Hi rf,
Where I get MY skivvies in a twist is that rather than REFORM the Church; Luther left it. Lutherans see Lutheranism as a continuation of the Church; rather than having abandoned it. In response to this; the Church DID reform, and cleaned itself up. This is known as the COUNTER-Reformation. (I like to say that the Reformation is the biggest wake-up call in the history of the world).
However, there were doctrinal changes that Luther made in addition to his “reforms”; and this is where the Church and Protestantism collide. The Church will never compromise with Protestant theology regarding Purgatory, intercessatory prayer, the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, transubstantiation, Sacred Tradition, or the 73-book Bible. That’s just the way it is.
In my book, if Luther had wanted to ‘reform’ the Church, and be considered an actual ‘reformer’, then he should not have left it. While he was right to rebuke the Church for abuses in matters of practice, it didn’t take him long at all to ‘transform’ his efforts into an assault on doctrine. In fact, the complaints about abuses in no way automatically lead to the desire to transform the doctrines of the Church. Yet before he was officially excommunicated from the Church he had refuted more than 4 dozen important doctrines of the Church. Luther was not a ‘reformer’. In fact, it was just a few months after his 95 Theses that he had already decided that he was going to fight the Church tooth and nail.
I posted this quote not too long ago on another thread, and while I generally don’t like to ‘double post’ quotes, this one definatily belongs on this thread because it reveals Luther‘s intent to
“Some time during the early spring of 1518 Luther had received a letter from his former professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Jodocus Trutfetter, a man whom he deeply respected and who had expected great service to the Church from so able a mind and so strong a personality as Luther. Now Professor Trutfetter solemnly warned his former student against the path he was taking, urging him to turn back before it was too late. On May 9 Luther replied: ‘To speak plainly, my firm belief is that the reform of the Church is impossible unless the ecclesiastical laws, the papal regulations, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic as the at present exist, are thoroughly uprooted.’ Such uprooting, he said, had now become his fixed purpose, ‘a resolution from which neither your authority, although it is certainly of the greatest weight for me, much less than that of any others, can turn me aside.’ Martin Luther, (Carrol quoting Fife, ‘Revolt of Martin Luther’, pg. 267)
This is one of the most important of the thousands of letters Luther wrote in his long, full lifetime. It reveals that as early as May 1518 he was essentially committed to the destruction of the Church as he knew it, though he had not yet proceeded to total public defiance of all Church authority. It shows his revolutionary temper, his purpose to ‘uproot’ rather than simply to reform, which is the goal of every revolutionary. It provides our first evidence that the upheaval to come was rightly to be called a revolt or a revolution, not a ‘reformation’. It also shows Luther in the act of coldly and deliberately breaking a bond whose quality and strength only the dedicated teacher and his former student know: the love and loyalty that emanate from their memories of each other.
Luther wrote this letter just before completing his defense in Latin of his position on indulgences. He sent a copy to the Pope with a cover letter, later printed with is as a preface. IN the preface he says that he ‘cannot recant’ from his position on indulgences, yet still insists on his willingness to listen to Leo X ‘as the ‘Voice of Christ’, who presides in him and speaks through him…….enliven me, kill me, call me back, confirm me, reject me, just as it pleases you’……despite the fact that in the text itself, sent with this letter, he had flatly and insultingly declared: ‘I do not care what pleases or displeases the Pope. He is just a man like other men. There have been many Popes inclined to errors, vices, and even very strange things.’
………In early July Luther was summoned to appear at Rome for trial within sixty days. He responded with his characteristic defiance, declaring that he would not accept excommunication if the Church decreed it for him. On July 25 he reiterated that defiance, along with references to ‘eternal predestination,’ in another sermon before Duke George of Saxony and his court. Shouting matches broke out afterward between Luther and professors defending scholastic theology. Undoubtedly the entire academic brawl deepened Duke George’s concern about the damage Luther was already doing and much greater damage he was capable of doing.” William H. Carroll, “The Cleaving of Christendom’, pg. 7-8
A year before the 7 day long Leipzig Debate with Eck, and 5 months before his ‘interview’ with Cardinal Cajetan, and a full 2 and a half years before he was excommunicated, Luther stated that he wanted to uproot the ‘ecclesiastical laws, the papal regulations, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic as they at present exist’. To uproot all of these things would be to destroy the Church, which was exactly what Luther had in mind. This mid 1518 letter reveals Luther’s real intentions, which was not ‘reform’ but destruction of the Church.
To describe Luther as a ‘reformer’ is to do a great disservice to the people in Catholic History who actually DID selflessly work to make the Church better.
God Bless You rf, Topper
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