What Really Caused the Reformation?

[Ani_Ibi]

And where do you think Hitler got his Seven points against the Jews from if not Luther himself?

In 1543, Luther’s animus probably reached its apotheosis in a vituperative pamphlet, On the Jews and their Lies (1543)*, *in which he urged the authorities to act against Jews with the utmost severity. A vile and calculating document, it drips with anger and contempt.

“What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? Since they live among us and we know about their lying and blasphemy and cursing, we cannot tolerate them…” Not content with merely demonizing Jews, Luther listed seven methods of punishing them.

"First, their synagogues… should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it.

"Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed.

"Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught.

"Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under the threat of death to teach any more…

"Fifthly, passports and travelling privilegesshould be absolutely forbidden to Jews.

"Sixthly, they ought to be stopped from usury. All their cash and valuables of silver and goldought to be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping.

“Seventhly, let the young Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spade, the distaff and spindle, and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses…”

Four centuries later, Nazis used quotations from this pamphlet, which was cited by the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer during the Nuremberg trials, to justify the Holocaust.

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

In August 1536, Luther’s prince Elector of Saxony John Frederick issued a mandate that prohibited Jews from inhabiting, engaging in business in, or passing through his realm. An Alsatian shtadlan, Rabbi Josel of Rosheim, asked a reformer Wolfgang Capito to approach Luther in order to obtain an audience with the prince, but Luther refused every intercession…

Paul Johnson writes that “Luther was not content with verbal abuse. Even before he wrote his anti-Semitic pamphlet, he got Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them from many German towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from Brandenburg in 1543.”

He refers to Jews as a brood of vipers and children of the devil…miserable, blind, and senseless, truly stupid fools, thieves and robbers, lazy rogues, daily murderers, and vermin, likens them to gangrene… Luther advised "… “we must drive them out like mad dogs.”

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in an essay on Lutheran-Jewish relations, observed that “Over the years, Luther’s anti-Jewish writings have continued to be reproduced in pamphlets and other works by neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan.”

The prevailing sentiment among historians is that “On the Jews and Their Lies” and other antisemitic writings by Luther laid the groundworkfor the modern “racial” form of antisemitism — that is, the persecution, deportation, or even genocide of Jews…

Writing in Lutheran Quarterly in 1987, Dr. Johannes Wallmann stated:

The assertion that Luther’s expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent influence in the centuries after the Reformation

, and that there exists a continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented anti-Semitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World War it has understandably become the prevailing opinion.

Franklin Sherman, editor of volume 47 of the American Edition of Luther’s Works in which On the Jews and Their Lies appears… states in response to the claim that “Luther’s antipathy towards the Jews was religious rather than racial in nature” that Luther’s writings against the Jews are not “merely a set of cool, calm and collected theological judgments.”

“His writings are full of rage, and indeed hatred, against an identifiable human group, not just against a religious point of view… [Luther] cannot be distanced completely from modern antisemites.” Regarding Luther’s treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote: “There you already have the whole Nazi program…” link

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Hitler’s Education Minister, Bernhard Rust, was quoted by the Völkischer Beobachter

as saying that: “Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance … I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are of the same old stamp [Schrot und Korn]”.

Hans Hinkel… paid tribute to Luther in his acceptance speech as head of… the film department of Goebbel’s Chamber of Culture and Propaganda Ministry. “… with Luther, the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun.”

Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman: “On November 10, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.” The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words “of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.”

continued…

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Let’s see what Reformation influence achieved in America.

The key element to understanding the radical Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is… the millenium… John Calvin’s doctrine of election made it possible to rethink the millenium in terms of physical reality. Now that one had living saints walking around on the earth, that is,

members of the Calvinist church, one now had candidates for the one thousand year rule of saints.

Translating the rule of saints into a physical reality meant reorganizing the church into a political authority, which is one of the fundamental aspects of Calvinism… The millenarianism of the Protestant settlers of America had two other crucial aspects: the Ordeal and the final battle between good and evil…

Some Protestants believed that the conflict between Natives and Europeans would be a spiritual conflict and began to actively proseletyze Native societies. This proseletyzation, done in the best intents, seriously disrupted Native American society. Not fully welcome in their own societies, and almost completely unwelcome in European-American society, the converts found themselves between two worlds.

