In the shadow of Execrabilis.

Luther’s defiance and the dawn of the Reformation movement.

Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

At the heart of the Reformation movement of the mid- to late-1500s lay a resilience to recover the biblical doctrine of salvation, the prime mover of which was the triune God. This attitude was met with more than a little consternation in the wake of the reformers’ dissent from papal ascendancy. Accordingly, an indispensable component of the Protestant campaign was the reorientation of doctrinal authority away from an ecclesiastical institution and back to God’s inspired Scriptures. Precipitating Wittenburg’s firestorm was a centuries-old skirmish between the magisterial dogma of the popes and the authoritative voices of the councils. As the Medieval Ages wore on, so, too, did the efforts of each camp to vie for ultimate authority in and for the church. In that way, then, the conflict between the conciliarists, who upheld the decisions of the councils as authoritative, and the curialists, who prized the dictates of the pope above all else, is traceable throughout the Reformation era, most notably through the efforts of Martin Luther.

Luther’s distinctly Augustinian vantage point put him in a unique position to dissect this conflict, especially as his spiritual moors were thoroughly transformed by the biblical gospel. What began as an attempt to discern the apparent discrepancies between the exegetical distinctives of his monastery and his burgeoning scriptural understanding soon surged into a public confrontation between Luther and all of Rome, as the friar-turned-reformer refused to relax his grip on the authority of Scripture alone. Augmenting the hostility between Luther and the Roman Church was the latter’s unequivocal effort to supplant the word of God as the definitive voice of faith and practice for the church and in its place elevate the pope. In 1460, the pre-Reformation generation witnessed curialism’s arrival at its logical terminus, as Pope Pius II issued Execrabilis, a papal bull that effectively made questioning papal authority theological suicide. Therefore, anyone who challenged or “sidelined the pope for the sake of a council,” notes Matthew Barrett, “would be excommunicated” (190).

As Luther’s conscience became increasingly captivated by Scripture, Rome’s curialism would find itself in Luther’s crosshairs, as he continued to challenge Rome’s papal prerogative. Through a series of debates from 1518 to 1519, Luther went toe-to-toe with the likes of Sylvester Prierias, Thomas Cajetan, and Johann Eck, among others, with each occasion serving to acuminate Luther’s claim of Scriptural precedence above papal authority. The maturation of Luther’s biblical stubbornness, therefore, coheres with his refusal to concede the premise that Scripture awaits exegetical confirmation and clarification from the papacy. “Therefore it is a wickedly invented fable,” Luther would later write in his 1520 treatise An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility, “and they cannot produce a letter in defence of it, that the interpretation of Scripture or the confirmation of its interpretation belongs to the pope alone” (2.75). Consequently, at the climactic Diet of Worms in 1521, with his excommunication from the Roman church already certain, Luther was confronted with the alternatives of capitulation or execution. Yet, even then, the soul of that German reformer refused to quake under the menace of the papacy and instead was steeled by God’s indefatigable word, forever altering the course of church history.

Works cited:

Matthew Barrett, “The Church,” Historical Theology for the Church, edited by Jason G. Duesing and Nathan A. Finn (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2021).

Martin Luther, Works: The Philadelphia Edition, Vols. 1–6 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1932).