The Calling: A John Luther Novel

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Brecht, 2:267; MacCulloch, 165. On one occasion, Luther referred to the elector as an "emergency bishop" ( Notbischof). According to one account, Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. Scholars Walter Krämer, Götz Trenkler, Gerhard Ritter, and Gerhard Prause contend that the story of the posting on the door, although it has become one of the pillars of history, has little foundation in truth. [49] [50] [51] [52] The story is based on comments made by Luther's collaborator Philip Melanchthon, though it is thought that he was not in Wittenberg at the time. [53] According to Roland Bainton, on the other hand, it is true. [54]

Luther taught that salvation and, consequently, eternal life are not earned by good deeds; rather, they are received only as the free gift of God's grace through the believer's faith in Jesus Christ, the redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority and office of the pope by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge, [4] and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. [5] Those who identify with these, and all of Luther's wider teachings, are called Lutherans, though Luther insisted on Christian or Evangelic ( German: evangelisch) as the only acceptable names for individuals who professed Christ. His translation of the Bible into the German vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more accessible to the laity, an event that had a tremendous impact on both the church and German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation, [6] and influenced the writing of an English translation, the Tyndale Bible. [7] His hymns influenced the development of singing in Protestant churches. [8] His marriage to Katharina von Bora, a former nun, set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant clergy to marry. [9] There is a world of difference between his belief in salvation and a racial ideology. Nevertheless, his misguided agitation had the evil result that Luther fatefully became one of the 'church fathers' of anti-Semitism and thus provided material for the modern hatred of the Jews, cloaking it with the authority of the Reformer." Cf. Luther's Works 47:107–119. There he writes: "Dear God, should it be unbearable that the holy church confesses itself a sinner, believes in the forgiveness of sins, and asks for remission of sin in the Lord's Prayer? How can one know what sin is without the law and conscience? And how will we learn what Christ is, what he did for us, if we do not know what the law is that he fulfilled for us and what sin is, for which he made satisfaction?" (112–113). Gow, Andrew C. (2009). "The Contested History of a Book: The German Bible of the Later Middle Ages and Reformation in Legend, Ideology, and Scholarship". Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. 9. doi: 10.5508/jhs.2009.v9.a13. ISSN 1203-1542.See also: Radical Reformation and German Peasants' War Lutherhaus, Luther's residence in Wittenberg From On War against the Turk, 1529, quoted in William P. Brown, The Ten Commandments: The Reciprocity of Faithfulness, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, ISBN 0-664-22323-0, 258; Lohse, 61; Marty, 166. Two of the earlier translations were the Mentelin Bible (1456) [147] and the Koberger Bible (1484). [148] There were as many as fourteen in High German, four in Low German, four in Dutch, and various other translations in other languages before the Bible of Luther. [149] Gerhard Loci Theologici, Locus de Morte, § 293 ff. Pieper writes: "Luther speaks more guardedly of the state of the soul between death and resurrection than do Gerhard and the later theologians, who transfer some things to the state between death and resurrection which can be said with certainty only of the state after the resurrection" ( Christian Dogmatics, 3:512, footnote 21). Gerhard Prause "Luthers Thesanschlag ist eine Legende,"in Niemand hat Kolumbus ausgelacht. Düsseldorf, 1986.

a b c Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation. (2005) Reformation Europe: 1517–1559, London: Fontana, 1963, 53; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700, London: Allen Lane, 2003, 132. Luther's major works on the Jews were his 60,000-word treatise Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen ( On the Jews and Their Lies), and Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi ( On the Holy Name and the Lineage of Christ), both published in 1543, three years before his death. [226] Luther argued that the Jews were no longer the chosen people but "the devil's people", and referred to them with violent language. [227] [228] Citing Deuteronomy 13, wherein Moses commands the killing of idolaters and the burning of their cities and property as an offering to God, Luther called for a " scharfe Barmherzigkeit" ("sharp mercy") against the Jews "to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames." [229] Luther advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbooks, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews' property and money, and smashing up their homes, so that these "envenomed worms" would be forced into labour or expelled "for all time". [230] In Robert Michael's view, Luther's words "We are at fault in not slaying them" amounted to a sanction for murder. [231] "God's anger with them is so intense," Luther concluded, "that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!" [229] Cf. Luther, Only the Decalogue Is Eternal, 35: "The law, therefore, cannot be eliminated, but remains, prior to Christ as not fulfilled, after Christ as to be fulfilled, although this does not happen perfectly in this life even by the justified. ... This will happen perfectly first in the coming life." Cf. Luther, Only the Decalogue Is Eternal,, 43–44, 91–93.Waldzither – Bibliography of the 19th century". Studia Instrumentorum . Retrieved 23 March 2014. Es ist eine unbedingte Notwendigkeit, dass der Deutsche zu seinen Liedern auch ein echt deutsches Begleitinstrument besitzt. Wie der Spanier seine Gitarre (fälschlich Laute genannt), der Italiener seine Mandoline, der Engländer das Banjo, der Russe die Balalaika usw. sein Nationalinstrument nennt, so sollte der Deutsche seine Laute, die Waldzither, welche schon von Dr. Martin Luther auf der Wartburg im Thüringer Walde (daher der Name Waldzither) gepflegt wurde, zu seinem Nationalinstrument machen. Liederheft von C.H. Böhm (Hamburg, March 1919)

