An Argument in Defense of All the Articles of Dr. Martin Luther Wrongly Condemned in the Roman Bull

In June 1520 the papal bull Exsurge Domine extracted forty-one propositions from Luther's writings, declared them heretical or offensive, and gave him sixty days to recant. He answered first by burning the bull along with the books of canon law at Wittenberg in December, then by publishing a Latin Assertio of every condemned article. This German treatise, Grund und Ursach aller Artikel, is his reworking of that defense for lay readers, finished in the early months of 1521 as the formal excommunication took effect and the summons to the Diet of Worms approached. It is Luther refusing to retreat on a single point, and explaining to the German public why.

The work opens with a methodological claim that governs everything after it. Luther will accept correction from Scripture alone, because Scripture is the first principle of Christian teaching and interprets itself; the fathers, the councils and the popes must be measured against it rather than it against them. Augustine, whom he honors above the rest, is explicitly included among those who can err. He then takes the forty-one articles in order and defends each, usually by setting out the biblical texts on which it rests and asking whether his opponents have refuted a single one. The result is a compact survey of his theology at the moment it hardened: sin that remains in the baptized and is forgiven rather than removed; a justification that rests on the promise rather than on the quality of the penitent's contrition; indulgences and purgatory exposed as unsupported by Scripture; the papacy stripped of divine right and Rome's claim to supremacy over the councils denied. The most consequential article is the one on free will, where Luther states that after the fall the will is free in name only and that human beings do nothing toward their salvation apart from grace. He admits that he now regrets having been too mild in some of the condemned statements, particularly those on indulgences, since he has come to see the papacy more clearly than when he first wrote. The tone is combative, often scornful, but the argument never leaves the texts.

The treatise mattered because it drew the line that Worms would make public and irreversible: no recantation without proof from Scripture. The free will article in its Latin form provoked Erasmus to write De libero arbitrio in 1524, which in turn drew Luther's The Bondage of the Will, so this work stands at the head of the central debate of the early Reformation. It also shows, more plainly than the better-known 1520 treatises, how Luther understood the authority of Scripture as a working rule rather than a slogan.

Who should read this: those who want to see the full set of positions Rome condemned and how Luther defended them from the text, and readers tracing the roots of the free will controversy. It is not an entry point to Luther; the article-by-article format assumes familiarity with the disputes, and readers new to him should begin with the 1520 treatises or the Small Catechism.