This is another in a serious of posts examining facts, legends and more related to Martin Luther and early Lutheranism on the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation.
So, Luther had forced Johann Eck to admit that popes could err, and that good works could only "act" after faith — a sola fide faith — had enlightened and sanctified a person.
So, we got?
A committee.
Why not.
The papal curia was, and still is, a bureaucracy like any secular state.
So a committee of about 40 sat down to fine-tooth comb Luther's writings. Among the group was not only Eck but Cardinal Cajetan, rebuffed by Luther the year before Eck was refuted.
The committee eventually led to Pope Leo X "calling bull" on Luther, with the papal bull Exsurge Domine, translated at the start of the header.
Cajetan wanted to take a nuanced approach of ranges of possible church discipline to different writings and comments of Luther's while Eck, more openly humiliated, wanted to bulldoze over him.
Result? Eck won.
The committee, similar to how Hus was treated a century earlier, just drew up a laundry list of what was wrong without saying why it was biblically wrong or how wrong it was.
Just as Rome and Constantinople were asunder long before their mutual anathemas of 1054 (he Slavic missionary competition in the 700s shows that, and the crowning of Charlemagne as emperor [NOT "western emperor"] in 800 in the secular side backs that up), so were Luther and Rome officially asunder when the bull was received by him, months before his excommunication and two years before the imperial pressure cooker of the Diet of Worms.
For Luther, the lack of imperial action — related to imperial succession issues — only emboldened him.
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