"Every one must stand and give account before God for himself; and no one can excuse himself by the action or decision of another, whether less or more.”
Sitting on a bookshelf in my parents’ house is a yearbook from my senior year of high school. Several of us graduating that year were asked to provide words of wisdom to those who would remain behind. Upon reviewing this yearbook recently, I was amused to discover that my own advice was, “If you don’t like something, protest it.”
I would certainly offer different advice to today’s graduating seniors—and I do, unsolicited, at every open house I attend—but the words that escaped my seventeen-year-old mouth were thoroughly in keeping with my American upbringing. The desire to protest is hard-wired in those of us raised in the fifty states. While we have not quite made it a national pastime like the French, our confidence in the right to free speech, our need to assert our consumer privileges, and our emphasis on individual expression all contribute to our tendency to object to anything and everything.
Yet protest did not begin on July 4, 1776. Human beings have always found ways of making their displeasure known. An entire branch of Christianity is nominally defined by its history of opposition: Protestantism. But why must we be called Protestants, a term that makes it sound like we are having a hissy fit, while the titles Catholic and Orthodox point to universality and doctrinal fidelity? Is this simply a case of an insulting name getting lodged in the public consciousness to such an extent that it must be embraced, e.g. “Puritan”?
No, this descriptor did not begin as an insult, nor was it the original term used to refer to those in Western Christendom who broke away from Rome. For the first decade and more after Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses were published, the word “Evangelical” was the most common differentiator.
To find the origin of the term Protestant, we must look at an event which occurred in the spring of 1529 and ended on April 19 of that year. It was the tradition within the Holy Roman Empire for the emperor to convene regular diets (gatherings of official representatives from his territories) in what were known as imperial free cities: municipalities that were essentially self-governing, answering only to the emperor himself. The diet of 1521 was famously held in the imperial free city of Worms. In 1529, the city of Speyer, made great by the old dynasty of Salian emperors, was selected to host the gathering.
Diets handled a wide variety of business over multiple weeks, and at this period in history, religious questions were often near the top of the agenda. But in 1529, the first priority was the defensive effort against invasions by the Ottoman Turks, who later that year would push all the way to the gates of Vienna. The emperor also had to watch his opposite border, where the French presented a similar threat. Therefore, in 1529 as in the previous diet of 1526, Emperor Charles V was not in attendance, choosing instead to focus on military matters. He sent his brother Ferdinand, archduke of Austria, in his place.
At the 1521 diet—the one at which Martin Luther appeared and refused to recant his teachings—the Edict of Worms was issued, outlawing Luther and his allegedly heretical views. However, it was up to individual princes to carry out this edict in their territories, and two electors of Saxony in turn declined to move against Luther and his followers in Wittenberg. Archduke Ferdinand had therefore hoped in 1526 to convince the members of the diet to enforce the Edict of Worms more strictly. Instead, they essentially agreed to a temporary suspension of the edict (known as the “Recess of Speyer”) until such time as the church could hold a general council to rule on the doctrinal issues in question. Evangelically minded princes such as Philip of Hesse and John “the Steadfast” of Saxony took advantage of this recess to push further religious reforms in their territories.
When the time came for the diet of 1529, Ferdinand was in no mood for toleration. He and the princes loyal to Rome formed a majority party that drafted a new measure condemning the religious changes made since 1526. It also required all princes to cease innovations and enforce the Edict of Worms or face an imperial ban along with Luther.
It was in this context that a minority party consisting of six princes and fourteen imperial free cities drafted a protestation to the ruling of the majority. In it, they objected to what they saw as a tyranny of the majority attempting to bind the consciences of the minority in violation of God’s Word, reversing the agreement of 1526.
“You, Well-beloved, and you others should have sought means whereby we might have been able, with a good conscience and without objection, to come to an agreement with you for the interpretation of the late Recess of Speier … whereby, too, the late Recess (which hitherto was everywhere considered just, and that, so far, unanimously) should also remain in essence and substance as then.” [1]
No, we do not need to protest everything, but when fidelity to the Word of God is at stake, protest can be righteous.
They considered the decision of the majority to be so unjust that it had no legal authority, writing that “our great and urgent needs require us openly to protest against the said resolution … as being, in view of the said late Recess, null and void, and, so far as we ourselves and our people, one and all, are concerned, not binding.”
In a further document known as the Instrumentum Appellationis, they argued that “in matters which concern God’s honour and the salvation and eternal life of our souls, every one must stand and give account before God for himself; and no one can excuse himself by the action or decision of another, whether less or more.” This was very much in line with Luther’s statement at the 1521 Diet of Worms that his conscience was captive to God’s Word above all else. As governing authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, continued to criminalize the Evangelicals’ teachings, they saw no option but to appeal to that higher authority before whom each of us must stand on Judgment Day.
This protest was not successful in swaying the opinion of the majority, but it did help to solidify the identity of those who would or could not commune with Rome. The minority party received the label Protestants from this point onward. At the Diet of Augsburg the following year, Charles V would attend in person, and Philip Melanchthon and others would present to him an official summary of the Protestant faith: the Augsburg Confession. This the emperor would not accept, and the factionalism within the Holy Roman Emperor would continue.
The legacy of the 1529 Diet of Speyer is therefore not so much the decisions of the majority party, but the banding together of the minorities. Hoping to bring his co-religionists together, Philip of Hesse hosted a colloquy later that year in his chief town of Marburg, hoping to reach agreement on the nature of the Lord’s Supper. However, Luther and Zwingli famously failed to do so, preventing full religious and political union. But in Speyer, princes sympathetic to both theologians had stood together in defense of their right to freedom of conscience. That has had an impact down to the present day as one step on the road to the development of modern Western democracy.
The Protest of Speyer has relevance for us today as we consider when and how to dissent from popular opinion. No, we do not need to protest everything, but when fidelity to the Word of God is at stake, protest can be righteous.[1] These translations are provided in “No. 107 – The Resolution of the Minority, 19-25 April 1529” in Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation, Edited by B.J. Kidd, Clarendon Press, 1911.
