war within the empire.
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As we will discover, as they discover in decades to come, when that happens, it's bloody and horrible and nobody really wins.
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But if social unrest starts to surface and the political order starts to get destabilized, the prince, the emperor will have no choice, if the elector will not do it, but to act in a way that crushes the social unrest.
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So Luther returns late 1521 to see what's going on in Wittenberg and he's very, very disturbed by the violence and the iconoclasm.
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And so he's recalled in early 1522, in 1522, to bring to an end this radicalizing of the
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Reformation. Now, when Luther returns to Wittenberg in 1522, I think this is the moment when his life is in greatest danger.
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Because we like the dramatic Hollywood moment, we think of the Diet of Worms, that's the moment.
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One man against the world, that's the moment when he's most in danger. In fact, in retrospect, he was probably always pretty safe because the emperor would not have wanted civil war at that point.
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1522, he goes back to Wittenberg and he's entirely alone at this point. His allies are the ones engaged in all of this rioting.
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All he has is sheer force of personality to bring peace and stability to Wittenberg.
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And if he can't do it, the prince will have no choice but to get rid of him. Amazingly enough,
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Luther does it by sheer force of personality. By his preaching and by his presence, he brings peace to Wittenberg and Karstadt and Zwilling have to leave the city.
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Melanchthon was always more moderate. Melanchthon remains part of the Lutheran Reformation.
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A couple of comments on that. One, I think it indicates to us what a magnetic person he must have been.
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Luther was a powerful figure and when
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Luther set trajectories, that's how it went. Luther was, he may have been a small man, but he was a dominant and powerful figure.
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One of the things I love about Luther is when you read his sermons, or particularly if you've never read any Luther, get hold of a book of his.
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You probably get it free online somewhere. Luther's Table Talk. Luther, we'll talk about his marriage in the last lecture, but when
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Luther married, he and his wife, to help with family finances, would have students to lodge with them.
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And it became a great practice for Luther to have a table full of students.
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And they'd get the beer out and they would drink beer and they would talk. Of course, I imagine being at table with Luther was essentially you sat and you listened to Luther telling lots of funny stories.
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And his followers would write some of these down and recorded them. So the Table Talk is this often hilarious,
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Luther off -the -record briefing on the great issues of the day. And you read those and you get some idea of Luther's wit, which could sometimes be cruel.
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His great enemy, Erasmus. When Erasmus dies in 1536, the news arrives in Wittenberg and Luther's comment is,
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Erasmus had produced a good text, Greek text of the New Testament.
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And Luther's comment is, oh, what a shame that he produced the Greek New Testament. What a shame he didn't die straight after that and then he wouldn't have done so much damage.
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When Zwingli's death, Zwingli dies on the battlefield of Kepel in 1531, news arrives,
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Luther's table, another of his enemies has died. And Luther's comment is, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.
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I often think that Luther is comparable to the late Gore Vidal on this level and this level alone.
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Vidal was sort of the master of the one, the catty one -liner. I love that statement that Vidal made.
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What was it? Every time I hear of the success of a friend, a little piece of me dies.
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Isn't that so true though that we don't like to admit it? Isn't that true? There's that little bit, oh, I wish it was me. Or it is not enough to succeed.
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Others must fail. I thought it was a great one as well. Luther was like that.
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Luther could be cruel. He could be funny. He was a man of extremes. He talks about everything.
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One of his love letters to his wife, who was a great home brewer. Luther suffered terribly from constipation, particularly brought on by his sedentary life in the
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Wartburg. And he writes this love letter to his wife in which he includes a passage about how he needs her to brew a particular brand of beer because last time she did it, he had,
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I think, three or four bowel movements before breakfast, he said. And my wife would not appreciate,
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I don't think. She'd be surprised if I wrote her a love letter. She would be very surprised if I mentioned bowel movements in such a letter.
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So, Luther, a powerful, powerful personality then. That brings us,
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I think, more or less to the conclusion of this particular lecture. In the third lecture, I want to round off Luther's life and talk, give some of the anecdotes of his personal life, bring out some of his humanity in sharper focus for you.