Sydow, Michael (1 December 1999). "Journal of Theology: Martin Luther, Reformation Theologian and Educator" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 September 2007 . Retrieved 17 May 2022. Article in the Berlinischer Zeitung 1755 in Complete Works ed. Karl Friedrich Theodor Lachmann– 1838 p. 59 "Was die Gegner auf alle diese Stellen antworten werden, ist leicht zu errathen. Sie werden sagen, daß Luther mit dem Worte Schlaf gar die Begriffe nicht verbinde, welche Herr R. damit verbindet. Wenn Luther sage, daß die Seele IS nach dem Tode schlafe, so denke er nichts mehr dabey, als was alle Leute denken, wenn sie den Tod des Schlafes Bruder nennen. Tode ruhe, leugneten auch die nicht, welche ihr Wachen behaupteten :c. Ueberhaupt ist mit Luthers Ansehen bey der ganzen Streitigkeit nichts zu gewinnen." Luther's hymns were included in early Lutheran hymnals and spread the ideas of the Reformation. He supplied four of eight songs of the First Lutheran hymnal Achtliederbuch, 18 of 26 songs of the Erfurt Enchiridion, and 24 of the 32 songs in the first choral hymnal with settings by Johann Walter, Eyn geystlich Gesangk Buchleyn, all published in 1524. Luther's hymns inspired composers to write music. Johann Sebastian Bach included several verses as chorales in his cantatas and based chorale cantatas entirely on them, namely Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4, as early as possibly 1707, in his second annual cycle (1724 to 1725) Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein, BWV 2, Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam, BWV 7, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 62, Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 91, and Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, BWV 38, later Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, BWV 80, and in 1735 Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit, BWV 14. Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther. tr. James L. Schaaf, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985–93, 1:112–127. Early in 1537, Johannes Agricola—serving at the time as pastor in Luther's birthplace, Eisleben—preached a sermon in which he claimed that God's gospel, not God's moral law (the Ten Commandments), revealed God's wrath to Christians. Based on this sermon and others by Agricola, Luther suspected that Agricola was behind certain anonymous antinomian theses circulating in Wittenberg. These theses asserted that the law is no longer to be taught to Christians but belonged only to city hall. [204] Luther responded to these theses with six series of theses against Agricola and the antinomians, four of which became the basis for disputations between 1538 and 1540. [205] He also responded to these assertions in other writings, such as his 1539 open letter to C. Güttel Against the Antinomians, [206] and his book On the Councils and the Church from the same year. [207]

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In his book Basic Theology, Charles Caldwell Ryrie countered the claim that Luther rejected the Book of James as being non-canonical. [17] In his preface to the New Testament, Luther ascribed to several books of the New Testament different degrees of doctrinal value: Kitto, John (Editor), (1845). A Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, Vol 1, (p556). Mark H Newman, NY Since the 1980s, Lutheran denominations have repudiated Martin Luther's statements against the Jews [ citation needed] and have rejected the use of them to incite hatred against Lutherans. [ citation needed] [275] [276] Strommen et al.'s 1970 survey of 4,745 North American Lutherans aged 15–65 found that, compared to the other minority groups under consideration, Lutherans were the least prejudiced toward Jews. [277] Nevertheless, Professor Richard Geary, former professor of modern history at the University of Nottingham and the author of Hitler and Nazism (Routledge 1993), published an article in the magazine History Today examining electoral trends in Weimar Germany between 1928 and 1933. Geary notes that, based on his research, the Nazi Party received disproportionately more votes from Protestant than Catholic areas of Germany. [278] [279] Legacy and commemoration Worldwide Protestantism in 2010 The Lutheran theologian Franz Pieper observes that Luther's teaching about the state of the Christian's soul after death differed from the later Lutheran theologians such as Johann Gerhard. [174] Lessing (1755) had earlier reached the same conclusion in his analysis of Lutheran orthodoxy on this issue. [175]