[livius]

If you want to discuss "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism," maybe we could start a separate thread on that...

But as far as this thread goes, I think the author does make some interesting points. First of all, let me say that I don't think Protestantism is directly descended from Islam. For one thing, what is "Protestantism"? There are so many varieties of it that the term is almost meaningless. Nowadays, it means simply neither Orthodox nor Catholic. So perhaps the best thing to do for this discussion is to limit it specifically to Luther and his immediate followers and disregard the variants that appeared later.

That said, I don't think Luther was directly inspired by Islam, although there certainly would have been some discussion of it in the universities of his day. Many of the things that Luther believed or defended, either initially or eventually, such as polygamy, were typical features of other, earlier movements and did not come from Islam. The only thing I do wonder about is the "Sola Scriptura" current. That strikes me as something that might reflect a direct influence of Islam and its approach to its texts. Or did it come from somewhere else? I don't recall it's having been part of any other earlier movement in Christianity.

[Enosh]

I think the author does make some interesting points.

Okay, here's a "point."

• all Bible believing Protestants from Luther to the present-day have required a huge substructure of unacknowledged assumptions and beliefs by which they interpret the Bible, and which don’t come from it.

What do you get when you ignore everything not found in the Bible? Fundamentalism. Christian Fundamentalism, to be exact.

Why, who are they? Presbyterians, Baptists, etc... Protestants all.

So you see, this one "point" in the article is flatly false.

Further, to compare Islamic Fundamentalism to Christian Fundamentalism is simply insane. We don't even worship the same God.

[GoLightly]

The only thing I do wonder about is the "Sola Scriptura" current. That strikes me as something that might reflect a direct influence of Islam and its approach to its texts.

Doubtful, since Islam doesn't require Muslims to understand the Koran & translation into any language from the original Arab is frowned upon. The idea is to recite the book in Arab & Allah will do the rest.

Then there are the side books about the life of Mo, so the faithful can model their lives after him. When Muslims want to know how it all applies to something, they get a ruling about it (fatwa) from a Muslim scholar.

[redgolum]

The Lutheran Reformation has less similarity to islam than some of the more radical and Reformed strains do. But remember this, the biggest common factor between the two are iconoclasm. Lutherans, for the most part, didn't do that. Neither did the Anglicans.

It is pretty easy to set up straw men, harder to take a look closely at things.

What is funny to me, is I used to lurk and the Catholic Answers forum. At least until there were a number of threads where a poster was saying that islam and Roman Catholicism were a lot closer than any Protestant, and most of the posters agreed. Many said that since islam has a better view of Mary than most "protestants", they were closer to being "Christian". Now that is balderdash, but if I wanted to start throwing mud on this issue, it would be very easy to spin it the other way.