Those, however, who believed that the final battle would be a physical battle began a pattern of violence against the Native Americans… Native Americans… were reconfigured in the American imagination as instruments of evil.

end of post

 

[Dulcimer]

Um…I’m still waiting for Luther’s Top 10 Reasons/Complaints against the Catholic Church…

(And yes, I read all the stuff you wrote, thank you! Much information there I had forgotten and/or was previously unaquainted with. It still doesn’t answer my question though…)

 

[Tomster]

The Protestant schism (I’d love to see anyone try to prove that the communities Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli formed were “reformed” in any sense of the word) was caused by Martin Luther, who exchanged the spiritual power of the Pope for the temporal power of the German princes.

Case in point: Luther’s sudden support for polygamy when Philip of Hesse decided he wanted another wife without the inconvenience of divorcing the first.

And, if I may add Teflon, the 265 men who have stood in the shoes of the Fisherman have this in common: They form the living links in a single chain of Catholic unity, a chain that stretches across human history back to Simon Peter himself. It’s true that a chain is as strong as its weakest link, and this chain, forged by Christ Himself, has been strained, at times seemingly well beyond the limit, but it has never broken.

In contrast, the Protestant Reformation can boast of nothing similar. While for two thousand years the papacy has stood as a bulwark for the Church against the savage efforts of the Evil One to sift it like wheat, Martin Luther and John Calvin sowed the wind, and today we are reaping a whirlwind of gigantic proportins. Under the guise of adhering to the find sounding principle of sola-scriptura, Protestantism has rejected the papacy, and what fruit has it yielded? Doctrinal disunity, blatant contradictions, relativism born of confusion, and fragmentation. By abandoning the rock on which the Church was built, the Reformers could build their new theological structure on only the shifting sands of mere human opinion. But Scripture calls to them, beckoning them home to the Rock of Peter, the one place where they can find the stability and permanence Christ promised his followers.

The rock of Peter, the thing that seems most distasteful to so many about the Catholic Church is, in fact, the answer to their most urgent problems. The papacy is the Lord’s doing, not man’s, and it ought to be marvelous in their eyes.

“The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes” (Psalm 118:22-23).

Tomster

 

[allischalmers]

God

 

[Ghosty]

For those interested, here is the text of the actual Excommunication of Luther, which lists his errors in the eyes of the Church. This is the text he burned, formally rejecting correction, and setting himself outside the Church.

papalencyclicals.net/Leo10/l10exdom.htm

Peace and God bless!

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Um…I’m still waiting for Luther’s Top 10 Reasons/Complaints against the Catholic Church…

1. 
   *]The Renaissance popularized humanism.
   *]Growth in trade stimulated materialism and cupidity.
   *]The plagues lowered the number of educated clergy.
   *]Corruption among some clergy exascerbated the need for discipline.
   *]Church/State boundaries became blurred.
   *]Nationalism was on the rise.
   *]In Luther was combined the genius of a Biblical scholar and bona fide cognitive distortions originating in childhood abuse and brought to a head by the Wittenburg Plague.
   link

 

[chris_molter]

God

Actually, I think ol’ Scratch himself is the author of dissidence and discord. I’m certain it was he who helped pull so many Bishops, Priests, and Religious into dissolute lifestyles, with harems and illegitimate children, selling indulgences, abject heresies, etc. I’m also certain it was he who pulled the various Reformers outside the boundaries of Catholic belief in their zeal to reform the Catholic Church. He used their zeal and pride as a weapon against the Church and all Christendom to help split us. He hardened the hearts of men on both sides with Pride and Greed and helped us murder each other in wars and burnings.

God? If you claim God caused the Reformation, that’s fine, but that God is no God of mine. Triumphalist rhetoric and soundbites do no good when you’re trying to reconcile with your brother. Somehow I do remember reconciliation with ones brother being of importance in that one book we’re supposed to be following.

