Luther’s Revolution

A revolution obliterates an institution, tradition, or country and a new institution, tradition, or country is created. A reformation is where an institution, tradition, or country is brought back to its original principles.  Luther’s actions were definitely a revolution, as new ideas, dogmas, and beliefs were created 1500 years after Christ. The Church was not brought back to its original principles by Luther. Therefore, it is more appropriate to label Luther as a revolutionary, rather than as a reformer.

His Beginnings

Martin Luther was the very first Protestant. He was born in 1483 and was raised by two very strict parents, who used to beat him physically, a lot. He once said his mother caned him for stealing a nut, until blood flowed.  This formed Luther’s thinking concerning God the Father.  He believed that when the Bible spoke about God’s righteousness, it referred to God the Father being very judgmental and strict to those humans who did not measure up to God’s perfection. This caused him to not only perform many penances and devotions, in order to please God, but also caused him great depression as well, because he knew he could never attain perfection.

One day he was walking home and he got caught in a terrible thunderstorm, with lightning flashing all around him. He prayed to St. Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to save him from being killed, and in return for the favor, he would enter the priesthood.  He was saved from the lightning, and totally against the wishes of his parents, he vowed to become an ordained Catholic Priest in the Augustinian Order.  His parents wanted him to become a lawyer, and they were depending on young Martin to support them financially in their old age. The Augustinians were a very strict and austere Catholic order, with lots of self-mortification and fasting for penance.  Martin Luther swore in front of God to be obedient to his superiors and to be celibate his entire life.

When it came time to perform his first Mass, he made sure his overbearing father was on hand.  At the consecration, Luther hesitated, because he truly believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and who was he, such a weak and unworthy sinner to be holding the King of Kings in his hands anyway?  He somehow managed to complete the Mass, and he then went to his father and asked him if he was pleased with his new vocation. The father threw it back in his face, telling the new priest that he had abandoned his parents in their old age, and he was therefore disobeying one of the commandments to “Honor thy father and thy mother.”  He tried to explain to his irate father that he could help them more with his prayers and penances by being a monk, but once again, Luther had failed to convince his father, who departed angrily.

Luther said on more than one occasion that he hated God, because God was so judgmental towards him. Luther was mistakenly replacing his understanding of God with his relationship with his overbearing Father. After Luther kept confessing this sin over and over again, his confessor told him that Luther had it exactly backwards – God wasn’t mad at Luther; rather, Luther was mad at God!

His Trip to Rome

Later on, Luther went to Rome on assignment, and he was very enchanted with the idea of visiting all of the holy sites there. He fully expected to gain some indulgences by visiting some of the churches and holy relics there. However, at that time, the Church and Rome were in crisis, and very worldly, to say the least.  Luther became very disgusted when he heard Roman priests mocking the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  Even Pope Adrian VI, called the antichrist by Luther, admitted that the Roman Curia was corrupt and needed to be swept clean.

However, a corrupt Roman Curia did not mean the whole Catholic Church was evil, just as a corrupt Congress does not mean all America is bad.  During his stay in Rome, Luther crawled up Pilate’s steps, saying an Our Father prayer on each step, which the Church said would help to free a soul from Purgatory (gain an indulgence for the soul undergoing purification).  At the end of his climb, Luther wondered if it was all true, or just an invention of the Church. The seed for the Protestant Revolt known as the Reformation was now germinating in Luther’s mind.

His Discovery

When Luther returned to the monastery in Erfurt, he was informed that he was being transferred to the University in Wittenberg, that he was to get his doctorate in Scripture, and teach young students. So here we have the situation of a depressed priest teaching others about the joy of Christ!  In other words, he was to be healed of his affliction by healing others.  Luther taught the Psalms to his students, and when he heard Christ say in Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Luther wondered why the perfect Jesus would say such a thing to His Father. Luther began to identify with the crucified Christ, because Luther also felt abandoned by God the Father, due to his own unrighteousness. It wasn’t until Luther started teaching Romans in 1515 that the light came on for him.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.   For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live (Romans 1:16-17).

Luther suddenly had an inspiration.  The righteousness of the believer is not dependent on his own goodness, or lack thereof, but rather, the righteousness of the believer is that of Jesus Christ!  Of course, this was not big news to the Catholic Church, which never preached otherwise.  Previously, in Luther’s mind, his own sinfulness and unworthiness would be judged by the righteous God, and that ensured hell forever for his soul.  His view of this, of course, was because of the severe beatings he got from his father and his mother.  Now, thanks to Romans 1:16-17, Luther believed that all one had to do was to believe in Jesus Christ through faith, and he was saved by faith alone.  The 1000 pound weight around his soul that he had been dragging around for so many years was now gone!

