Posted on 10/16/2019 5:53:55 AM PDT by Gamecock
Legend has it that on 31 October 1517, a German friar named Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailed a statement of criticism of the Roman Catholic Church on the doors of Wittenberg church. It is not known for sure whether he really nailed his protest to the doors or sent it directly to the local Archbishop. But one thing is certain: his ‘95 theses’ shook Europe to the core and led to a great cultural revolution.
It encouraged the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, in which the rural poor raised an army of 300,000 to fight the feudal order, and later still the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Both resulted in appalling death tolls and widespread destruction of Church property and artworks. A third of the peasant army was massacred and during the Thirty Years’ War the modern equivalent of 40 million people died.
Luther’s ideas, and those of the Reformation, did not just fall out of the sky. There had been earlier critics of the Church’s corruption. However, Luther’s protest occurred at a time when the feudal system in Germany was unravelling. Not only were the plebians fed up with exploitation and taxes but towns and cities were developing with a class of merchants and industrialists being held back by the old feudal order. Luther was also supported by some among the aristocracy – the secular princes – who were more than happy to confiscate and seize Church property in the name of a higher principle. The Church owned a third of the land.
Luther’s dissent was able to gain much ground thanks to the Gutenberg printing press, technology that allowed for books, pamphlets, posters and cartoons to be printed in large numbers. Not everyone could read but there were gatherings at which the latest subversive works would be read to those assembled and, within a decade, half of Germany was ‘Lutheran’.
As with other events that turned the world upside down, such as the English barons’ revolt and the struggle for Magna Carta in the thirteenth century, Luther had no idea what he was unleashing. He thought he was just provoking a debate over issues that outraged him, such as the Church’s practice of selling Indulgences to raise money for the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
An Indulgence was a certificate issued by the Church and sold by priests with a guarantee that it would ensure passage to Heaven. They were very costly at about half a year’s wage.
In the 95 Theses, Luther asked: ‘Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?’
Perhaps Luther’s most subversive and radical idea was his belief that the Bible, not priests and popes, was the central religious authority. Back then, Bibles were in Latin – a language of the priests – and usually chained up in churches. Luther’s translation of the Bible into the language of the people – vernacular German – had revolutionary implications.
Essentially, Luther challenged and overturned the idea that the relationship between the individual and God requires the mediation of priests representing an institution headed by a theologically infallible source of divine authority, the Pope.
Luther is best described as an ‘accidental revolutionary’, someone who opposed actual revolution. When the peasants took up arms against the Church and other landlords, he immediately opposed them and supported their suppression; for him, liberty was purely spiritual. It has been said that Luther liberated Germans from feudal Catholicism but bound them to state power.
In asserting the individual nature of the relationship with God, and in translating the New Testament from Latin to German, he was creating the conditions for individuals to think for themselves and to doubt and criticize what had been ‘common sense’ for the previous thousand years.
By all accounts, Luther was not a nice person. He was a fanatic, obsessed with guilt and sin. He constantly prayed, confessed, fasted and flagellated himself for long periods. By today’s standards, he was an extreme fundamentalist, and anti-Semitic to boot (as were many Catholics back then).
What could such a person and his rebellion against the Catholic Church possibly have to do with democracy? Why is it that around the world millions will not just commemorate, but celebrate, his act of defiance of 500 years ago?
I do not have space in this post for the complicated detail but, again, the essence of his challenge was that the connection to God was an individual one, that faith was what mattered, not actions such as rituals and Indulgences. From this perspective, every baptised person was a pope: ‘the priesthood of all believers’. Such insights laid a basis for progress toward democracy. The free Christian eventually became the free citizen – but only when philosophy caught up with and digested the still unfolding changes occurring on the ground, changes reflected by the displacement of religion in the C18th with the Enlightenment.
In a ‘papal bull’ issued in June 1520, Pope Leo X called for Luther’s works to be burned. Luther responded in December by publicly burning the bull. In January 1521, the Pope excommunicated him and Luther responded by calling the Pope ‘the Anti-Christ’. Christianity was split in two, and then further fragmented.