 

[estesbob]

I do not believe the 95 theses started or caused the Reformation. The Church addressed the 95 theses and corrected the abuses. But the Reformation – like the Mississipi – just keeps on rollin’ aloooong.

Both Luther and Henry VIIi wanted to marry their girlfriend.

 

[estesbob]

God

mighty inept god-let people be condmenmed to eternal hellfire for following false doctines and belonging to a false church.

The "reformation’ offered a simplistic approach to salvation rather than the narrow road Christ set out.

 

[Contarini]

Both Luther and Henry VIIi wanted to marry their girlfriend.

With regard to Luther that’s sheer nonsense. He had not met Katharina until the Reformation was well underway; he resisted the idea of getting married for a long time; and on the whole his marriage seems to have been one of convenience rather than primarily driven by romantic or sexual feelings. That being said, once he did it he certainly enjoyed being married and spoke frankly about it, including the sexual part. But this lusty attitude *followed *a theologically driven decision–there is no evidence whatever to indicate that his theological views were driven by lust, and only the most unscrupulous and scurrilous Catholic polemicists suggest otherwise. You discredit your cause by embracing this line of thinking.

You have more to go on WRT Henry VIII, but even there you ignore the political issues surrounding a king without a male heir in the sixteenth century. We are not talking about Dawson’s Creek here.

Edwin

 

[Tantum_ergo]

You forget that Henry did have a ‘male’ heir. . .his illegitimate son, Harry Fitzroy, child of Bessie Blount, who was about the age of his daughter Mary.

Henry looked into having Harry legitimatized (yes, that could be done) before Anne Boleyn ever came back from France to the English court. It is entirely possible that, if Henry had stayed faithful to Catherine, that this could have been done, with young Harry marrying a princess of Spain while Mary married a prince.

Further, although Isabella and Ferdinand are often linked together, Isabella was a queen regnant in her own right before that marriage. Women rulers were not entirely unknown.

Also, Henry was a relatively young man who had arguably (before he developed the leg ulcers which kept him from exercise) one of the best constitutions known. If Mary Tudor had married at age 16, as her mother Catherine did to young Arthur, in 1534, and had had a male child in 1537. . .even if Henry had continued on to die in 1547, that child would have been the same age as Henry’s son Edward was at Henry’s death. And it is certainly equally likely that Henry, under Catherine’s care, would have lived another 10 years or maybe more–in which case, that grandson would have been of full age for succession, England would have remained a Catholic power, and possibly most of Europe would have remained solidly Catholic as well.

 

[Dulcimer]

1. 
   *]The Renaissance popularized humanism.
   *]Growth in trade stimulated materialism and cupidity.
   *]The plagues lowered the number of educated clergy.
   *]Corruption among some clergy exascerbated the need for discipline.
   *]Church/State boundaries became blurred.
   *]Nationalism was on the rise.
   *]In Luther was combined the genius of a Biblical scholar and bona fide cognitive distortions originating in childhood abuse and brought to a head by the Wittenburg Plague.
   link

1. 
   Thank you for ALMOST answering my original question…
   
   C’mon people, I want LUTHER’S top 10 reasons for splitting from the Catholic Church…The selling of indulgences was certainly high on the list. (If you don’t know, please don’t change the subject; let someone else answer the question.) Thanks!

 

[Contarini]

You forget that Henry did have a ‘male’ heir. . .his illegitimate son, Harry Fitzroy, child of Bessie Blount, who was about the age of his daughter Mary.

Henry looked into having Harry legitimatized (yes, that could be done) before Anne Boleyn ever came back from France to the English court. It is entirely possible that, if Henry had stayed faithful to Catherine, that this could have been done, with young Harry marrying a princess of Spain while Mary married a prince.

That is interesting, and I don’t think I’d ever heard about that option, to be honest (though Harry Fitzroy rings a bell).

Your other points are also valid. However, my point was simply that there were political ramifications, and so the matter can’t simply be boiled down to “he wanted to marry his girlfriend.” That’s the soap opera version of history (though there is always a good deal of soap opera in history, particularly Tudor history!). There’s also the fact that by all indications Henry sincerely believed that his first marriage was invalid (of course what we “sincerely” believe is often helped plenty by our desires). There were theological issues concerning “incestuous” marriages and the Pope’s power to dispense from impediments to such marriages. And of course there was the underlying issue of royal vs. papal control of the Church of England.

