Hello Sparkle:
Only God knows what Luther “was trying to do.” We can only judge what he did, we can’t know his motives.
That said, we have to dsay that much of what he did was vile, awful, incredible. Go look at Dave Armstrong’s website: I challenge you to take a look at the real Luther. There is an awful lot of stuff, as Luther was a prodigious writer, and there is much that has not been published much if at all. This is what makes Luther such a complex and fascinating character.
Luther was a driven, sensual, tortured man. One only has to look at his dismal view of human nature–basically his own nature–to see the reasons for his theology. He is a mass of contradictions, and this comes out in his many contradictory positions, Dave Armstrong’s site compares some of these, which are so contradictory that one sees why he was called by some a liar. He was capable of the vilest, most intemperate, insulting and scatological language that one could ever want to find. He said even blasphemous things about Christ. What conclusion do I draw from all this? I think he was sometimes nuts. If I had to guess, based on what I’ve read, I’d call him a neurotic manic-depressive/bipolar personality wracked by self-hatred and his vision of an angry God.
Luther’s personality was the spark that lit the whole Reformation. Other causes were pernicious errors in philosophy and a decline in the quality of philosophical teaching, conciliarism in the Church and the hersies it engendered, the greed of the princes, the low state of religion and the neuroses caused by the bubonic plague that had devastated Europe in the previous generation, universal resentment over taxes, the emerging nationalism of the time, and a dozen other things. Corruption in the Church, and still less any doctrinal errors, were only the excuses or occasions for the conflagration that Luther lit, not the causes of it.
The Church never taught that anyone could buy his way into heaven, never taught that one could buy a soul out of purgatory (even if Tetzel really did preach, as the Protestants accused him of doing, that “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, then a soul from purgatory springs”), never taught that we work our own way into heaven. Had the Protestants been interested only in correcting the abuses, why did they throw out so many Catholic doctrines?
No, your claim that Luther was a good guy only fighting to correct abuses and that only others did the dirty work just won’t wash: like the current and former movies made on Luther it is sanitized hagiography for the masses, not history. Let us rather see Luther for what he was, a heretic and a heresiarch. BTW, none other than Wm. Schirer, the author of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, observes that it was Martin Luther that made Adolph Hitler’s rise in Germany possible. Was he an “evil person”? Only God knows. What we know is that he did some pretty bad things.
Regards,
Joannes
sparkle:
What Luther was trying to do back then was not bad. I don’t think we Catholics need to slam him into the ground saying he was awful, terrible, mentally disturbed, abused by his father, etc., etc., or anywhere near on the same grounds as Hitler. Luther was NOT an evil person. He simply saw the negatives about the RCC back then, i.e., indulgences, etc., etc., and sought to change it, purify it, and make people aware that you can’t buy your way into heaven… Unfortunately, others got carried away, in further rebellion, and hence the Protestant Reformation. Can’t we just see Luther himself for who and what he was???
