The topic is what Luther thought about a religious concept, purgatory.
It's very on topic to look at the broader sweep of his religious thought and ask if there were either obvious errors, or incredible insights in his work.
Writing a long treatise on the evil of the Jews is an obvious error, in my opinion.
It's not that Luther was just another theologian, after all. Millions of people have as their denomination "Lutheran".
HiTech's comment that: "Luther carried institutional Catholic prejudices along in his vision of Christianity." also strikes me as a cop out. This was a man whose entire claim to fame is throwing off outmoded Christian beliefs, passed down by the 1200 year old Church of his fathers, and replace them with his own insights, based on hie reading of scripture.
And yet he didn't merely remain mute on the topic of the Jews, he wrote perhaps the most virulently anti-Semetic treatise in the entire canon on Christian apologetics. "To simply dismsiss it as "Oh, that was just Catholic tradition" is having your cake and eating it too.
As for this: Other Christians were to prove better witnesses to Jews.well, I sure hope so! Were there any that were worse anti-Semites than Luther? Because he seemed to set a pretty high bar for anti-Semitism.
Boatbums asked a fair question: "You gonna apply that same logic to Roman Catholicism?".
It's not phrased quite clearly though: here I am objecting to the writings of Luther, a man, and saying that they are so horrible that it' makes it hard for me to accept him as a moral authority in other areas.
I didn't go the next step and condemn the institution of the Lutheran, or Protestant, churches based on this one man, even though that one man is supremely important to their denomination in a way no single Pope is to the Catholics.
I would certainly apply the same logic to any and all Popes who wrote similar garbage anti-Semitic screeds. Which ones did? The link doesn't provide any answers to that. I will stipulate that I assume there are at least several, and possibly many.
Does the entire Catholic Church as an institution deserve to be rejected because of an omnipresent and unremitting levels of anti-Semitism? Possibly. It appears that is the case the book linked tries to make.
The Catholic Church certainly must be condemned for their behavior in the historical periods where they were actively anti-Semitic. And it must also be condemned on those grounds today, if those failures have not been clearly rejected by more recent and current leaders. This goes for the Lutherans, too. Where are they at now?
As HighTech RedNeck says "Other Christians (after Luther) were to prove better witnesses to Jews."
At some point between 1500 and now, then, some groups, possibly including modern Lutherans and modern Catholics have "proven better witnesses to Jews" - by which I assume you mean "stopped being horrible anti-Semitic goblins".
Well, I certainly hope so, and if true that's a very good thing.
But I still would not look up to the people who were actively anti-Semitic as thought leaders in any area of morality.
I can ignore Henry Ford's anti-Semitism. It's obnoxious, but it wasn't fundamental to his mission of building cheap cars.
I think a lot of the problem was Luther’s hot temper. The anger of man gives a mighty foothold to the devil. Before you know it, if you let ungodly anger have its head, you’ll start looking like your worst opponent (which in Luther’s case wasn’t even the Jews, but the Roman Catholic institution of his time).
Yes, it would be desirable that a radical back-to-the-bible revamp of institutional Christian theology would go all the way... but humans being humans, the steps taken can only be so large at a time. Empirically, most modern Christian Jewish following can trace its Christian part to the more fundamentalist theology of Baptists, not Lutherans or Catholics. Baptists began as a pietistic movement in the Anglican church, which earlier had its own split from the Roman Catholic church in the dark days when institutional church and government were badly intertwined.
It’s not a cop out, it’s a historic fact. A bedrock principle in Christian faith is that a God who does not err works through people who sometimes err very, very badly in order to work an ultimate end of blessing to all who are willing to receive it. That won’t change whether the stewards are venal or conscientious, but the conscientious ones make better witnesses and that is all planned in by the good Lord.
It’s plenty off topic.
The subject was Purgatory.
Luther writing an angry tract when he heard that Jewish converts to Christ were being forced back to Judiasm is not the topic.
What stake do YOU have in this thread in the first place?