Thank you so much for this authoritative note, which has been needed for weeks. I could not do it, altough I posted a two pager on another thread.
It is not authoritative. In fact it was successfully
refuted shortly after it was posted. It is merely a point of view which supports your own.
Luther’s primary objections were not to Church doctrines. His primary objections were to Church community. Why? Because community of any kind in which he was not personally in control was emotionally intolerable to him.
Although a lack of emotional balance began to emerge in his day-to-day life before the Wittenberg Plague (he overlooked his religious duties while juggling a grueling administrative schedule) it was the horror of mass suffering and death which he, as vicar, stood by and helplessly watched which imho sent him over the edge.
It is plausible that, at that time, he had a relapse into whatever condition led him to join the monastery in the first place (on which occasion he himself said he joined to save himself from regular, frequent, steadily escalating, and brutal beatings by both parents).
He jad been happy within the Church, thrived under Her healing protection, became well respected for his scholarship and diligent service, and was promoted through the ranks to take on ever-increasing responsibilities.
If his troubles were primarily over doctrine then one could have expected his explosion of raging invective to have commenced well before the point in time ten full years after his visit to Rome. But the visit to Rome – so highly touted by his son Paul as the turning point in Luther’s thinking – was if anything overlooked by Luther himself.
That is significant as Luther rarely flinched from justifying his own errors while aggressively insulting others for theirs – whether imagined or real.
The Plague saw Luther descending into the personal hell of scrupulosity. On the one hand, he broke rules and neglected his duties. On the other hand he punished himself for same by locking himself in his room for weeks; going without food, water, and sleep; and torturing himself with harrowing mortifications.
This was a clear indication that he sought his own counsel to interpret and displace the source of his torment from the authority figure of his father who was violent to the authority figure of the Church which was benign: a cognitive distortion on Luther’s part to be sure and one with tragic ramifications.
In other words – because of the disordered thinking which was now flowering unchecked as a result of the stressful conditions of his position – Luther, as his own counsel, rejected outright the structure and care of his community whom he could not bring himself to trust.
It was not because the friends in his community were untrustworthy. It was because he could not bring himself to trust anyone. This decision on his part only served to exascerbate the emotional storm which he was experiencing and which clouded his formidable faculties of reason.
The objections to doctrine which he lodged later were no more than justifications for his own destructive behaviour. The objections were the children of his scrupulosity, a condition which leaves the sufferer with the (wrongful) belief that the torments of guilt cannot be escaped.
Yes, some of his objections had merit for their own sake. But, as has been pointed out many times before, these objections were addressed by the Church and questionable practices were stopped.
Yet the Reformation plunged on heedless of any need for reconciliation and heedless of the fact that many folks would follow Luther’s example by taking advantage of the ensuing political chaos to grab whatever personal power they could.
And as a result, lives were lost.
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