The Fallacy of “Faith Alone”

However, this “salvation by faith alone” idea and the way he taught it, was fraught with errors.  Many people erroneously believed they didn’t need the sacraments anymore, because they already believed in Christ. This lead to the idea that the liturgy and sacraments from an outdated Church where irrelevant. Once the need for a teaching authority in a church was removed, then all anyone needs is the Bible, and the Bible alone to be saved.  Since there is no more authoritative interpreter of scripture from the magisterium of the Church, then everyone becomes his own interpreter of scripture, right or wrong!

However, this idea is not biblical; Jesus did not leave us a bible for each person to figure everything out for themselves.  No, Jesus left us a Church, with his apostles and his authority, to go forth and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This Church is protected by Christ Himself from the gates of hell triumphing over it.  This same Church gave us the Bible as we know it today in the late 4th century.  To jettison the Church is to jettison Christ, because Christ is the head of His Church, according to Ephesians 5:23.

His German Bible

Luther took it upon himself to translate sacred scripture into German. The myth is that his translation allowed the bible to be read by the common man for the first time. In reality, St. Jerome, in the 4th Century, beat him to the punch by 1100 years. Previously, the bible was only available in Hebrew and Greek;  St. Jerome translated all of the 73 books of sacred scripture into the common European vernacular of the day, Latin.  This allowed just about everyone who could read, to read the bible, and the bible was read at every Mass everywhere a Mass was said. St. Cyril and St. Methodius also translated the bible into the Slavonic language in the year 863.  A previous German bible, the Koberger bible, was printed in 1483, and was commonly available.  The first book ever printed, the Gutenberg Bible, printed in the century before Luther, assured the availability of the Bible to all who could understand Latin, and at a much reduced cost than the hand-transcribed bibles of Catholic Monks.

The Bitter Fruits of His Revolt

Luther’s protestant reformation set in motion the fragmenting of Christianity into over 30,000 different denominations, all claiming to properly interpret scripture, Jesus’ prayer for unity, as a sign to the unbeliever. Luther’s new religion, named after himself, the Lutherians, is based on a different interpretation of scripture, altered to reflect what he thought scripture should be. He added the word “alone” to Romans 3:28, to make it read “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith alone without the deeds of the law.  This change supported his new philosophy that we are “saved by faith alone.” He also downgraded seven books of the Old Testament that he didn’t like – Sirach, Wisdom, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Judith, and Tobit. These books were all included in the very first printed bible, the Gutenberg Bible, in the century before Luther was born.  If that weren’t enough, many Catholic Churches in Germany were stolen from the Church and became Lutheran Churches.

Luther Quotes

We have all heard about Luther posting his grievances against Church teachings on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and his hatred (rightly so!) of the selling of indulgences (not indulgences themselves) but what else did this man have to say?

If your Papist annoys you with the word (‘alone’ – Rom. 3:28), tell him straightway, Dr. Martin Luther will have it so:  Papist and ass are one and the same thing.  Whoever will not have my translation, let him give it the go-by: the devil’s thanks to him who censures it without my will and knowledge.  Luther will have it so, and he is a doctor above all the doctors in Popedom (J. Dollinger, La Reforme et les resultants quelle a produits. (E. Perrot, Paris, Gaume, 1848-49), Vol III, pg. 138).

A person that is baptized cannot, thou he would, lose his salvation by any sins however grievous, unless he refuses to believe. For no sins can damn him but unbelief alone (On The Babylonian Captivity of the Church).

No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day ( Sämtliche Schriften, Letter No. 99, 1 Aug. 1521).

Do not ask anything of your conscience; and if it speaks, do not listen to it; if it insists, stifle it, amuse yourself; if necessary, commit some good big sin, in order to drive it away. Conscience is the voice of Satan, and it is necessary always to do just the contrary of what Satan wishes (J. Dollinger, La Reforme et les resultants qu’elle a produits. (E. Perrot, Paris, Gaume, 1848-49), Vol III, pg. 248).

Christ committed adultery first of all with the women at the well about whom St. John tells us. Was not everybody about Him saying: Whatever has He been doing with her? Secondly, with Mary Magdalen, and thirdly with the women taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even, Christ who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died (Trishreden, Weimer Edition, Vol. 2,  Pg. 107).

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