ummm... yes?
No 'e' on Brown at the link.
Face it. He was an anti Semite and a glutton. Henry VIII was a cruel hedonist. These two guys will never be confused with Saint Peter or Saint Paul. Two founders of the Reformation were decadent at their core. No surprise how it all turned out five hundred years later.
To quote Sarah Palin, “You betcha!”
A 1935 review entitled The Psychoanalysis of Luther: Escape from Pessimism, by Francis J McGarrigle. S.J.
>https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=652<
A LOT of worthless gasbags make their living parsing words from 500 Years Ago without disclosing that the vernacular and meaning words have changed in that period. They assign interpretations, and sometimes put [unspoken] words in the mouth of people.
If you don't believe me, go try to read something in old or middle English. Ostensibly the SAME language, but totally incomprehensible.
Meh...
Luther seems about typical of Christian clergy of any persuasion in his time. He was just a little more flamboyant. I don’t see that any Christian group has a claim on moral superiority based on Christian views at the same time in history.
..perhaps he was suffering from dementia later in life. The Reformers were great on Soteriology, but their spiritualization of the OT gave birth to Replacement theology...
In a word, yes. Cringe-worthy stuff he said. Going back a bit further (ok, a lot), many of the so-called early church fathers had some not so nice things to say about Jews also.
Writing as he did, Luther would have been welcomed in the mosque.
>>Lets own it with sadness and grief. To do otherwise is to be less than honest with the memory of Martin Luther.
Let’s do that, and let’s look at it in the context of his time and not ours. Eugenics and Humanism created the Holocaust, not the anti-semitism of Luther, as some like to claim.
Luther set out to reform a religion that had turned into a secular power that ruled governments and kings and committed vile acts of evil in God’s name. The actions of that secular power masquerading as the Church forced Reformers into a new Church.
Always remember that the Roman Church murdered people whose only crime was to make the bible available to the laity, which is something that we take as a right today. They did this BEFORE the Reformation. Luther may have been anti-semitic, but how many Jews did he burn or garotte?
It is amazing that God chooses to use flawed humans.
Blessed Father Luther was flawed, but used mightily to restore the Gospel of grace.
Righteousness is found in God alone and He alone gets the glory when He uses imperfect tools to accomplishing sh His will.
Sadly, true, but not in the sense that we think today.
My understanding is that Luther expected Jews to be excited at the rise of the real, reformed church he was instituting. When they did not he turned against them.
Therefore, it was not a despisal of the semitic bloodline that originally motivated Luther. It was a religious rejection of Jews and Judaism.
That’s not good by any means. It’s just different than 20th century anti-semitism which was more a racist ideology.
Re: “Tragically, Adolph Hitler thought that Luther was a genius who figured out how dangerous the Jewish people were. And the date that many historians mark as the beginning of the Holocaust, Nov. 9, 1938, was the day that Hitler put Luthers advice into practice, setting on fire and vandalizing Jewish synagogues, shops, and homes”.
But Hitler’s anti-semitism was not based on Luther. The “bible” for Hitler’s anti-semitism was the ancient Roman historian Tacitus’s book “Germania”. Read “A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich” by Christopher Krebs.
As Christians we must remember that no mere human has ever lived without dreadful, soul-damning sin -- not Paul, Peter, John, Joseph, Mary or anyone else. Like us, they were all sinners solely dependent upon the substitution of God's perfect lamb, Jesus Christ, who lived a sinless life, died a sacrificial death in our place, and overcame the ultimate penalty of sin by his miraculous resurrection. Were we to have authored God's plan from the beginning, none of us would have chosen a single one of the key actors whom God selected. God's strength is displayed in our weakness.
The history of Europe includes a history of hating Jews. Martin Luthor reinforced the hatred of Jews. The story of Hansel and Gretel originally had the witch as Jewish. And the witch (Jewish) was tossed into the oven. The history of the Land of Christiandom led up(or down) to the German death camps. Along the way the Land of Christiandom had influences from the Moslems. The Christians learned various techniques of cruelties from the Moslems.
Wow
The author fails to mention that the "writings penned by Jews in past generations" that Luther was upset with, was the Talmud.
Sinful writings by Martin Luther. Also, Adolf Hitler was raised as a Roman Catholic as was Martin Luther. There is enough sin to go around. We all put Christ on that cross.
Yes he was.