Post by gloryintruth on Sept 29, 2007 6:24:33 GMT -5
Martin Luther. Reformer. Founder of the Protestant movement.
If one were to ask the average person on the street as to who Martin Luther was, they would probably labour mightily to even state the above. If they knew anything about him at all. Or, worse, they would express juicy urban myths which "everyone knows" but which are not actually true. For instance, it is not true that Martin Luther threw inkwells at the devil.
The myth that Luther was an Olympian inkwell tosser came into existence in a typically bizarre fashion. Apparently, some of Luther's houses had dark discolourations on the wall which looked like ink blotches. But the original legend, started by one of Luther's Wittenburg students, was that the Devil threw inkwells at Luther. But like any tall tale, the shoe morphed onto the other foot. People who don't like Luther love this myth because they usually try to castigate his theology on the basis that he was a psychopath.
Another of my favourite Luther myths was reported in one of my countries newspapers a couple of years ago, namely that most of Luther's theological breakthroughs occured when he was seated on the privvy due to his frequent bouts of gastric infection. Like stories which seem kind of possible (after all, we probably all have read extensively on the privvy), there is a ring of reality amongst the sounding gong of the surreal.
Despite many of the myths about Luther being totally silly, it is not inaccurate to say that he was a complex man, and at times, not a particularly likeable individual. He was prone to bizarre outbursts; and to using the earthy and coarse speech of the day in his regular preaching. We would probably find Luther somewhat offensive these days. Yet, despite this, it sometimes seems that just about everything Luther said or did was written down, in addition to Luther's own huge corpuse of writings. This keeps scholars very busy indeed.
Luther once said he would have made a very happy monk, minding his own business in his little monastary. He would have pottered about life, reading and preaching, and never disturbing a single fibre of the fabric of human history. Unfortunately, destiny (if we hold to Fate), predestination (if we hold to God's sovereignty), or uneasy conscience (if we are Arminian) got in the way. Luther poured himself out into what he called "monkishness" - the labours of merit.
Never was there a monk more dedicated to monkishness, he said, but it did not apparently soothe his inner turmoil. Unbeloved by his father, he probably percieved (as so many of us do) that God acts in a manner consistent with our earthy fathers. I remember reading about a conversation between a believer and an unbeliever in a taxi:
B: So you don't believe in God?
U: No. I'm an atheist. You can keep your God!
B: If, hypothetically, there were God, how would you describe Him?
U: I would say he is distant, unloving, harsh and so far removed from the human race that why should we make the effort?
B: Now describe your own father.
Apparently the unbeliever ended up in tears. He had cast God the Father in the same mould as Dad - earthly father. I do wonder whether Luther suffered from the same issue, imagining God to be demanding, harsh and distant from human experience, as his own father was in relation to his life (Luther's father was never was able to bring himself to hug Luther, or even acknowledge his achievements).
By all accounts Luther was a frequent visitor to the confessional. Roman Catholics claim Luther's real problem was that he was scrupulous - burdened with an overactive conscience, which his confessor should have diagnosed and dealt with. They claim this is evidence that Luther just had an issue with his own private struggles, out of which emerged his Protestant doctrine - as opposed to there also being a problem with Roman Catholic teachings themselves. Early Roman Catholic commentators spread the most malicious rumours about Luther, accusing him of wanton sexual immorality. These types of accusations can be safely dismissed as totally false, and they do not appear in any Roman Catholic apologia today.
We simply don't know what went through Luther's mind, because Luther's confessions are not recorded. However, if I could make a guess I would say Luther felt inadequate; he felt that something was absent from his life; something was missing. He did not feel "in touch" with the God of the heavens, and percieved that the fault must lie within himself (surely a better conclusion that assuming the fault lies with God). He once said that he was seeking for a God "whom I can love, and who loves me". I think most of us on this forum - whether exe or 2x2 - could relate to feeling separated from God, cut off and flung far from his existence, just as God must surely have flung the stars to the furtherest corners of the universe.
Luther, like John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) suffered from profound self-doubt. Wesley toward the end of his life wrote in a letter that he had never loved God in his life, and that made him nothing more than "an honest heathen". Luther felt similarly. The final blow came when he was dispatched to Rome from his monastery with letters for the Vatican.
On arrival at Rome - the epicentre of Roman Catholicism - he found things that disillusioned him to the core of his being. He returned to his monastery an embittered and faithless man.
I could go on, but I must leave it here. I will close by adding some notes I have jotted down in my recent study of Luther's text Of Christian Liberty. I wrote these notes a couple of weeks ago, and they are very rough. But they are prompted by Luther's writings and may be of some value:
Christianity must be proved experimentally – that is, through experience with it. Primarily, Luther asserts, by testing Christian faith within times of conflict and disaster (“tribulation”).
