What???
Luther didn’t resurrect anything. He caused confusion, misery, even massive bloodshed (the Peasan’ts War). He loosened morals until they were non-existent… He blashphemed the Holy Church that Jesus Christ himself established on the earth…I think that you need to apologize for this appalling and ridiculous accusation. You do not know of what you speak.Besides, it makes total sense - If you believe you’re saved no matter what u do anyway, as many Protestants believe & as Luther taught, why not just do “whatever”… even molest a child…
… Do you think??
In a sermon of 1528 Luther said, “That we are now so lazy and cold in the performance of good works is due to our no longer regarding them as a means of justification. For when we still hoped to be justified by our works our zeal for doing good was a marvel. One sought to excel the other in uprightness and piety. Were the old teaching to be revived today and ur works made contributary to righteousness, we should be readier and more willing to do what is good. Of this there is, nowever no prospect and thus, when it is a question of serving our neighbor and praising God by means of good works, we are sluggish an not disposes to do anything.” “Werke” Weimar editions volume 27, p. 443What???
He may be in Hell right now… God knows…
My question is: Why follow a MAN, when you can follow Jesus Christ (God and man) - be a member of HIS Church, not just some “church” made by an imperfect human… ???
I think Luther, in his exaggerated exposition of his theology, taught that all manner of sins didn’t really matter.
This wouldn’t work on my puter; can you site it somewhere else thanks
In the sense that they had no direct effect on your standing before God, true. But he explicitly taught many times that a believer would not want to commit sin, and would only commit sin out of weakness. In the Galatians commentary he actually said that if you didn’t resist the “works of the flesh,” you would eventually lose faith in Christ and be damned (if you didn’t repent). So it is not true that in the long run sin didn’t matter.
The motivation for not sinning for Luther, then, is that you ‘eventually would lose faith in Christ’. And be damned? You mean you would be punished for committing serious sin. He actually said that?
No. The motivation for not sinning was that you didn’t want to sin, because your life was governed by faith in Christ and gratitude for God’s grace.
Not directly, but in the sense that if you persisted in sin without repentance you would eventually stop believing in Christ.
Yes… I can’t prove it to you right now without searching a very long thread in which I posted this material a couple of years ago–the online version of the Galatians commentary is abridged and my hard copy of the whole thing is at my office. But he did say it. I was surprised myself.
Absolutely true. But only as long as you believe. And faith was not, in his view, compatible with a deliberate abandonment of oneself to sin. That’s the catch. He didn’t talk about this early on, because he was confident that faith would automatically produce fruits. But by the time of the Galatians commentary he realized that people needed a little more guidance, though he was still afraid of promoting “works righteousness” if he made the link too direct.
He certainly did not abhor repentance. He abhorred trusting in good works for salvation, and that would include trusting in one’s own repentance (i.e., in the strength of one’s own contrition or the works of penance one did).
I don’t think you can understand Luther adequately except in the context of a combination of radical Augustinianism (i.e., the belief that humans were radically sinful in ways they could not control) and the “nominalist” belief that human beings were basically saved by keeping a contract with God.
See above. He certainly believed that a believer would experience lust and sometimes fall into sin, but that they would not want to sin (perhaps we are talking about first-order vs. second-order desires here) and would repent of their sins. See Romans seven–“it is not I that do it, but sin that dwells in me.” Luther may have misinterpreted Paul (in this respect–he certainly did in others), but he didn’t make up this concept of one’s sinful impulses acting in some sense outside believers’ control and against their fundamental desires. Augustine was probably the first person to apply this to the situation of the believer.
For real Christians, sinning is offending the one, true, sinless, good God. True repentance is sorrow for offending this all-good God.Exactly. Which is why, in Luther’s view, believers would not want to sin–and why, for that matter, only a believer could truly repent (in some of his writings, Luther distinguished between “legal” and “evangelical” repentance, with one preceding faith and the other following), because only a believer would love God and want to please Him.
I agree. However, to be honest the same appears (from the outside) to be true of Catholicism. There are certainly an awful number of people who grow up as Catholics yet seem to have misunderstood Catholic teaching in pretty major ways. I am not sure that you really have any advantage over Lutheranism that way. The assumptions, footnotes, and “by the way’s” are just different.
As a historian who cares about ideas, I don’t dismiss anyone, however “whacked out.” I try to understand them. And I find Luther’s ideas particularly rich and fascinating. Often bull-headedly wrong, but always worth the effort to try to understand.
Well, first of all Arianism had a lot of political support! However, the bigger point is that I think it’s always a mistake to explain away ideas in terms of social/political causes (or vice versa). As my advisor put it, human behavior is always “over-determined”–i.e., you can explain it in many completely different ways, all of which would be enough to cause the behavior in question. My big problem with much of the criticism of Luther on this forum is that people use psychological or political or sociological explanations to get out of actually trying to understand Luther’s ideas. However valid some of those explanations may be, it is unfair to start and stop with them, unless you want to lend credence to historians who do exactly the same thing with Catholicism.
Please explain. Your references are vague.
I disagree. Catholicism flows as does all truth, one truth after the other.
come on…
Maybe you need to apologize for accusing people of not knowing things that maybe they DO know of…
Not sure where this tread is coming from or going.
I think maybe you need to CHILL.
And this was my response:If you believe you’re saved no matter what u do anyway, as many Protestants believe & as Luther taught, why not just do “whatever”… even molest a child…
The accusation to which I was responding was beneath contempt.
It is put poorly, but Luther taught that we should sin, and sin more boldly, it did not matter what we did. Luther should be ashamed of what he taught; we are shamed by bringing it to ultimate, ugly extremes.
No, he did not “teach” this. He made this remark once in a pastoral letter to a scrupulous friend.
uch: :hypno: is at this site. It is VERY interesting… and scary.