The bull that burned
Leo X excommunicates Luther
Pope Leo X issues the bull Exsurge Domine — Arise, O Lord — on June 15, 1520. It identifies forty-one errors in Luther's writings and gives him sixty days to recant or face excommunication.
The bull's opening is self-revealing: Arise, O Lord, plead your cause. A wild boar has invaded your vineyard.
Luther is the wild boar. Leo is asking God to deal with the animal that is destroying the church.
The bull is posted in Germany. Luther's response is to write three treatises in 1520 that together constitute the most complete articulation of the Reformation program yet produced: Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian.
In the first he calls on the German princes to reform the church since the clergy will not. In the second he attacks the entire sacramental system of medieval Catholicism as a Babylonian captivity of the gospel. In the third — the most personal and the most lasting — he articulates the paradox of Christian freedom: the Christian is perfectly free, subject to none; the Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all.
By December, sixty days have passed. Luther has not recanted.
On December 10, 1520, before the Elster Gate in Wittenberg, Luther burns the bull. He burns the books of canon law alongside it. He burns the works of his opponents.
And then he goes inside.
“Since you have corrupted the truth of God, may God corrupt you. Fire for fire. This day begins.”
— Martin Luther, at the burning of the papal bull, December 10, 1520 AD
“It happened, when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, that the king cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier.”
Luther burned the papal bull in public, outside the city gate, in full view of students and colleagues.
This was not an impulsive act. It was a deliberate, irreversible, public declaration: I am not recanting. The institution's authority to condemn me is exactly what is in question. I will not submit to a condemnation whose authority I reject.
The burning is not defiance for its own sake. It is the logical consequence of the Leipzig position — if councils and popes can err, then a condemnation by a pope and council is not necessarily correct. Luther is acting on his stated conviction.
Conviction that stays only in words is not yet conviction. The moment it costs something — the moment you have to burn the thing rather than sign it — is the moment you find out whether you actually believe what you said you believed.
What conviction do you hold that you have not yet been required to act on? And do you know whether you will act on it when the moment comes?