Martin Luther

From Christianity Today-

In the sixteenth century, the world was divided about Martin Luther. One Catholic thought Martin Luther was a "demon in the appearance of a man." Another who first questioned Luther's theology later declared, "He alone is right!"

In our day, nearly 500 years hence, the verdict is nearly unanimous to the good. Both Catholics and Protestants affirm he was not only right about a great deal, but he changed the course of Western history for the better.

Thunderstorm conversion

Martin was born at Eisleben (about 120 miles southwest of modern Berlin) to Margaret and Hans Luder (as it was locally pronounced). He was raised in Mansfeld, where his father worked at the local copper mines.

Hans sent Martin to Latin school and then, when Martin was only 13 years old, to the University of Erfurt to study law. There Martin earned both his baccalaureate and master's degrees in the shortest time allowed by university statutes. He proved so adept at public debates that he earned the nickname "The Philosopher."

Then in 1505 his life took a dramatic turn. As the 21-year-old Luther fought his way through a severe thunderstorm on the road to Erfurt, a bolt of lightning struck the ground near him.

More here-

https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/theologians/martin-luther.html

Martin Luther and Me. Reckoning with Germany’s Dangerous Legacy

From Boston Review-

I am a son of Martin Luther. As was my father. As was his father. But as a German man living through today’s German and European politics, what does it mean to be a son of Martin Luther?

It took me a while, more or less the first forty years of my life, to at least partially comprehend this heritage and to understand who I am: a member of a long line of Lutheran pastors. I had not seen myself like that. I had seen myself, in the narcissism so particular to my generation, as independent, a creation of my own.

And so when I eventually opened the Bible that my father gave me a few months before he died, I was shocked to see and read the year it was printed: 1546, the year Luther died. Opening this book, very heavy and clad in old brown leather with two iron bars at the side, was a like staring into a well. It was deep, it was dark, and I plunged right into it: the texture of the paper, the old German letters that I can read only with effort, the way the pages are adorned with drawings of biblical scenes, and most of all the small notations, some in German and some in Latin, that covered each page. The comments on specific lines or words—thoughts of my forefathers—were mostly illegible and hard to decipher, like a very loud chorus that I was unable to hear. It was my family history in a palimpsest.

More here-

http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/georg-diez-martin-luther-and-me

The Guardian view on the power of heresy

From The Guardian-

In the 500 years since Martin Luther started the Reformation, not much that he believed has survived. The thought world in which he moved has vanished utterly and his perspective is very difficult for us to recapture. But one thing has lasted – he made “heretic” into a term of moral approval. He didn’t mean to: he thought it was his opponents who had fallen into heresy. To Luther, and to everyone before him, a heretic was someone who was wrong in fact and morally wrong as well. Today’s equivalent would be climate change denier or a “scientific racist”. But all these people would nowadays claim the benefit of heresy. The word has come to imply moral integrity, and the hope of future vindication. “Orthodoxy” is, by implication, something to be overthrown.

This means that heresy, after Luther, has become an innately unstable condition. No heresy can persist for very long: either it must triumph, and then it will form a new orthodoxy of its own, or it will fade into oblivion. This was not always true. Before Luther, and still in pre-Lutheran thought, heresies were perennial: they represented recurrent temptations to be wrong, the sort of thing we call today a cognitive bias rather than an intellectual disagreement. Some beliefs, like flat Earth theory, are heresies in both the modern and pre-modern senses. But most of the things we call heresies are meant in the modern sense.

More here-

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-power-of-heresy?CMP=share_btn_fb

The stand

From The Economist-

IN THE summer of 1974, a 26-year-old Mayan villager lay drunk in a town square in the Guatemalan highlands. Suddenly he heard a voice that was to change the course of his life and that of his home town, Almolonga. “I was lying there and I saw Jesus saying, ‘I love you and I want you to serve me’,” says the man, Mariano Riscajche. He dusted himself down, sobered up and soon started preaching, establishing a small Protestant congregation in a room not far from the town’s ancient Catholic church.

Half a millennium earlier, a 33-year-old German monk experienced something similar. At some point between 1513 and 1517, Martin Luther had a direct encounter with God and felt himself “to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise”. His moment of being born again was private. The day on which he is said to have nailed a list of 95 complaints about ecclesiastical corruption to the church door in Wittenberg, Saxony—widely thought to have been October 31st 1517—made the private public and, soon, political. A mixture of princely patronage, personal stubbornness and chance led what could have ended up as just another minor protest in a remote corner of Europe to become a global movement.

More here-

https://www.economist.com/news/essay/21730868-stand

How Martin Luther Changed the World

From The New Yorker-

Clang! Clang! Down the corridors of religious history we hear this sound: Martin Luther, an energetic thirty-three-year-old Augustinian friar, hammering his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and thus, eventually, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church into two churches—one loyal to the Pope in Rome, the other protesting against the Pope’s rule and soon, in fact, calling itself Protestant. This month marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s famous action. Accordingly, a number of books have come out, reconsidering the man and his influence. They differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on is that the hammering episode, so satisfying symbolically—loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. 

More here-

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/how-martin-luther-changed-the-world?mbid=social_facebook_aud_dev_kw_paid-how-martin-luther-changed-the-world&kwp_0=579319&kwp_4=2047753&kwp_1=855422

Martin Luther’s ‘dream’ church? It wasn’t in Europe

From RNS-

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the launching of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Commemorations will be held from Memphis to Mombasa to Mumbai to Munich.

