Martin Luthers Personality

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I was just wondering if you could describe to me martin luther the protestant personality
 
Last year, my History teacher took my class and I to see “Luther” at the downtown theatre. According to the movie and what I’ve read about him, he was a very troubled man. He seemed to be friendly to his peers, but always seemed to be in a stressed mood.

In all honesty, he seemed like a nice guy that followed the rules of the Lord. Maybe if he would have waited it out a bit in the monastery, he would have discovered why we do things the way we do and would not feel like he was responsible to bring people back to glory.
 
Affable, genteel, intuitive, discerning, trusting, obedient, orthodox.

Haha…just kidding. More like…

Insecure, guilty, irate, flippant, farouche, carousing, disobedient, slanderous.

He had excretement fights with the Devil, and he called the pope and other people asses. Was good at using farting jokes to explain his theology.
 
The man was paranoid and severely scrupulous,hence the faith alone doctrine came about.He kept his devotion to the Blessed Mother.He was a very disturbed man, he went into religious life, not because of a call,but because during a bad storm he promised if he got home alive he would enter religious life. His life is really quite sad.I wonder if he could have imagined what his actions would start.God Bless
 
An absolutely bubbling genius who was uncompromising in the face of adversity.

Well . . . he was. 😉
 
Originally Quoted by michaelp:
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An absolutely bubbling genius who was uncompromising in the face of adversity.
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Well . . . he was. 😉
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Many madmen are geniuses.

My school library carries all Luther’s works complete. One time I took a look at what he wrote about and what he had to say. Overall I was surprised at how orthodox he was on a number of issues. People don’t usually recognize that. However, from what I have read of his works, he also had a tempermental and outrageous side.

Although I have so far only read about him briefly and his Institutes from selections, I find John Calvin a much more respectable individual so far as decency is concerned.🙂
 
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af1650:
Hi

I was just wondering if you could describe to me martin luther the protestant personality
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I suggest that you check out EWTN’s website under “documents”. The Catholic Encyclopedia provides a short biography of Luther’s life and fortuitous hierarchal ascendance in the Augustinian Monastery in Germany.
 
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af1650:
Hi

I was just wondering if you could describe to me martin luther the protestant personality
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SEE, the marvelous film which just was released on DVD this week: “Luther” with Joseph Fiennes.

Of course, who knows really his true personality. Only what we read/hear about.

Blessings~~
 
Does the film show him in a good or bad light? Is it protestant-slanted?
 
“Degenerate Moderns” by E. Michael Jones portrays him as a rabid libertine who jettisoned the celibacy vows primarily so that he and his fellow priests could raid the convents for nuns. Also that he came up with the justification-by-faith doctrine just to take free will away so he could rationalize his own behavior as beyond his control.

I’m sure these charges go back to the day. I wonder how true??? Pretty racy reading though!
 
Yes, these charges do go back to his own day, and they’re utterly ridiculous. Luther was quite reluctant to get married, and there’s no reason to think he was insincere in this. I don’t know of any evidence that Luther was a libertine, except in the sense that once he had developed his peculiar doctrines, they led him to believe that his vows of celibacy were wrong, and once he married he certainly seems to have enjoyed it. But I know of no evidence that he was unchaste before his marriage or unfaithful after it. This is not an excuse for his breaking his vows. But his behavior was the result of his doctrine, not the other way round.

In Christ,

Edwin
 
Luther a libertine? Perhaps not in the modern sense of the word. He did order the slaughter of 100,000 peasants for revolting against their masters after all.
 
Come on, Grolsch. If you want to criticize Luther, do it intelligently. Luther wasn’t a magistrate or a military leader–he didn’t have the authority to order anyone’s slaughter. He initially warned both sides they were headed for damnation, but then changed his mind when he heard atrocity stories about the peasants, and sanctioned the brutal repression of the rebellion. I don’t defend his conduct, but Catholics distort it in ridiculous ways (just as Protestants do with lots of stuff Catholics did).

In Christ,

Edwin
 
Oh nonsense. Luther wasn’t a magistrate, yes, but he was a prominent and influential figure who urged the princes to crush them. Luther thought the peasants had twisted his teachings and said that spiritual equality before God did not mean social equality on earth.
At first Luther was sympathetic with the peasants’ cause. In his tract An Admonition to Peace (1525) he condemned aristocrats with stinging words, “…you do nothing but flay and rob your subjects in order that you many lead a life of splendor, until the poor common folk can bear it no longer,” but when massive riots broke out across Germany, Luther was horrified. He felt his writings on Christian freedom had been misinterpreted. He meant spiritual freedom and warned the peasants that armed rebellion was contrary to God’s word. “The fact that rulers are unjust and wicked does not excuse tumult and rebellion.”
In reality, Luther needed the support of the rulers of Germany in his battle with the Roman Catholic Church and he felt the peasants’ revolt was an unwarranted distraction from his much more important religious campaign. Convinced the peasants threatened the survival of society, he wrote a tract Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants in which he said, “Let everyone who can smite, slay, and stab [the peasants] secretly and openly. Remember that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.” From that point, Luther became a champion of established authorities and Lutheran theology a champion of state control over the church. For all its attachment to the establishment, Roman Catholicism had always at least claimed to be a power separate and aloof from the state, able to speak independently. The new conservative Luther welcomed state support for Protestantism and once it had been achieved became an ardent devotee of the status quo.
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ehistory.com/world/amit/display.cfm?amit_id=2315
 
I would hazard a guess that Luther suffered from OCD (aka scruples) and that he might have been bipolar. At the time, as well as a hundred years before with Hus, the Church had not yet rejected Nominalism in favor of Realism. In Nominalism, you had to have -perfect- contrition to be forgiven. To a pious and sincere soul, like Luther, that would lead to serious problems, because the very presence of concupiscience/sin nature means that we are still tempted to sin, so Luther could never know that he was forgiven for any given sin. In Realism, your confession ‘merely’ has to be unfeigned.

Since that time, it is my understanding that the Roman see has rejected Nominalism in favor of Realism.

The recent Luther movie does appear to be a hagiography. I did very much enjoy the reconstructions of Rome and Wittenberg as they would have been at the time.

Carol, that is pure slander that you’ve picked up. The historical sequence is quite different, and Luther didn’t want to marry, Kate more or less pressured him into it (Just as Calvin didn’t, but the city fathers forced a wife on him, and he became a devoted husband. I suspect he had Asperger’s, he would study himself to near death, which is why the city fathers got him a wife, to take care of him. He never wanted to be a pastor, just a scholar in Strassborg)

Grolsch, Luther did not order the slaughter - he was appalled at it. He -did- implore the secular rulers to suppress the uprising. He doesn’t seem to have realized, as the son of a miner and as a monk, what that was going to involve.
 
Originally Quoted by Wil Peregrin:
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Since that time, it is my understanding that the Roman see has rejected Nominalism in favor of Realism.
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Can you please supply us with Church documents showing that the Church held Nominalism as an offical philosophy of the Church?

I know that Luther was an Antinominalist, but I thought that Nominalism was a theology endemic to only a few areas–such as Oxford with William of Occam.
 
:Oh nonsense. Luther wasn’t a magistrate, yes, but he was a prominent and influential figure who urged the princes to crush them.:

Urge is not order. And he did this only after he had been informed that the peasants were killing and looting indiscriminately. I don’t dispute that Luther helped legitimize the atrocities, but “order” is a ludicrously inappropriate word.

In Christ,

Edwin
 
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