I once served in a Local Ecumenical Project which included Lutherans from Bavaria (under the Meissen Agreement).
This time of the year frequently led to debate. As I was prepared to celebrate All Saints and All Souls Days, they were wanting us to celebrate Reformation Sunday.
What’s to celebrate, I asked? After the Great Schism of East and West, the protestant reformation was the next disaster for the church. Once we broke away from our mother church, there was continued fracturing – Congregationalist, Baptist etc. I want the reformation to be healed, not celebrated.
In any case, Luther did not intend to form a breakaway movement (not did King Henry 8th). He wanted to reform the Western Church from within.
When it comes to celebrating Luther himself, I cannot, because of his gross anti-Judaism:
Martin Luther: advocated a tolerance towards Jews. But even this limited tolerance soon faded when his hopes that the Jews would convert to Christianity did not materialise.
“Know, O adored Christ, and make no mistake, that aside from the Devil, you have no enemy more venomous, more desperate, more bitter, than a true Jew who truly seeks to be a Jew… a Jew, a Jewish heart, are hard as wood, as stone, as iron, as the Devil himself. In short, they are children of the Devil, condemned to the flames of hell.”
“O Lord, I am too feeble to mock such devils. I would do so, but they are much stronger than I in raillery, and they have a God who is a past master in this art; He is called the devil and the wicked spirit. They have transformed God into the devil, or rather into a servant of the Devil, accomplishing all the evil the Devil desires, corrupting unhappy souls, and raging against himself: in short, the Jews are worse than the devils.”
“What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honour of God and of Christianity, in order that God may see that we are true Christians. Secondly, their homes should be likewise broken down and destroyed. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught. Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threats of death to teach anymore.”
“Now whoever wishes to accept venomous serpents, desperate enemies of the lord, and to honor them, to let himself be robbed, pillaged, corrupted and cursed by them, need only turn to the Jews. If this is not enough for him, he can do more: crawl up into their…… and worship the sanctuary, so as to glorify himself afterwards for having been merciful, for having fortified the Devil and his children, in order to blaspheme our beloved lord and the precious blood that has redeemed us. He will then be a perfect Christian, filled with works of mercy, for which Christ will reward him on the-day of judgment with the eternal fire of hell (where he will roast together with the Jews).”
“In truth, the Jews, being foreigners, should possess nothing, and what they do possess should be ours.”
“…Cursed goy that I am, I cannot understand how they manage to be so skillful, unless I think that when Judas Iscariot hanged himself, his guts burst and emptied. Perhaps the Jews sent their servants with plates of silver and pots of gold to gather up Judas’ piss with the other treasures, and then they ate and drank his offal, and thereby acquired eyes so piercing that they discover in the scriptures commentaries that neither Matthew nor Isaiah himself found there, not to mention the rest of us cursed goyim..”
“If I find a Jew to baptize, I shall lead him to the Elbe bridge, hang a stone around his neck, and push him into the water, baptizing him with the name of Avraham. I cannot convert the Jews. Our lord Christ did not succeed in doing so; but I can close their mouths so that there will be nothing for them to do but to lie upon the ground.”
“I hope I shall never be so stupid as to be circumcised; I would rather cut off the left breast of my Catherine and of all women.”
“If we are to remain unsullied by the blasphemy of the Jews and not wish to take part in it, we must be separated from them and they must be driven out of their country.”
Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies in 1543: ‘Jews are ‘our plague, our pestilence, our misfortune’, they ‘look into the devil’s black, dark, lying behind and worship his stench…Furthermore, ‘We are at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord. We are at fault in not slaying them. Rather we allow them to live freely in our midst despite all their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying, defaming.’
The logical result – Adolf Hitler: “I believe that I am today acting according to the purposes of the Almighty Creator. In resisting the Jew, I am fighting the Lord’s battle.”
At a Church conference, Hitler affirmed that the Catholic Church has always regarded Jews as evildoers and had banished them into ghettos. He (Hitler) is only doing what the Church had been doing for fifteen hundred years. (Siegfried Leffer.) “Christus im Drittem Reich der Deutschen,” p. 79)
In Claude Lanzmann’s harrowing Holocaust documentary Shoah, a Polish farm labourer is interviewed standing on the steps of her church after Sunday Mass. During the war the church had been used as a holding pen for Jews destined for the nearby death camp. Lanzmann presses her for an explanation. She answers with the story of Jesus’s trial in Matthew 27. Having offered the mob a choice between Jesus and the criminal Barabbas, and the crowd having chosen Barabbas for release and Jesus for crucifixion, Pontius Pilate washes his hands of the decision. Then ‘with one voice the people cried “His blood be on us and on our children”.
Luther was quoted by the defence at the Nuremburg trials.
My first essay as an undergraduate was something on the lines of ‘Luther, medieval man or modern man?’
The standard textbook of the time was trhe romantic ‘Here I stad’ by Roland Bainton. My conclusion, which still stands forty years on, was – Medieval.
Away with it. And away with his flawed doctrine of justification by faith (which pits the caricature of legalistic Judaism against the caricature of grace-filled Christianity) which has taken four centuries to undo by the likes of E. P. Sanders.
Meanwhile, let us raise a glass to Halloween, pagan and American though it is. And raise two glasses for the reunification of Western Christendom.
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