When, nearly two centuries later, John Locke's ‘Letter concerning Toleration’ (1690) argued that the church was a voluntary association based on individual conscience, he was presenting a key Reformation idea that one's religious confession is a matter of individual choice rather than institutional imposition.
Today, freedom of conscience owes much to the forces unleashed 500 years ago at Wittenberg. In fighting the tyranny of Rome, Europeans learned to fight tyranny of every kind. The ‘priesthood of all believers’ was a vital precondition for the much later secular democracy of all citizens.
Your argument points strongly to satan being the one keeping the catholiciism religion afloat. Once the many paganized rituals and doctrines are exposed in that religion, a Christian cannot honestly attribute the support of such to the choosing of God in Whom is no shadow of turning.
Shoot, the Catholic church is holding a synod right now that is glorifying and normalizing pagan rituals.
For a similar reason that ALL the first gatherings of believers were unaffiliated with an Org or institution ... the Ekklesia are in a personal relationship with The Lord Christ, not a gaggle of go betweens claiming spiritual powers to ... well, you should get the picture at this point.
LOL, how indeed!
I believe most RCs are my brothers and sisters in Christ. I am always struggling with how barbed my replies should or should not be.
Don’t confuse your current heretic Pope with Luther.
You get so many things wrong, you must be a Mormon.
Hence the reason to study the original languages including primarily the Greek. The study of the languages was one of the things that opened the eyes of the Reformers while Rome languished, and still does, in Latin.
You've heard of Greek before....right? It's the language the NT was written in.
x
my son reads biblical greek and hebrew. I’ve always wanted to learn. Maybe a retirement project.
Simply going around spouting off to people that *You’re wrong!* is no help at all.
There are millions of ways to be wrong but only one way to be right.
So if someone is wrong, tell them what the right is instead of just mouthing off like a broken record.
If you’re not willing to do that, you might as well not even bother wasting the bandwidth posting because nobody is going to listen to anything you have to say.
You’re not productively contributing to the discussion, you’re just rabble rousing at that point.
Luther was a Catholic priest.
Unless you are one as well, I daresay that he knew more about Rome’s inner workings and how indulgences in his day worked than you do.
Because of geography, mission focus, or some other factor.
If you are going to claim that they are all different, then you have your work cut out for you to demonstrate that.
Usually, you can go on their church website and find their statement of faith and compare all however many thousand you think there are and find out just how much or how little they diverge from each other.
As an aside, examples of geography are easy.
Examples of mission focus are also. Some groups, like Salvation Army, work in the US to homeless in the city and drunks.
A denomination like Christian and Missionary Alliance has a huge overseas mission focus. Samaritans Purse works with disaster relief and helping the destitute in third world countries.
All preach salvation by faith in Christ and being born again.
One body, different gifts , and different members.
1 Corinthians 12:12-26
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
“I think Luther is indispensable in the cause of human freedom.”
Absolutely this is correct.
And I want to say here how my journey to Protestantism began. This is a journey that has surprised nobody more than me, except maybe my best friend, who knows me better than I know myself, she’s astounded by it.
It started with me reading the first of Hillary Mantel’s book Wolf Hall (about Thomas Cromwell, very good) which begins (or if not begins it’s very early) with a scene in which a woman is arrested (or maybe she’s burned at the stake, it was a while ago that I read it) for reading the Bible in English.
Now, I am a very, extremely, conservative person. When I learned about the American Revolution in elementary school, I KNEW that had I lived then I would have been a Tory. And I KNEW, when I read Wolf Hall that I would have supported reading the Bible in English. Not saying I would have been willing to get burned at the stake over it, but it was an amazing thing to realize. I had never thought about it that way before.
Very much looking to this Reformation Sunday, my second as a proud Presbyterian.
Thanks be to God. See you in the clouds
Pope Announces Any Time Spent Watching 'The View' Counts As Time Served In Purgatory
I'm not sure the author really understands the Reformation all that well. He piles a lot of misplaced blame on Martin Luther. Many of his exaggerated arguments sound like the typical Luther/Protestant-bashing polemics we've gotten used to seeing here.
Get your son to show it to you.
It helps show why Luther reacted the way he did when he translated using the Greek.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.