The Diet Of Worms
I realized I haven’t posted in over a week. There’s good reason. We are currently on a three week vacation across Central Europe, and a lot time has gone into simply seeing the sights and soaking it all in.
I have posted quite a bit on Facebook including photos and narrative of the journey. If we aren’t yet connected on that platform, you can find me at https://www.facebook.com/schnekloth
A few days ago we made a visit to Worms, Germany. Worms is one of those historical locations so ripe with historical fecundity as to warrant all the superlatives. I do not say this only as a Lutheran pastor, for whom the significant moments in the history of the founding of the Lutheran movement function as pilgrimage sites.
No, I say this as a human being living in whatever it is we think the “West” is… culturally, historically.
The Diet of Worms is just that significant.
However, although I had made my way around on previous visits to Germany to many of the historical sites significant in the life of Luther and of the Reformation (Wittenberg, Eisenach, Eisleben, Augsburg, Wartburg, etc.), I had never yet made it down to this tremendously beautiful portion of Germany that extends along and around the Neckar.
When you arrive in Worms, you discover it has stewarded its history and the narrative of the Diet tremendously well while also moving in various ways into the kind of modern life common around much of Germany. It’s a very diverse town, and the historical consideration of Luther and the Reformation is integrated in natural ways into the urban life of the city.
When we arrived at the Reformation monument, significantly there was a climbing wall set up out front of it because on this particular Saturday, the entire downtown was populated by a youth sports expo event.
As we made our way around town, the local and very popular Italian ice cream shop situated literally right in front of the church built on the location of the Diet (and Luther’s famous words spoken there) sells, quite unostentatiously, a Luther ice cream.
As we made our walk about the city, I kept thinking to myself: how do I, as a Lutheran pastor today, think about a visit to Worms? I’ve long since moved beyond the kind of triumphalist sensibilities of my earlier passion for Lutheranism. Which is to say, I no longer think Luther’s stand there in front of the Emperor Charles the Vth was an unmitigated triumph.
And I’m aware, as even the interpretive signs point out, that the famous line now ascribed to Luther in that moment, “Here I stand, I can do no other…” was, in fact, not spoken by Luther at all and only ascribed to him later.
But, in historical perspective, we are all forced to reckon with the reality as described in a simple sign along the “Luther way” that this is THE moment that signifies the transition from the Medieval to the modern era. This is true not only in the theological sense, inasmuch as a separate Christian tradition we can largely call Protestant emerged from the moment (and it really did), but also philosophically, with an individual with “big shoes” standing up for his beliefs over against the demands of tradition and institutional forces.
For better or worse, Luther was a rock star of the era, Europe’s first best-selling author and mass-media celebrity. When he arrived at Worms for the Diet, 14,000 people arrived to witness the event. At the time, Worms had a population of about 7000.
To put the popularity of Luther in perspective, keep in mind just one statistic: in 1522, for example, Luther’s publications accounted for a total of 20% of ALL published works in the region. One of his most famous works, The Freedom of a Christian, went through an astounding sixteen printings in one year (1520, the year prior to th eDiet).
So even if I have overcome in my own piety some of the wide-eyed wonder I once bumbled about with as a young Lutheran pastor visiting the pilgrimage sites of the Reformation1, nevertheless I now can enter a city like Worms and still wonder as I walk along the streets how a single moment such as that Diet can consolidate so much of the force of history and turn it in new directions.
I especially appreciated the signs out front of the Holy Trinity Church for the simple ways they commemorated significant theological commitments of Luther and the Reformation. First, the sign out front of the church sets out (in German of course) the dialectic articulated in The Freedom of A Christian, that …
““A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.”
Further up the street, if one comes down the hill from the cathedral, you also encounter the three “Solas” of the Reformation. Alone through faith, alone by grace, alone in Christ.
It’s fair to say these are the simply articulated characteristics of the Reformation moment, and when stated in this fashion, without the strange triumphalism of Protestantism for much of the last 500 years, they stand as taut description rather than cheer.
I’m honestly still trying to sort out what it means to have finally completed the “Luther tour.” Like any trip, there is a sense of completion and discovery coupled with mildly depleting sense of “now what.” A sense that yes, Luther was a “great man of history” but also “I’m not a fan of the great man of history narrative.” A sense that yes, I love many of the freedoms and clarities that emerged from the Reformation moment but also do we need to recognize that some parts of late stage capitalism are a direct outcome of those very freedoms and clarities?
The graffiti on the “Allein durch glauben” pillar reads “ohne Tauben,” which in German means “without pigeons.” I’m not entirely sure that’s slang I’m not familiar with, an inside joke, or something else entirely, but somehow it’s lurking presence just below (on, marring?) such a serious and significant series of pillars radiates its own modernist absurdity.
Through faith, by grace, in Christ… without pigeons. That’s entirely on point somehow.
Thus concludes our mini-tour of Worms and its Diet.
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. (Prelude, Canterbury Tales)