To taste true Christianity is to develop instant addiction to it – always desiring to write, speak, and think about it more. I write, I speak, but do I think? And is not the greatest of these three activities, thought?
The humility of spirit; humility within knowledge? Who knows Luther’s true orientation?
Luther thinks himself in a superior position than the elegant, subtle and sophisticated theologians because he has been tempted already, through which he considers himself to have “attained faith”. Interesting that Luther here should speak the language of Free Will and not Predestination. A follower of Calvin would have carefully structured such a passage using the same elegant, subtle and sophisticated language Luther here lambastes – God has granted me a small drop\measure of faith.
The philosophy of language is a well-spring hardly to be exhausted. Which is best? To approach people on their own turf with lofty language, or to be blunt and simple in tongue? When the Apostle Paul spoke to the Areopagite philosophers his orations are easily to be understood but so deep in meaning. Perhaps then elegance in speech is an effort to make our words seem more profound than they really are; that through highfalutin speech we pride ourselves on somehow having substance. But maybe it is in simplicity that the deepest, most striking, most profound things are.
An apparent contradiction in terms: the Christian as lord and servant; as subject to none, yet subject to everyone. Luther must be referring to the inner and outer life of the Christian. Inwardly, he is free and without bondage, yet outwardly it appears as though he is only a servant and in bondage to all.
It is funny, but all those who read the Apostle Paul extensively seem to develop his inflection.
Christ is the ultimate contradiction.
This is why Christ is of fundamental important to the human race. He shifted the centre of reality to the spiritual. So even the most carnal, tarty, lustful, sinful, party animal that spends years moving from one drunken stupor to another, who never spares a thought for God, who rolls around in one bed after another, has still tasted of the impact of Christ. Because although he is ultimately carnal, the shift in reality affects even his or her thinking to the point where there is some redeeming feature – grace of God, and restrained by God. In all of this Christ is the centre of all humanity, society, virtue, morality, and reality.
Diversity within the one form leads to conflict. The two halves are at war with each other.
Luther makes a definition of flesh to mean the “bodily nature” but this doesn’t seem much of an improvement to me. What does “bodily nature” mean? The part in bondage – servitude? But we all agree: the spirit is not free until it is converted, likewise bodily.
It’s worthwhile to remember the diversity within the human being – it helps to interpret and synthesis the passages of the bible which say different things concerning the human.
Perhaps the flesh and the old man cannot be defined without reference to the new. The new man is everything which the old man is not. The flesh is everything opposed by the spirit. Etc.
If one were to ask the average person on the street as to who Martin Luther was, they would probably labour mightily to even state the above. If they knew anything about him at all. Or, worse, they would express juicy urban myths which "everyone knows" but which are not actually true. For instance, it is not true that Martin Luther threw inkwells at the devil.
The myth that Luther was an Olympian inkwell tosser came into existence in a typically bizarre fashion. Apparently, some of Luther's houses had dark discolourations on the wall which looked like ink blotches. But the original legend, started by one of Luther's Wittenburg students, was that the Devil threw inkwells at Luther. But like any tall tale, the shoe morphed onto the other foot. People who don't like Luther love this myth because they usually try to castigate his theology on the basis that he was a psychopath.
Another of my favourite Luther myths was reported in one of my countries newspapers a couple of years ago, namely that most of Luther's theological breakthroughs occured when he was seated on the privvy due to his frequent bouts of gastric infection. Like stories which seem kind of possible (after all, we probably all have read extensively on the privvy), there is a ring of reality amongst the sounding gong of the surreal.
Despite many of the myths about Luther being totally silly, it is not inaccurate to say that he was a complex man, and at times, not a particularly likeable individual. He was prone to bizarre outbursts; and to using the earthy and coarse speech of the day in his regular preaching. We would probably find Luther somewhat offensive these days. Yet, despite this, it sometimes seems that just about everything Luther said or did was written down, in addition to Luther's own huge corpuse of writings. This keeps scholars very busy indeed.
Luther once said he would have made a very happy monk, minding his own business in his little monastary. He would have pottered about life, reading and preaching, and never disturbing a single fibre of the fabric of human history. Unfortunately, destiny (if we hold to Fate), predestination (if we hold to God's sovereignty), or uneasy conscience (if we are Arminian) got in the way. Luther poured himself out into what he called "monkishness" - the labours of merit.
Never was there a monk more dedicated to monkishness, he said, but it did not apparently soothe his inner turmoil. Unbeloved by his father, he probably percieved (as so many of us do) that God acts in a manner consistent with our earthy fathers. I remember reading about a conversation between a believer and an unbeliever in a taxi:
B: So you don't believe in God?
U: No. I'm an atheist. You can keep your God!
B: If, hypothetically, there were God, how would you describe Him?
U: I would say he is distant, unloving, harsh and so far removed from the human race that why should we make the effort?
