Hard to believe the Guardian would publish this.
Oct 31 1517.
Yeah ask that to the peasants whose murder he advocated he was a tool of the Princes to gain power over the people and the emperor. Huge schmuck.
Of course the Reformation era Protestants like Luther et al., once ascendant throughout Northern Europe, were hardly proponents of religious toleration when it came to followers of the old religion, but viciously and cruelly outlawed Catholicism. Even when religious toleration became a thing with Locke and later the French Revolution, they didn’t want to give religious toleration to Catholics. The American revolutionaries were somewhat unique among the Enlightenment people in eschewing this anti-Catholic hypocrisy.
The real issue for today, which the leftist writer will not mention, is where is the Islamic Martin Luther. Because that religion is still burning people at the stake and is screaming for reform.
I was shocked by the silence, intellectually fraudulent.
Replace "congregation" with "Conservatives" and "Rome" with our "(local/state/fed) governments" - and you have a sense of what Germany's congregation of regular folk must have felt and why they embraced Luther.
Luther makes Hitler look like a piker when it comes to spreading evil,lies,death, and destruction.
I have a bad feeling about this thread.
We already have someone who played the Hitler card.
This could get both funny and ugly.
Jews ain’t joining the fête.
Be ready to hear the claim that MARY caused it all!
What Luther and the other Reformers sought to do was actually reforming or returning the organized church back to its original Scriptural basis.
• Jaroslav Pelikan (Lutheran, later Eastern Orhodox), The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1959), also found:
“The reformers were catholic because they were spokesmen for an evangelical tradition in medieval catholicism, what Luther called "the succession of the faithful." The fountainhead of that tradition was Augustine (d. 430). His complex and far-reaching system of thought incorporated the catholic ideal of identity plus universality, and by its emphasis upon sin and grace it became the ancestor of Reformation theology. … All the reformers relied heavily upon Augustine. They pitted his evangelical theology against the authority of later church fathers and scholastics, and they used him to prove that they were not introducing novelties into the church, but defending the true faith of the church.”
“...To prepare books like the Magdeburg Centuries they combed the libraries and came up with a remarkable catalogue of protesting catholics and evangelical catholics, all to lend support to the insistence that the Protestant position was, in the best sense, a catholic position.
Additional support for this insistence comes from the attitude of the reformers toward the creeds and dogmas of the ancient catholic church. The reformers retained and cherished the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the two natures in Christ which had developed in the first five centuries of the church….”
“If we keep in mind how variegated medieval catholicism was, the legitimacy of the reformers' claim to catholicity becomes clear. (Pelikan, pp. 46-47)
"Substantiation for this understanding of the gospel came principally from the Scriptures, but whenever they could, the reformers also quoted the fathers of the catholic church. There was more to quote than their Roman opponents found comfortable." (Pelikan 48-49). More Here
NOT!
