Posted on 06/19/2009 10:03:34 PM PDT by dangus
Praise God, that we are saved by grace alone. Works without faith are utterly without merit. This is not merely a Protestant notion.
Such has been the persistent teaching of the saints throughout the ages. Yet a whitewashing of Martin Luther has led to many people, even Catholics, fundamentally misunderstanding the Catholic Church's criticism of him.
Please understand that what I write here is no ad-hominem attack on Luther for any purpose, including the slander of Protestantism. Attacking the moral character of Martin Luther is gainless, for no-one supposes Luther to be imbued with the gift of infallibility. But when the counter-reformation is known by most people only by what it opposes, it becomes necessary to clarify what it was that it opposes. Further, given the whitewashed history of Martin Luther, it is imperitive to remember the context of the Catholic Church's language and actions, which seem terribly strident, presented out of the context.
The Catholic Church does not believe that one could merit salvation by doing good works. Nor could one avoid sin by one's own strengths. In fact, the Catholic position is one held by most people who believe they follow Luther's principle of sola fides. We are saved by grace alone, by which we have faith, which necessarily leads us to righteous works, and the avoidance of sin.
This is not Luther's position. Luther held that it was impossible to avoid sin. “As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin.” (Letter to Melanchthon, 1521) "They are fools who attempt to overcome temptations by fasting, prayer and chastisement. For such temptations and immoral attacks are easily overcome when there are plenty of maidens and women" (Luther's Works, Jena ed., 1558, 2, 116; cited in P. F. O'Hare, "The Facts About Luther", Rockford, 1987, 311).
As such, it was not necessary to avoid sin. “If grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.” In fact, the way to conquer sin, he taught was to indulge it: “The way to battle a tempting demon was to “in-dulge some sin in hatred of the evil spirit and to torment him.” Even the greatest sin was permissible, so long as one believed in Christ.: “Sin shall not drag us away from Him, even should we commit fornication or murder a thousand times a day. (all quotes from Letter to Melanchthon, 1521)
These quotes are often brushed aside as being hot-headed rhetoric. (Ironically, one passage to suggest that such intemperate statements were righteous is Jesus' warning that should one's eyes cause him to lust, he should cast the eye into Gehenna. How diametrically opposed to Jesus' teaching is Luther's!) But they were not said in a harmless context. Luther counseled Prince Phillip that it would be fine to take a mistress. And his comments that peasants were born to be cannon fodder is horrific in light of the deaths of 100,000 peasants in a rebellion of which he spoke, “I said they should be slain; all their blood is upon my head... My little book against the peasants is quite in the right and shall remain so, even if all the world were to be scandalized at it.” (Luther's Works, Erlangen ed., 24.299)
Such beliefs are not incidental to Luther; they are a major part of the reason for many princes siding with him against the Catholic church. Without such support, his movement would have no base. But he also appealed to their financial motives, arguing that they had no obligation to fight Muslims. In fact, Luther preached that Islamic domination was superior to Catholicism. His horrors at the excesses of Rome were pure fiction, aimed at weakening Rome's military strength. His lies are betrayed by his ignorance of Rome's geography. (He mistakenly thought that the Vatican was built on one of the seven hills of Rome, an assertion he'd make time and time again in asserting that the Papacy was Babylon.) Again, the context is horrifying: Belgrade fell in the very same year as the Council of Worms, 1521. By 1529, the Islamic horde had reached Vienna.
Luther even attacked the Holy Bible, itself. Nowhere does the bible say we are saved by “faith alone.” In fact, those words exist only in the Letter of James. So, Luther sought to have that book struck out of the bible. At the Council of Worms, he was shown how the 1st Letter of Peter refers to purgatory, how Revelations depicts the saints in Heaven praying for the souls below, how James explicitly states that “faith alone is dead, if it has not works.” Later Protestant apologists offered alternate explanations for these difficult passages, but Luther simply declared that they were false: “Many sweat to reconcile St. Paul and St. James, but in vain. 'Faith justifies' and 'faith does not justify' contradict each other flatly. If any one can harmonize them I will give him my doctor's hood and let him call me a fool “
His violence to the Word of God was worse still regarding the Old Testament. In condemning the Ten Commandments, he said Moses should be “damned and excommunicated; yea, worse than the Pope and the Devil.” Yet this man argued that the bible alone was authoritative?
When confronted by the Catholic church over his statements, Luther never disavowed these statements, or claimed they were exaggerations, or apologize for putting his foot in his mouth. Instead, he boasted, “Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great gifts on any bishop as He has on me.”
Thus, the Catholic church was in the position of defending Western Civilization militarily against the Islamic horde, when an outrageous heretic preached all manner of hatred against it, instigating insurrection, and leading political forces to align against it. In doing so, he attacked not only the Church, but the historical and biblical under-pinnings of the bible. Could there be any wonder that the church responded harshly? Luther is dead, and he has never been held to be infallible or sinless. This is not an attack on him, but a defense on the Catholic Church, which he assailed.
