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To: bornacatholic

Luther attacked the abuses of the church. You err by assuming that those abuses were created by Christ Himself.


13 posted on 01/02/2006 6:40:21 AM PST by Mr. Lucky
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To: Mr. Lucky; bornacatholic
Luther attacked the abuses of the church. You err by assuming that those abuses were created by Christ Himself

Not so! It started with the abuses of power and turned into reformation of theology as well. Luther claimed that what the Church teaches was in error and that he was the final arbitrer of what was right and wrong. Everyone else was in error according to him!

15 posted on 01/02/2006 6:47:24 AM PST by kosta50 (Eastern Orthodoxy is pure Christianity)
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To: Mr. Lucky

Yeah, right. People don’t seem to read what Luther wrote, instead developing their own ideas about his ideas and propagating those as his. In the Conclusion of “The Bondage of Free Will” (sic!) he writes to Erasmus of Rotterdam (author of “On Free Will”), “I greatly commend and extol you for this thing also, that you are the only man of all my antagonists that hath attacked the heart of the subject, the head of the cause [i.e. Luther’s claim that we are not endowed by God with free will and so, we can’t really be expected to chose good over evil - hence, our evil actions would really be God’s fault, given Luther’s understanding of grace, which is as devious as it is outrageous]; instead of wearing me out with those extraneous points, the Papacy, Purgatory, Indulgences, and a number of like topics, which may more fitly be called trifles, than matters of debate : a sort of chase, in which nearly all my opponents have been hunting me hitherto in vain. You are that single and solitary individual, who hath seen the hinge of the matters in dispute, and hath aimed at the neck : I thank you for this from my heart [...]”. Undeterred by Erasmus’ rebuttal in Hyperaspistes, Luther himself continued to acknowledge that what he wrote in “The Bondage of Free Will” was most important to him, as he wrote 12 years later in a letter to Wolfgang Capito, “Regarding [the plan] to collect my writings in volumes, I am quite cool and not at all eager about it because, roused by a Saturnian hunger, I would rather see them all devoured. For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps the one On the Bound Will and the Catechism.” But then, realizing what Luther really meant would make everyone run, not walk, back to the Roman Catholic Church faster than anyone could say “Luther.”


12,906 posted on 09/14/2014 11:16:45 PM PDT by Kleio (Luther, Roman Catholicism, free will, Erasmus, Reformation)
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