The Diets of Speyer
ive letters were braided on the right
sleeves of the evangelical princes’ men when they came to Speyer in the summer of 1526:
V.D.M.I.Æ. They stood for Verbum Domini manet in aeternum, “The word of the Lord
endureth for ever.” The same words hung on the princes’ coats of arms over the doors of
their lodgings. “The Word of God,” wrote Merle d’Aubigné, “such from
this moment was the palladium of the Reform.”1
Speyer was an old imperial city on the Rhine, with a great cathedral where emperors of Germany lay buried.2 Twice in three years the princes of the empire met there to settle what was to be done with Luther and his followers. The first diet gave the Reformation room to breathe. The second tried to take that room away, and in resisting it the evangelical princes received a name. Timothy George traces the road “from the Diet of Worms in 1521 (‘Here I stand’) to the Diet of Speyer (where the term protestant was coined) in 1529.”3
The Word Endures (1526)
Five years earlier, the Edict of Worms had made Luther an outlaw and ordered his books destroyed. But Charles V had been kept from enforcing it by war with France, and the diet that opened at Speyer on June 25, 1526, was meant to finish the work. The emperor’s instructions, sent from Seville, ordered that the old church customs be kept entire and that those who refused to carry out the edict be punished. His brother Ferdinand presided in his place.4
The evangelical princes did not come as guilty men. When the bishop of Speyer refused them a church, their preachers took to the inns. Roland Bainton describes how, “being denied the pulpits, [they] stood upon balconies of the inns and addressed throngs of four thousand.”5 On the feast days, while Ferdinand and the bishops celebrated the old rites in the cathedral, “the unadorned Word of God, preached in the Protestant vestibules, engrossed the hearers, and the Mass was celebrated in an empty church.”6
To Answer to God
Then the world shifted under the emperor’s feet. Pope Clement VII joined France in the so-called Holy League against him, and the Turks were advancing from the east. Charles could not fight the pope and the Lutherans at once. “Let us suspend the Edict of Worms,” he wrote to his brother; “let us bring back Luther’s partisans by mildness.”7
The recess of the diet, issued on August 27, 1526, put off the whole question until a general or national council could meet. Until then, each state should, in all matters touching the Edict of Worms, “so live, rule, and bear itself as it thought it could answer it to God and the Emperor.”8 Bainton notes that “this was practically a recognition of the territorial principle.”9 For three years the evangelical lands were free to organize their churches, visit their parishes, and teach their people. D’Aubigné judged the moment rightly: “In this single step there is a complete victory: the cause of the Reform is won.”
Few saw it at the time. Luther wrote the day after the recess was published: “The diet is sitting at Spire in the German fashion. They drink and gamble, and there is nothing done except that.”10 God was at work beneath the frivolity.
The Wind Turns (1529)
By 1529 the emperor’s quarrel with the pope was being mended, and his hands were freer. On November 30, 1528, he summoned a new diet to Speyer so that decisive measures might be taken “to secure the unity and sole supremacy of the Catholic Church.”11 Ferdinand again presided. The Roman party came in greater numbers and stronger than ever, and the evangelical princes were now forbidden to have the gospel preached in their lodgings. Melanchthon, who had come with Elector John of Saxony, wrote: “We are the execration and the sweepings of the world; but Christ will look down on his poor people, and will preserve them.”12
On March 15 the imperial commissioners announced that the emperor had annulled the recess of 1526 by his own authority. Johann Fabri, one of the bitterest enemies of the Reformation, sat on the committee that framed the new decree. D’Aubigné records his boast: “If we must choose between the Holy Scriptures of God and the old errors of the Church, we should reject the former.”13
The decree that passed on April 7 kept the Edict of Worms in force wherever it had been enforced. Where the Reformation had already taken hold, there was to be no further reform, no hindrance to the Mass, and no protection for any Catholic who wished to embrace the gospel. Bainton calls it an “invidious arrangement”: Catholics were to have liberty in Lutheran lands, but Lutherans none in Catholic lands.14 The Reformation could survive where it was, but it could not grow.
