[Vermont Crank]

Dear boatbums. I was trying to be kind to him and quote him writing the truth about the One True Church.

Now, I could have written what he taught about Jesus, that He, Jesus, became a sinner, an evil doer and a murderer:

But Christ took upon Himself all of our sin, and thus He died upon the cross. Therefore he had to become that which we are, namely a sinner, a murderer, evildoer, etc. . . . For insofar as he is a victim for the sins of the whole world, He is not now such a person as is innocent and without sin, is not God's Son in all glory, but a sinner, abandoned by God for a short time

See? The truth about what the great Heresiarch taught is quite nasty, heretical and evil. The person, Luther, taught that Jesus, He who is eternally without sin , He who is Our Lord and Saviour, was a damnable Sinner - like Luther.

[boatbums]

Please! Just stop with the attempts to smear Luther with out-of-context, UNSOURCED snippets from works I highly doubt you have taken the time to read. I shouldn't have to follow Catholics around correcting all the misinformation they spew about a Godly man! I'm not a Lutheran but I DO care about truth. If you cared about writing the truth and being "kind", you would take the time to research rather than toss out inflammatory words which no one should just accept at face value unless they look at the quotes further.

I've given you this link before, please take a few moments to look up a passage to get the real point rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to words ripped from their context and designed to give the false impression of the speaker being "nasty, heretical and evil". When I went to http://beggarsallreformation.blogspot.com/search?q=did+luther+say+jesus+became+a+sinner, I find out:

No one knows if Luther actually said this. The critical apparatus in the Weimar Ausgabe reveals the textual and grammatical problems in this supposed quotation. Schlagenhaufen recorded only a portion of what he remembered Luther to have said that day (and after how many beers?). No context is given.

Scholars know how difficult, if not impossible, it is to link the lapidary "table notations" of Luther's friends to Luther's own views. The editors of the American Edition speculate in a footnote that the "probable context is suggested in a sermon of 1536 (WA 41, 647) in which Luther asserted that Christ was reproached by the world as a glutton, a winebibber, and even an adulterer" (LW 54:154).

A more probable context is Luther's account of the atonement. One of his basic assertions is that our sins become Christ's and Christ's perfect righteousness becomes ours by faith. This idea of "the happy exchange" is found in many Luther texts. Given his central soteriological and christological concern, the theological irony in Schlagenhaufen's remembered notation becomes clearer: The "godly" Christ becomes or is made a sinner through his solidarity with sinners, even to the point of dying as a God-forsaken criminal on the cross. This is how Luther understood Paul's statement, "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).

So Christ "becomes" an adulterer, though he does not actually commit adultery with Mary or anyone else. He puts mercy front and center, and rejects the legalism which demanded that the woman caught in adultery be killed and the woman at the well and Mary Magdalene be shunned. The holy one becomes the sinner by putting himself into the situation of sinners, by loving and forgiving them, and ultimately by taking their sins on himself. For this gospel reason, Luther could also remark that God made Jesus "the worst sinner of the whole world," even though he also acknowledged that the sinless, righteous Christ actually committed no sin himself.

Please take a few extra moments next time to find out if what you are saying IS actually what Luther said and in what context he said it and why. That way, you will look less like a slanderer and more like a truth-seeker who is kind.