The Eight Wittenberg Sermons

The Eight Wittenberg Sermons, often called the Invocavit Sermons after the Sunday on which they began, were preached by Martin Luther on eight consecutive days, March 9 through March 16, 1522, in the city church of Wittenberg. Luther had been hidden at the Wartburg castle since May 1521, following his condemnation at the Diet of Worms. In his absence, Andreas Karlstadt and Gabriel Zwilling had pressed reform forward at speed: the mass was celebrated in German and without vestments, the cup was given to the laity, priests married, images were pulled from churches, and in January 1522 the town council issued an ordinance regulating worship and poor relief. Preachers from Zwickau claiming direct revelation added to the agitation. The council asked Luther to return, and he came back against the wishes of Elector Frederick, arriving on March 6 and climbing into the pulpit three days later.

The sermons do not retract any of the reforms in principle. Luther agrees that private masses should end, that both kinds belong to all communicants, that images are not to be worshiped, and that vows and fasts bind no conscience. His quarrel is with how these things were done. He draws a sharp line between what God commands and what God leaves free, and he insists that in free matters no one may be coerced, because a new law of the gospel is still a law. Above the distinction between command and freedom he places love: the strong must bear with the weak, and a reform that frightens a neighbor out of the church before the Word has reached his heart is no reform at all. Faith cannot be forced; it is produced only by preaching. Luther points to his own case, saying that he did nothing but preach and write while he slept or drank Wittenberg beer with Philip and Amsdorf, and the Word did the work. He takes the contested practices in turn, the mass, images, communion in both kinds, confession, and fasting, and in each he asks whether the change was made in faith and love or in impatience and compulsion, and whether a thing that is permitted has been wrongly turned into a thing required.

The sermons restored order in Wittenberg within the week and set the pattern for Luther's reformation as a movement of persuasion rather than ordinance. They are the clearest short statement of his teaching on Christian freedom applied to practice, and they remain a standing rebuke to reformers of every era who are right about the goal and wrong about the pace.

Who should read this: pastors and lay leaders facing a congregation divided over changes in worship, anyone who wants Luther's practical ethic of freedom and patience in one brief and vivid text, and students of how the Reformation chose its methods. Those seeking a systematic treatment of the sacraments or of adiaphora should look elsewhere; these are urgent occasional sermons, repetitive by design, and they assume a reader already sympathetic to the reforms whose manner they correct.