It's 1529. The Muslims are in Bavaria. There's a madman boasting that he's responsible for 100,000 dead peasants, and he sides with the Turks. Can you really say that the Church treated him too harshly?
Here's a news flash: it didn't take chr*stianity to discover that no one's perfect.
Human frailty doesn't negate the obligation of Israel to obey Torah (and non-Jews to obey the Noachide Laws).
>> “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” <<
Tell that to her husband.
God reads our hearts, and knows our intent. If we long to commit adultery, and do not only because we know the object of our lust wouldn’t have sex with us, or we fear the conflict with her husband, our soul is just as sinful. That’s what Jesus meant. He did not mean that committing adultery is no more harmful than desiring to commit adultery... because there are other issues besides our own sinfulness.
You (and Luther) are correct in one sense: we all are sinners, and I certainly will have to rely on the forgiveness of Christ. I acknowledged as much when I said, “I’ll ever conquer my own concupiscence totally.” I’ll go one further and acknowledge that all sin, no matter how small, makes us deserving of death, and that only through Christ can we avoid eternal judgment.
But we CAN reduce the amount of harm we do in the world. And if we love each other, we should seek to reduce that harm by avoiding sin. Yet Luther commended adultery, saying it was impossible to avoid. No wonder he thought it was unavoidable! His counsel of avoiding temptation to commit adultery was to keep the company of many maidens, and to indulge the senses, somehow unaware that indulging desires only inflames them.
The Catholic Church and St. Paul give much sounder advice to avoid sin: mortification of the flesh, through abstaining from sensual pleasures. Stop allowing your eyes to feast on sexy women, and you will not commit adultery. Stop rewarding your lust with even the pleasure of oggling women, and soon you will not even lust in your heart.
Acknowledging that my own sanctification (purification from evil desires) is incomplete is quite another thing from acknwoledging that I am, even with the grace of God, helpless to avoid grave sin.
>> Were you there? <<
The actual quote is this:
:: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen. ::
At some point, decades later, someone seemed to have decided that “Here I stand, I can do no other” was a pithy summation, and soon it spread he had said it. Later hagiographies began inserting it between “...nor right to go against conscience” and “May God help me.”
Do we know for certain he did NOT say it? No. But why would the early writings, including from Lutheran sources, have edited OUT such a pithy “soundbite.” More likely, it emerged from verbal retelling of what he said.
Plausible, to me.
I just think it’s at least a bit risky, as a general rule, to be 100% emphatic about things long ago unless they are part of God’s Word.
>> First of all, FWIW, I have since leaving the church learned from a very traditional source that the correct Catholic position is that both faith and works are necessary for salvation, and that the position that you, dangus, are putting forward, is a Protestantized version. <<
What I said was this:
:: [W]e are saved by grace alone. Works without faith are utterly without merit... The Catholic Church does not believe that one could merit salvation by doing good works. ::
Allow me to also add to that that faith without works is dead; If you say you have faith, but you have no works, then I say you’re faith is misplaced. Suppose you say you faith in Bob. Bob says that if you don’t move your car off the tracks, the car will be hit by the train and destroyed. You do not move your train off the tracks, and your car is destroyed. Can you say you truly believed in Bob? You might believe he existed, but you did not believe what he told you. But if you do have faith in Bob, you will move your car. Does that mean that faith is insufficient?
Suppose you, instead, stand in front of the car, bracing yourself to push the train off the tracks and away for the car. This is what people try to do all the time when they try to be righteous without divine assistance. They try to avoid sin, or do great works with their own strength and their own intellect. But if they are not obeying Christ, their actions are futile, because only Christ knows what they must do.
>> I just think it’s at least a bit risky, as a general rule, to be 100% emphatic about things long ago unless they are part of God’s Word. <<
True. We were discussing what a good, impartial biography of Martin Luther was. I didn’t even say it was a bad book. I only offered a reason for skepticism.
It would also help if women would quit displaying their bodies so as to get the attention.
Maybe the title was meant to encourage sales.
“I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience” wouldn’t fit on a paperback...
:: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen. ::
The great problem with that quote, of course, is that Luther might as well have added: “And if scripture disagrees with me, than it must not be truly scripture, for my own rash judgments and prejudices are the very word of God.” Because the Catholic Church’s response to his assertions was precisely to quote scripture to him. And his counter-response was to declare that the 14 books cited were later inventions. And, yes, 9 of those books are in the Protestant canon today.
I think I have at least a bit of an understanding of your perspective.
Thx.
The whole "faith vs. works" dilemma comes from replacing (chas vechalilah!) G-d's laws and rituals with those of chr*stianity. For almost five hundred years now Catholics (and Orthodox) have been trying to explain to Protestants why Jewish rituals don't "work" while chr*stian ones do.
All this trouble would be saved by merely admitting that G-d had already spoken and chr*stianity was never necessary.
