The problem here is that there were people around during that time period where were not like that. Sheesh, even Luther in his younger years was not like that.
He didn’t use that kind of language, because the circumstances were different (and perhaps because he was a less grouchy and frustrated person). I don’t think his basic view of the issues was that different.
It seems to me that every culture has its unique set of moral issues to which the culture is blind to (example killing innocent human life prior to birth). It is the responsibility of the church to go against the grain of the culture on these issues..not to conform to the culture (Romans 12:1-2).
And I would bet that if you examine all of these time periods, you would find some of God’s people that *can and do *discern the moral blindness and decay of their respective cultures and resist it.
Betting is easy. I’m just not sure it works like that. God rarely if ever zaps into people’s minds a direct knowledge of absolute moral standards. That’s why relativism (for all its obvious incoherence if taken as a description of the way things really are) is appealing to people who look at cultures comparatively. It’s obvious that our knowledge of the truth is relative, although the truth itself is not.
Yes, the Gospel brought into the world an access to divine truth that had not existed before. But it took centuries in many cases (slavery being the most obvious example) before the full implications of this were worked out–no doubt on many issues we’ve only begun to understand the Gospel.
The Church must indeed stand against the moral blindness of its times. But it does this almost always not by being “ahead” of the times but by being “behind” them–by refusing to give in to a particular distortion that has arisen in a particular culture, not by promoting some moral principle that in the natural course of history would not have arisen in anyone’s mind until centuries later.
The Catholic Church (while largely responsible for the rise of anti-Judaism) did paradoxically also hold out against it in a minimal but significant sense–that is, given what Christians believed about Jews, it’s remarkable that the Church continued to insist that Judaism could not simply be wiped out but must, in principle, be tolerated and protected (though within increasingly severe limits). Given the ferocity of Christian anti-Judaism, it’s remarkable that Rome was until the modern period one of the safest places in Europe for Jews. That is a more realistic and sober example of the way Christians did and do and can stand out against the moral blindness of their times (though fortunately there are better examples!).
The only Christians I find that resisted their culture were some anabaptists
But did they really resist their culture, or did their culture condemn them first? This is a serious debate in Anabaptist scholarship. Some would argue that if Zurich and other reformed communities had rejected infant baptism, an Anabaptist “state church” might actually have taken shape. But of course this is counterfactual speculation–and particularly fanciful, since rebaptism struck at the foundations of Christendom.
So sure, the rejection of infant baptism was radical, and the majority of Anabaptists who took that oppositional attitude toward Christendom in the direction of pacifism rather than apocalyptic violence are to be thoroughly commended.
Edwin
of modern comparisons.
o 
) I cannot remember the name of, but I know it was NOT a Catholic book,& had the text of a letter that he wrote to one of the pastors he was overseeing…
(say Mother Theresa or Billy Graham) had written a text like “On Jews and Their Lies”. I dunno about anybody else, but my admiration would turn to:bigyikes: :tsktsk: 
I’m glad the Lutherans made him into a bishop. Too bad the Catholics don’t like him, though.