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.
“ Luther is NOT a saint, sorry to disappoint you.
Doesn’t sound as if you know what the Bible says a saint is...
“The Jewish church was managed by the tribe of Levi, they were Levites.”
There was no Jewish church. The Levites ran the temple and rituals therein. There is nothing to suggest that 1st Century Synagogues were exclusively run and operated by Levites, Priests or otherwise.
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Not exactly. Rabbi’s went to a “Rabbinical” school run by the priesthood which had as it’s hub head the Temple. When a man had finished rabbinical school he was eligible to become a president of a synagogue. Certification was two fold, first school, then election by a congregation. Without the priesthood there was no Rabbi. The Rabbi however did not perform any ordinances, he simply ran the synagogue and sent people to the Temple or invited priests in to do ordinances. A rabbi for instance could not perform or assist in sacrifice, washings or anointing’s. John The Baptist for instance was a Levite, that is why he could baptize.
The Jewish “Church” if you will was strictly run by the priesthood, they all taught the same doctrine and obeyed the same rules as propagated by the temple priesthood.
The Jewish religion is a little different today. There is no central Temple. While there are still Rabbinical schools and most rabbis are graduates from one of them they do not all teach the same doctrine. Today there are different sects in Jewery, in the time of Christ there was only one.
Open challenge to RC brothers and sisters (for so I believe you are!)
PRAYERFULLY:
1) READ the 95 theses.
2) READ Luther’s preface to Galatians
Then review what Rome teaches you about the man.
If that does not provoke at least some squirming, then I don’t understand you at all. Not that I think you will become a Protestant..., it should at least provoke some uneasiness about the teaching that he was simply a schismatic heretic and disruptor of the “unity” (HA HA) of the church.
Do it. Both are online free reading.
It will be good for you.
Since most of us cannot read German......
https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-reformation/the-95-theses-a-modern-translation/
and
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/luther/galatians.ii.html
Thanks for posting these articles GC. :)
I don’t know about “salvation”, but according to Romans 2:6-9, what you do in life, aka “works” or “deeds”, is of critical importance.
Who (God) will render to every man according to his deeds:I tell Him what I believe, but God can actually see what I believe just by watching what I choose do and how I choose do it.To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life:
But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath,
Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile;
By my works, He knows me. I hope my words and works are in agreement with each other and with Him, or close enough, or I really am doomed!
IF you look at the voting on this IIRC only 46% approved the canon.
Rome could not even get a simple majority of agreement on "what has always been understood everywhere".
:: It is unwise to suppose to put words into scripture that are not there. ::
Yet, you...JAKraig...alter Scripture to read “Keys of the Church”. Who then is the pot and whom then kettle?
Frankly, your pedantic forms are tiring. A first year Lutheran catechumen could slay your rhetorical dragons sufficiently.
Have a nice day, JA.
Romans 2 is referring to those who recognize a right and wrong and try to earn salvation through works without Christ. Yes, they have to do is be perfect. In Romans three he reveals the bad news - there are none good, not one. All have fallen short. That’s why we need a savior.
The Catholic Church never accepted a canon in a full ecumenical counsel (ie. Church wide) until the Counsel of Trent in the 16th Century. Carthage was a small regional counsel. Of course we know from Athanasius’ Festal letter that the current canon had been almost universally acknowledged by 367. The vast majority of the current canon was established by the middle of the second century. The other books were not as widely distributed which is why their acceptance by the entire church took a bit longer because so many were just unaware of them.
Definition of anathema
1a : one that is cursed by ecclesiastical authority
b : someone or something intensely disliked or loathed —usually used as a predicate nominative
It is unwise to suppose to put words into scripture that are not there. ::
Yet, you...JAKraig...alter Scripture to read “Keys of the Church”. Who then is the pot and whom then kettle?
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I was not quoting scripture when I made that statement. I did make it clear when I was quoting.
“Your comment that everyone is flawed. Speaking of the catholic doctrine that Mary was sinless”
O.K. I get it.
As far as all such beliefs, including the virgin birth, I believe that G-d is O.K. with anyone leaving the truth or myth of such things to G-d. I don’t believe that, in order to be a good Christian, anyone had to take a position on such things.
“Once you kill the head of the snake the body will follow”
But with the Roman Empire it was the other way around; the arms and legs were cut off first.
In 285 AD, Emperor Diocletian decided that the Roman Empire was too big to manage. He divided the Empire into two parts, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. Over the next hundred years or so, the empire would be reunited, split into three parts, and split in two again. Finally, in 395 AD, the empire was split into two for good. The Western Empire was ruled by Rome, the Eastern Empire was ruled by Constantinople.
So if by “Rome” you mean the Roman Empire, it was already split up, by internal problems, by 395 A.D.; that was not the doing of the Germanic tribes.
The last Roman soldiers and administration left Britain in 410 A.D.
Most of the Roman administration of Gaul fell to the Franks around 476 A.D.
Odoacer separately took the City of Rome, later that year in September.
Rome fell because it’s extensions and those who it sought to keep controlled by it rebelled. The process started at the periphery and made its way in. “The head” lost when it could not control the arms and legs, THEN, afterward, taking the “head”, at the end (not the first) was maybe inevitable.
Dividing the empire under the authority of different rulers was long established well before that but it was still the Roman empire. Augustus, Mark Antony and Lepidus divided it into three spheres of rule three hundred years before Diocletian.
1. If by “at odds” you mean they differ on the details of theology that’s also true of various prominent clergy within the Catholic Church.
2. The Lutheran church is almost five hundred years old. The Catholic Church in Europe is almost dead.
3. “They are too closely tied to political/civil circumstances that make them untenable in many circumstances ...”
That’s rich, seeing how the current pope is more or less a Marxist.
The Church, the Ekklesia found in individual homes,made up of ONLY those whom God had imputed righteousness to their once dead spirits, is NOT an Org such as you are speciously trying to portend. the Catholic church is not even Christian with its so deeply inveigled pagan concepts. Everything else that follows of your fraudulent reasoning is not even worth rejecting for the twists are so demonically inspired as to rebuked by The Lord ... when individuals counting on such a religion stand at the Judgment, The Great White Throne of Judgment.
You spewed that you were not going to ‘argue’, yet here you have made several posts now, arguing. Having fun yet?
“Dividing the empire under the authority of different rulers was long established well before that but it was still the Roman empire. Augustus, Mark Antony and Lepidus divided it into three spheres of rule three hundred years before Diocletian.”
No argument. My point with included that data point was the whole of it - the fall of the Roman Empire - was NOT centered on the fall of Rome, the city, and when that city finally fell, the empire had been depleted, officially in the splits, and “falling” from its extensions, in, BEFORE the fall of “Rome”, the city. The “head” fell nearly last.
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