I wasn’t saying that Henry’s sexual desires didn’t play an important role–I was resisting a simplistic and dismissive version of the story. You appear to know more about it than I do, so I’m happy to leave the discussion in your capable hands.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Thank you for ALMOST answering my original question…

C’mon people, I want LUTHER’S top 10 reasons for splitting from the Catholic Church…The selling of indulgences was certainly high on the list. (If you don’t know, please don’t change the subject; let someone else answer the question.) Thanks!

The problem is that by the time he “split” (which I would define as his burning of the papal bull in December of 1520), there was a chain of “reasons.” Luther’s reasoning would go something like this, I think:

1. The Pope is the Antichrist because
2. He has not only presided over the distortion of the Gospel concerning human salvation but
3. Condemned my efforts to challenge these distortions and
4. Exploited his illegitimately won temporal authority to try to intimidate Elector Frederick and Emperor Charles into arresting me as a heretic; when in fact
5. The Church has no coercive authority but only the authority to proclaim the Gospel and
6. Administer the Sacraments, which have been seriously distorted, especially penance
7. (As supremely exemplified by that indulgence business), and
8. The Eucharist, which is a gift of grace and not a sacrifice, (and
9. Should be administered in both kinds and never celebrated privately) since
10. We are saved only by grace through faith and no work of our own has any value before God.

I intend the first and last items in this list to have particular importance, although of a very different kind, constituting the positive and negative poles driving Luther’s “break with the Church.”

Edwin

 

[Dulcimer]

THANK YOU!!!

Okay, now where do we Catholics/Protestants go from here? IS reconcilliation possible? What doctrines would we have to abandon on BOTH sides to make it happen? And would that be “peace at any price”, and therefore unacceptable?

Please, your thoughts…?

 

[estesbob]

With regard to Luther that’s sheer nonsense. He had not met Katharina until the Reformation was well underway; he resisted the idea of getting married for a long time; and on the whole his marriage seems to have been one of convenience rather than primarily driven by romantic or sexual feelings. That being said, once he did it he certainly enjoyed being married and spoke frankly about it, including the sexual part. But this lusty attitude *followed *a theologically driven decision–there is no evidence whatever to indicate that his theological views were driven by lust, and only the most unscrupulous and scurrilous Catholic polemicists suggest otherwise. You discredit your cause by embracing this line of thinking.

He married his girlfiend-havingbroken his vow to obey the Church I am sure it wasnt hard for him to break his vow of celibacy. Oaths and vows never did mean much to Luther

You have more to go on WRT Henry VIII, but even there you ignore the political issues surrounding a king without a male heir in the sixteenth century. We are not talking about Dawson’s Creek here.

Edwin

Henry already has a bastard son that he could easily have had Parliment affirm as his heir.Would have been a lot easier that asking the Pope for still anohter dispensation. And Henry didnt want a divorce just to gain an heir-he wanted one specifically to marry Ann. His pettion to the Pope not only asked for permission to divocrce it also asked for a dispensation from the rule one could not marry a woman if you had had sex with their Sister-a sitaution that applied to Ann Bolen His emissary prudenelty omited the second request deciding it was too much to ask the Pope for BUT it affirms beyond the shadow of a doubt that he wanted a divorce to marry his mistress.

Quite a contrast One Church was founded by Christ-the other founded on lust 1500 years later

 

[estesbob]

THANK YOU!!!

Okay, now where do we Catholics/Protestants go from here? IS reconcilliation possible? What doctrines would we have to abandon on BOTH sides to make it happen? And would that be “peace at any price”, and therefore unacceptable?

Please, your thoughts…?

I dont think so. Protestanst would have to affirm the Authority of the Pope and the Church and jettison all the other errors that have crept in sinc ethe “reformation”-female Priests, homosexual Bishops, Sola Scriptura, Sola Fidelis, et al