[daniel1212]

Are you excusing and defending Luther's hatred of the Jews by claiming Rome taught him that, after he had broken with the Catholic Church, started his own religion,

Luther has no more excuse then those who said like things before him.

Luther at the beginning sought the welfare of Jews, but their intractable hardness, pride, acts and blasphemies finally exasperated him, while Luther was never one to mince words and use acerbic speech at times. The Jews of old provoked even Moses "spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips," (Psalms 106:33) but Luther was wrong in advising worse things than conservative want to be done to illegal immigrants.

Yet many things are charged with inciting antisemitism. Paul himself stated by the Holy Spirit,

For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost. (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16)

But Paul was willing to be damned for them.

And

Patristic bishops of the patristic era such as Augustine argued that the Jews should be left alive and suffering as a perpetual reminder of their murder of Christ. Other Church Fathers, such as John Chrysostom went longer in their condemnation. Ephraim the Syrian wrote polemics against Jews in the 4th century, including the repeated accusation that Satan dwells among them as a partner. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_antisemitism#The_Church_Fathers

Yet Hitler's use of things to justify the holocaust must be understood as one aspect of his deception.

Listen to this speech:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.”

[Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on his personal Christian feelings. Published in "My New Order", quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]

What guile!

[af_vet_1981]

Luther has no more excuse then those who said like things before him.

Luther at the beginning sought the welfare of Jews, but their intractable hardness, pride, acts and blasphemies finally exasperated him, while Luther was never one to mince words and use acerbic speech at times. The Jews of old provoked even Moses "spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips," (Psalms 106:33) but Luther was wrong in advising worse things than conservative want to be done to illegal immigrants.

Yet many things are charged with inciting antisemitism. Paul himself stated by the Holy Spirit,

For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost. (1 Thessalonians 2:14-16)

But Paul was willing to be damned for them.

And

Patristic bishops of the patristic era such as Augustine argued that the Jews should be left alive and suffering as a perpetual reminder of their murder of Christ. Other Church Fathers, such as John Chrysostom went longer in their condemnation. Ephraim the Syrian wrote polemics against Jews in the 4th century, including the repeated accusation that Satan dwells among them as a partner. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_antisemitism#The_Church_Fathers

Yet Hitler's use of things to justify the holocaust must be understood as one aspect of his deception.

Listen to this speech:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…

And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.”

[Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on his personal Christian feelings. Published in "My New Order", quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]

What guile!

Thank you for a civil and interesting perspective; a few points:
1. I would reword one sentence as " Luther at the beginning sought the welfare of Jews, but" his own hatred finally overcame him and left us his legacy The Jews and Their Lies, and the horrific implementation of it by a wicked generation of his nation.
2. If we try to blame the Jews as a people for not accepting Lutheranism in the 16th Century by comparing them to the Jews of Moses and Paul's day, it perhaps has the side effect of making out the Jews as a race to have a perpetual defects due to their perpetual unwillingness to change their religion. This has tended all through history to be the ource of their persecution. Do I blame previous Catholics for such persecution ? Absolutely ! Yet I see that frail old MSN walking to the Western Wall, putting a prayer note into a crack, on behalf of the Catholic Church, asking for forgiveness for mistreating the Jews and not doing enough to help them, my heart just melts. I forgive. Moses and Paul were both willing to share the fate of their brethren rather than enter the kingdom without them. That shows me they had God's love and mercy. I don't see that in Luther, and of course not those who used his words in that generation of monstrous wickedness. I would agree that the Scriptures teach blindness to Messiah (which is not Lutheranism) has happened to Israel in part, until the fullness of the Gentiles come in, and then all Israel will be saved. What a glorious time that will be !
3. Your post of Hitler's speech was brilliant, as well as brave. It reminds us how easily a man can be corrupted who strays from sound doctrine and makes up his own religion, using and twisting the Bible toward an unbalanced and evil end. The Jews always seem to be the target of the adversary, in every generation. Knowing that Messiah has already conquered sin and death, the adversary was left with the strategy of destroying the remnant of Israel to perhaps thwart the prophecy and inflict the most pain and suffering on he apple of God's eye.