Yet, most events and books on the Reformation explore it without any reference to African Christians.

This silence is profound, and I would like to break it by offering possible Ethiopian connections to Martin Luther and the Protestant movement.

Luther launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517, but he had begun that year fascinated with Ethiopian Christianity.

That will come as a surprise to many of today’s Christians, even scholars, who are accustomed to discussing Luther and the Protestant Reformation as solely European subjects.

But Luther esteemed the Church of Ethiopia because he thought Ethiopia was the first nation in history to convert to Christianity.

More here-

http://religionnews.com/2017/10/28/martin-luthers-dream-church-it-wasnt-in-europe/

Why Can’t Christians Get Along, 500 Years After the Reformation?

From Atlantic-

Elizabeth Eaton is in a bit of a bind. Exactly 500 years ago on October 31, Martin Luther allegedly nailed his famous “95 Theses” to the door of a German church, decrying the Catholic Church’s abusive sale of indulgences, or reprieves from punishment for sins. The monk’s dramatic declaration set in motion years of theological sparring and bloody wars. It also led to the flowering of Protestantism and its many distinct denominational traditions, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, over which Eaton presides as bishop.

The thing is, “that was not good for the church,” Eaton said, referring to the global body of Christian believers. The New Testament calls for followers of Jesus to be “completely one.” By Luther’s time, Christianity had been split from East to West as the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches parted ways. Within those traditions, dissidents had already formed a number of prominent sects. The Protestant Reformation catalyzed further breakdown.

More here-

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/luther-reformation-500-ecumenical-dialogue/543876/?utm_source=atlfb

Honor the Reformation's African roots

From Commercial Appeal-

This year marks the 500th year anniversary of the launching of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Commemorations will be held from Memphis to Mombasa to Mumbai to Munich.

Yet, most events and books on the Reformation explore it without any reference to African Christians.

This silence is profound, and I would like to break it by offering possible Ethiopian connections to Martin Luther and the Protestant movement.

Luther launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517, but he had begun that year fascinated with Ethiopian Christianity.

That will come as a surprise to many of today’s Christians, even scholars, who are accustomed to discussing Luther and the Protestant Reformation as solely European subjects. 

But Luther esteemed the Church of Ethiopia because he thought Ethiopia was the first nation in history to convert to Christianity.

More here-

http://www.commercialappeal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2017/10/21/honor-reformations-african-roots/783252001/

Martin Luther, Pacifist?

From Plough-

The idea that you could associate the name “Martin Luther” with “pacifism” will come as a shock to most people, including most Lutherans. So let’s be up front about it: Luther would not qualify as a pacifist, plain and simple, by today’s definition. He strongly believed that God called certain people to certain public offices for the protection of the weak and innocent from harm, and those offices might well involve some violence in order to prevent even more violence. He called this “temporal authority” and not only theorized about it but at times also invoked it – and being that he was Martin Luther, the princes listened.

Unfortunately, when people today hear anything of Luther’s political philosophy at all, it’s only his views on temporal authority. And the exact nature of temporal authority à la Luther is explicated by his “two kingdoms doctrine”: God reigns in the right-hand kingdom through the church, in the left-hand kingdom through the state, and ne’er the twain shall meet – or so it’s said.

More here-

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/nonviolence/martin-luther-pacifist

LUTHER AT 500

From First Things-

It all did start with the ninety-five theses, in a sense. Luther probably did not actually nail them to the church door—at least no one at the time tells us so. And if he did, it was not in anger or protest against the church. He was trying to arrange an academic discussion, and evidently that’s where the bulletin board was. What we do know is that he mailed them off to his archbishop, together with a treatise on indulgences and a cover letter dated October 31, 1517, so that is the date remembered as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Martin Luther was a professor at the University of Wittenberg, which is why he was arranging a disputation, a standard medieval form of academic discussion that would subject his theses to helpful critical debate so that he could clarify his own position. (He was certainly not wedded to all ninety-five theses.) He was also the official town preacher with pastoral responsibilities for the laity of Wittenberg, which is why he was trying to clear up some issues concerning the theology of indulgences, which were being sold very aggressively in neighboring territories, much to the harm of the souls in his charge. And he was a pious monk, intensely obedient to authority, who was convinced the pope could not possibly approve of turning indulgences and the forgiveness of sins into a kind of merchandise at the expense of Christ’s people.

More here-

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/11/luther-at-500

Martin Luther Passionate reformer

From Christianity Today-

In the sixteenth century, the world was divided about Martin Luther. One Catholic thought Martin Luther was a "demon in the appearance of a man." Another who first questioned Luther's theology later declared, "He alone is right!"

In our day, nearly 500 years hence, the verdict is nearly unanimous to the good. Both Catholics and Protestants affirm he was not only right about a great deal, but he changed the course of Western history for the better.

Thunderstorm conversion

Martin was born at Eisleben (about 120 miles southwest of modern Berlin) to Margaret and Hans Luder (as it was locally pronounced). He was raised in Mansfeld, where his father worked at the local copper mines.

Hans sent Martin to Latin school and then, when Martin was only 13 years old, to the University of Erfurt to study law. There Martin earned both his baccalaureate and master's degrees in the shortest time allowed by university statutes. He proved so adept at public debates that he earned the nickname "The Philosopher."

Then in 1505 his life took a dramatic turn. As the 21-year-old Luther fought his way through a severe thunderstorm on the road to Erfurt, a bolt of lightning struck the ground near him.
More here-

http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/theologians/martin-luther.html