Martin Luther's Diet Of Worms Research Paper

On April 18,1521, Martin Luther was sent to appear at the Diet of Worms in front of The Holy Roman Empire. Luther was sent to Worms to be incriminated of being a heretic, because he had written about the Church in a negative way. He also posted, “The 95 Theses,” to the doors of the Wittenberg church. This action infuriated Pope Leo the X, and other Church officials, to the point they ordered Luther to appear before the Diet of Worms. As a result of the private conference in Worms, Luther condemned himself a heretic because he didn’t take back what he had wrote about the Church, his literature was banned, he was excommunicated by the Church, and on top of all this it was made legal for anyone to kill Martin Luther and not suffer any legal consequence.

As far as inciting social unrest, when Luther posted “The 95 Theses” to the church door, he didn’t do it with a polite intent. When he posted it, he wanted to make multiple points of how corrupt the church was. He did it to stir up trouble, and make peasants think the Church was using them for their money. “They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.” To elaborate, this was number twenty-seven from “The 95 Theses,” where Luther was going against the Church saying how they only preach human doctrines which goes against the bible, where churches are suppose to teach with their lips. The last accusation was when Luther caused a political rebellion, an example would be the peasant revolt. In class, we talked about how peasants were fed up with how they ended up with the short end of the stick so they rebelled against Princes and Kings. The peasants may have gotten the extra courage they needed to fight back because of Martin Luther. They saw how things worked out for Luther, and then took it upon themselves to stand up for themselves. “... God may inspire some one with His Spirit to lend this suffering nation a hand…” Therefore, peasants could’ve gotten the initiative to go against the Princes and Kings just by reading some of the books by

In “The 95 Theses,” the many focus of most of the theses was to warn people about how indulgences were a scam. Number eighty-one, “This unbridled preaching of indulgences makes it difficult for learned men to guard therespect due to the pope against false accusations, or at least from the keen criticisms of the laity.” Basically, saying how since the Pope is just handing out these fake indulgences, how can people know when to trust him? Even if Martin Luther was looking out for his fellow peasants, it still goes against the ruling of promoting religious heresy against the Church. In this case, it doesn’t matter the motive, it matters if Luther committed the crime, which he had. Overall, it is not about the intentions of the crime, it is about if you committed the crime or