B: Now describe your own father.
Apparently the unbeliever ended up in tears. He had cast God the Father in the same mould as Dad - earthly father. I do wonder whether Luther suffered from the same issue, imagining God to be demanding, harsh and distant from human experience, as his own father was in relation to his life (Luther's father was never was able to bring himself to hug Luther, or even acknowledge his achievements).
By all accounts Luther was a frequent visitor to the confessional. Roman Catholics claim Luther's real problem was that he was scrupulous - burdened with an overactive conscience, which his confessor should have diagnosed and dealt with. They claim this is evidence that Luther just had an issue with his own private struggles, out of which emerged his Protestant doctrine - as opposed to there also being a problem with Roman Catholic teachings themselves. Early Roman Catholic commentators spread the most malicious rumours about Luther, accusing him of wanton sexual immorality. These types of accusations can be safely dismissed as totally false, and they do not appear in any Roman Catholic apologia today.
We simply don't know what went through Luther's mind, because Luther's confessions are not recorded. However, if I could make a guess I would say Luther felt inadequate; he felt that something was absent from his life; something was missing. He did not feel "in touch" with the God of the heavens, and percieved that the fault must lie within himself (surely a better conclusion that assuming the fault lies with God). He once said that he was seeking for a God "whom I can love, and who loves me". I think most of us on this forum - whether exe or 2x2 - could relate to feeling separated from God, cut off and flung far from his existence, just as God must surely have flung the stars to the furtherest corners of the universe.
Luther, like John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) suffered from profound self-doubt. Wesley toward the end of his life wrote in a letter that he had never loved God in his life, and that made him nothing more than "an honest heathen". Luther felt similarly. The final blow came when he was dispatched to Rome from his monastery with letters for the Vatican.
On arrival at Rome - the epicentre of Roman Catholicism - he found things that disillusioned him to the core of his being. He returned to his monastery an embittered and faithless man.
I could go on, but I must leave it here. I will close by adding some notes I have jotted down in my recent study of Luther's text Of Christian Liberty. I wrote these notes a couple of weeks ago, and they are very rough. But they are prompted by Luther's writings and may be of some value:
Christianity must be proved experimentally – that is, through experience with it. Primarily, Luther asserts, by testing Christian faith within times of conflict and disaster (“tribulation”).
To taste true Christianity is to develop instant addiction to it – always desiring to write, speak, and think about it more. I write, I speak, but do I think? And is not the greatest of these three activities, thought?
The humility of spirit; humility within knowledge? Who knows Luther’s true orientation?
Luther thinks himself in a superior position than the elegant, subtle and sophisticated theologians because he has been tempted already, through which he considers himself to have “attained faith”. Interesting that Luther here should speak the language of Free Will and not Predestination. A follower of Calvin would have carefully structured such a passage using the same elegant, subtle and sophisticated language Luther here lambastes – God has granted me a small drop\measure of faith.
The philosophy of language is a well-spring hardly to be exhausted. Which is best? To approach people on their own turf with lofty language, or to be blunt and simple in tongue? When the Apostle Paul spoke to the Areopagite philosophers his orations are easily to be understood but so deep in meaning. Perhaps then elegance in speech is an effort to make our words seem more profound than they really are; that through highfalutin speech we pride ourselves on somehow having substance. But maybe it is in simplicity that the deepest, most striking, most profound things are.
An apparent contradiction in terms: the Christian as lord and servant; as subject to none, yet subject to everyone. Luther must be referring to the inner and outer life of the Christian. Inwardly, he is free and without bondage, yet outwardly it appears as though he is only a servant and in bondage to all.
It is funny, but all those who read the Apostle Paul extensively seem to develop his inflection.
Christ is the ultimate contradiction.
This is why Christ is of fundamental important to the human race. He shifted the centre of reality to the spiritual. So even the most carnal, tarty, lustful, sinful, party animal that spends years moving from one drunken stupor to another, who never spares a thought for God, who rolls around in one bed after another, has still tasted of the impact of Christ. Because although he is ultimately carnal, the shift in reality affects even his or her thinking to the point where there is some redeeming feature – grace of God, and restrained by God. In all of this Christ is the centre of all humanity, society, virtue, morality, and reality.
Diversity within the one form leads to conflict. The two halves are at war with each other.
Luther makes a definition of flesh to mean the “bodily nature” but this doesn’t seem much of an improvement to me. What does “bodily nature” mean? The part in bondage – servitude? But we all agree: the spirit is not free until it is converted, likewise bodily.
It’s worthwhile to remember the diversity within the human being – it helps to interpret and synthesis the passages of the bible which say different things concerning the human.
Perhaps the flesh and the old man cannot be defined without reference to the new. The new man is everything which the old man is not. The flesh is everything opposed by the spirit. Etc.