“In matters of conscience the majority has no power,” the evangelical princes answered. When they withdrew to confer, Ferdinand rose and left the hall. “It is a settled affair,” he told their messengers; “submission is all that remains.”15
The Protestation
On April 19, 1529, the Elector of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Prince of Anhalt, and the dukes of Lüneburg returned to the hall and read their answer. At the last sitting of the diet, fourteen free cities joined them. They argued that what the whole diet had agreed in 1526 could not be undone by a majority. And, as Köstlin records, they declared “that, even apart from that, in matters relating to the honour of God and the salvation of our souls, every man must stand alone before God and give account for himself.”16
The heart of the Protestation was not politics, but the Word. The new decree ordered preachers to expound the gospel according to the writings accepted by the holy Christian church. The princes answered that one must first agree on what that church is, and that there is no sure doctrine but what agrees with the Word of God:
We are resolved, with the grace of God, to maintain the pure and exclusive preaching of his only Word, such as it is contained in the biblical books of the Old and New Testament, without adding anything thereto that may be contrary to it. This Word is the only truth; it is the sure rule of all doctrine and of all life, and can never fail or deceive us. The Evangelical PrincesSpeyer, April 19, 152917
From that act came the name Protestant. It is often mistaken for a word of mere negation, but the princes meant something far more positive. To protest was to bear witness. In Bainton’s summary, they declared that “they must protest and testify publicly before God that they could consent to nothing contrary to his Word.”18 D’Aubigné saw in it the essence of the whole Reformation: “Protestantism sets up above the magistrate the power of conscience; and above the visible Church the authority of the Word of God.... In presence of the crown of Charles the Fifth, it uplifts the crown of Jesus Christ.”19 Their conscience was not free, but captive to the Word.
A Small Room in St. John’s Lane
Ferdinand would not even keep the document. When the evangelical deputies brought it to him the next day, he tried to hand it back; they laid it on a table and left the room. On Sunday, April 25, the princes’ chancellors met with two notaries in the ground-floor room of a humble deacon named Peter Muterstatt, near the Church of St. John, to give the protest legal form. Their appeal was made “for ourselves, for our subjects, and for all who receive or who shall hereafter receive the Word of God,” to the emperor and to a free general council of Christendom.20
The next morning the princes left Speyer. Melanchthon returned to Wittenberg exhausted and anxious. “It is a great event that has just taken place at Spire,” he said. “It is big with dangers, not only to the Empire, but also to Religion itself.”21 Within the year, the evangelicals would stand before the emperor himself at Augsburg.
A Shadow over Speyer
Honesty requires one more word. The same diet of 1529 revived the ancient Code of Justinian, which prescribed death for rebaptism, and turned it against the Anabaptists throughout the empire.22 The Protestation objected to the decree’s treatment of the Sacramentarians, who had not been heard, but it said nothing for the Anabaptists. Bainton notes that the decree of death was passed “with the concurrence of the Evangelicals,”23 and that “Luther made no comment.”24 The men who claimed for themselves the right to answer to God alone did not yet extend that right to others. Their courage was real, and so was their blind spot.
Speyer Again (1544)
The princes met at Speyer once more in 1544. Charles was again at war with France and needed the help of the Protestant princes, who granted it only on terms. Joseph Stump writes that they consented “but only on condition that they received a guarantee of permanent peace and equal rights with the Roman Catholics. The emperor had no choice but to yield.”25
For that diet, at Martin Bucer’s request, John Calvin wrote The Necessity of Reforming the Church, a supplication “to the most invincible Caesar, Charles V, the most illustrious princes, and other ranking officials, now holding an assembly of the empire at Speyer.” The emperor and his party paid it no attention, but its closing words still ring with the spirit of 1529:
But whatever the outcome may be, we will never regret that we began and advanced this far. The Holy Spirit in us is a faithful and certain witness of our doctrine. We know that what we preach is the eternal truth of God. John CalvinThe Necessity of Reforming the Church, 154426
Stewards of the Protest
The name Protestant has grown tired in our day. It is worn by many who protest nothing and confess less. At Speyer it meant a public confession, made at real risk, that the Word of God stands above every decree of man, and that Christ, not the majority, is Lord of the conscience. The princes did not claim the right to believe whatever they pleased. They claimed the duty to believe what God has spoken, and to see it preached to their people and to all who would hereafter receive it.
That is our inheritance. The letters on the sleeves at Speyer are still true. Emperors and diets have passed away. “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8).
soli Deo gloria