I don’t mean to disrespect you, ZC, but I’m not interested in debating you. You ignored every premise of my original work to insert your own patently false assertions of what I believe, and your own beliefs are far outside the framework of this discussion. I responded to what I did just to reiterate one particular point.
Not to downplay the spiritual benefits of modesty, but immodesty is not the root cause of male lust. If all women wore dresses to the floor, the untamed male will furiously lust after the shameless hussy who revealed a little bit of ankle, or let his mind go wild with what lay beneath the cloth.
Certain Islamic societies, as you know, have completely hidden women behind an oppressive burqa, and men fantasize about the bodies of children, because that’s their closest guess as to what a woman’s body is like.
Do you find this statement to be true or not?
I talked to my friend to verify that what I said was true and he said yes, that he was probably 40 years old before he knew there was a Bible.
He said he grew up in the Catholic Church and went to CAtholic school and never heard anything about the Bible.
He said the reason he learned about the Bible when he did was because he met the woman that he married and she had a King James Bible.
See my post no. 115.
Simply not credible. Ridiculous in fact.
That kind of staggering ignorance cannot be laid at the feet of the Catholic Church.
How old was he when he first learned about the dictionary? The phone book? The sun?
“Because the Catholic Church’s response to his assertions was precisely to quote scripture to him.”
Having seen some of the scripture quoting done on a few of these Catholic threads, I think I can understand why Luther wasn’t convinced.
I cannot defend Luther's action in this, but it isn't quite as simple as your description.
From Here I Stand: A Life Of Martin Luther, quoted here:
http://www.ntrmin.org/Armstrong%20and%20Bainton%201.htm#a6
"“There are several incidents over which one would rather draw the veil, but precisely because they are so often exploited to his discredit they are not to be left unrecorded.” The most notorious was his attitude toward the bigamy of the landgrave, Philip of Hesse. This prince had been given in marriage with no regard to his own affections — that is, for purely political reasons — at the age of nineteen to the daughter of Duke George. Philip, unable to combine romance with marriage, found his satisfaction promiscuously on the outside. After his conversion his conscience so troubled him that he dared not present himself at the Lord s Table. He believed that if he could have one partner to whom he was genuinely attached he would be able to keep himself within the bounds of matrimony. There were several ways in which his difficulty could have been solved. If he had remained a Catholic, he might have been able to secure an annulment on the grounds of some defect in the marriage; but since he had become a Lutheran, he could expect no consideration from the pope. Nor would Luther permit recourse to the Catholic device. A second solution would have been divorce and re-marriage. A great many Protestant bodies in the present day would countenance this method, particularly since Philip had been subjected in his youth to a loveless match. But Luther at this point interpreted the Gospels rigidly and held to the word of Christ as reported by Matthew that divorce is permissible only for adultery. But Luther did feel that there should be some remedy, and he discovered it by a reversion to the mores of the Old Testament patriarchs, who had practiced bigamy and even polygamy without any manifestation of divine displeasure. Philip was given the assurance that he might in good conscience take a second wife. Since, however, to do so would be against the law of the land, he should keep the union a secret. This the new bride's mother declined to do; and then Luther counseled a lie on the ground that his advice had been given as in the confessional, and to guard the secrete of the confessional a lie is justified. But the secret was out, and the disavowal was ineffective. Luther's final comment was that if anyone thereafter should practice bigamy, let the Devil give him a bath in the abyss of hell.
The whole episode had disastrous political consequences for the Protestant movement because Philip, in order to secure pardon from the emperor, had to dissociate himself from a military alliance with the Protestants. The scene of Philip abjectly seeking grace from His Imperial Majesty has a certain irony because Charles deposited illegitimate children all over Europe, whom the pope legitimatized in order that they might occupy high offices of state. Luther's solution of the problem can be called only a pitiable subterfuge. He should first have directed his attack against the evil system of degrading marriage to the level of a political convenience, and he might well have adopted the later Protestant solution of divorce."
“I also was raised Catholic, and in 8 years of Catholic school, we were never once encouraged to read a Bible, and you never ever heard the word Bible and study in the same sentence.”
And yet the Church did encourage it and so did every Catholic Bible itself. Ever hear of Vatican II?
“Not once. Sure, we were read some of the stories in the Bible, but that all we ever got, just a few verses here and there.”
Ever go to Mass? There's way more than a few verses here and there.
“I know of only just a few Bibles on the church property, one at the altar, and maybe a few of the nuns had them. There were never ANY Bibles in the pews, just that missal thing.”
There's no reason to put Bibles in the pews when the Missal is what is needed for the Mass.
“We had one at home, but since we were never encouraged to read it, we never did or were even curious about it.”
The real problem would be your own lack of curiosity.
“In short it was big ripoff.”
No, in itself it wasn't.
“I am so blessed that the Lord opened my eyes in recent years.”
Apparently they're not open enough yet.
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