Are you ready to celebrate the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation? part 2

Letter to Calvin Martin continued...

Martin Luther and the Poor of the Land

Martin had let the genie out of the bottle.  In January of 1521, Martin was summoned to the Diet of Worms by Emperor Charles VI.  A note on the Diet of Worms:  The word Diet comes for the Latin word “dies” meaning “day.” A parliament was referred to in German as a Reichstag or Landtag, (tag meaning day in German) and Worms is a city in west central Germany. Worms is derived from a Celtic word meaning settlement in a swampy area. Swamptown, more or less.  It has the sense of “days of meeting” or “court days,” or, in a sense, “a day in court.” This has nothing to do with slimy invertebrates. The town is pronounced “Vawrms.” The invertebrates are Wuermer, pronounced “Voeermer.” Sort of.

To properly pronounce some German vowels it is necessary to first suck on a lemon for half an hour. I suppose it could be called the Swamptown Parliament, but it is great fun to call the parliament of the city of Worms Germany by its classic name the Diet of Worms. It has provided endless school boy jokes, things about Charles downing a Fifth and forcing Luther to eat a diet of worms. This is not what happened.

Martin was given a safe passage to and from the Diet, but he was declared an outlaw by the Emperor. He mysteriously disappeared on the way home. He was kidnapped by Prince Frederick of Saxony who hid him in Wartburg Castle, where he lived under an assumed name (Juenker Joerge, translated Sir George, more or less) and translated the Bible the way he thought it should be translated. He also drank beer and went hunting wild boar. The castle did not have cable TV or Wi-Fi)

After about a year, Martin got bored with boar hunting and boring translation work and decided to risk going back to Wittenberg. The place was a mess. Luther wrote, “During my absence, Satan has entered my sheepfold, and committed ravages which I cannot repair by writing, but only by my personal presence and living word.” Fr. Martin preached a series of Latin sermons in which he talked about patience, and taught that violence was not the way.

The peasants loved Luther’s new religion because if the priests didn’t need popes and bishops, they certainly didn’t need the landlords and the aristocracy. “Do you know what the Devil thinks when he sees men use violence to propagate the Gospel? He sits with folded arms behind the fire of hell, and says with malignant looks and frightful grin: ‘Ah, how wise these madmen are to play my game! Let them go on; I shall reap the benefit. I delight in it.’ But when he sees the Word running and contending alone on the battle-field, then he shudders and shakes for fear.”

Wittenberg calmed down, but the rest of the German-speaking world was up for grabs. The Zwickau prophets Nicholas Storch and Thomas Muentzer encouraged the peasants to rise up and smash the gentry. Luther the nonviolent decided that enough was enough, so he wrote a tract with the charming name, “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” in which he implored the nobility to smash the peasants.

“Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel ... For baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul; and the Gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who, of their own free will, do what the apostles and disciples did in Acts 4.  They did not demand, as do our insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others, of Pilate and Herod, should be common, but only their own goods. Our peasants, however, want to make the goods of other men common, and keep their own for themselves. Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. Their raving has gone beyond all measure.”

“What strange times are these when a prince can enter heaven by the shedding of blood more certainly than others by means of prayer!"           

"It is no longer a question of tolerance, patience, pity. It is the hour of wrath and for the sword; the hour for mercy is past... No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.”

Thus Luther the nonviolent reformer and friend of the poor.

Martin and Katarina

Luther slowly changed form Father Martin to Dr. Luther over the next few years. In 1523 Martin helped 12 nuns escape from the convent by hiding them in herring barrels. He managed to get them all married off, except one, Katharina von Bora, so he married her. She ever after called him “Herr Doktor.”  They had six children together. Katharina was 26. Martin was 41.

Doktor Luther really believed that sex was an accommodation to human lust. For Catholics marriage is a sacrament, human sexual activity in marriage is a source of grace. For Luther marriage was a roll in the hay. Here are some quotes collected by Frank Nelte which I have borrowed from the web.

“The body asks for a woman and must have it; to marry is a remedy for fornication...”

“Since wedlock and marriage are a worldly business, we clergy and ministers of the Church have nothing to order or decree about it, but must leave each town ... to follow its own usage and custom.”

In other words marriage is not a sacrament. It is a civil contract. In this sense, Luther is the inventor of civil marriage.

Intimacy in marriage is essentially sinful according to Luther. “In spite of all the good I say of married life, I will not grant so much to nature as to admit that there is no sin in it ... no conjugal due is ever rendered without sin… The matrimonial duty is never performed without sin. The matrimonial act is a sin differing in nothing from adultery and fornication.”

Doktor Luther doesn’t seem to have held women in very high regard either “The Word and work of God is quite clear, that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes... Even though they grow weary and wear themselves out with child-bearing, it does not matter; let them go on bearing children till they die, that is what they are there for.” And, most interesting, “It is not forbidden that a man should have more than one wife.”

PS If you don’t believe this stuff, look it up. I am not making any of it up.

Next week, Luther bobbles the ball!

Are you ready to celebrate the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

How are you planning to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation year after next?

Calvin Martin

Dear Calvin,

On October 31, 1517, Luther posted the ninety-five theses, which he had composed in Latin, on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, according to university custom. In about one year the western world will break into paroxysms of joy to celebrate this momentous event, an event that forever changed the world. Bells will be rung, prayer services and ecumenical gatherings will be convened and we will congratulate ourselves that we are better than our ancestors who couldn’t just get along as the great American philosopher, Rodney King exhorted us. We are the flower of human history because we know that “everything is beautiful in its own way,” as the poet Ray Stevens taught us in the glorious 60’s and early 70’s.

The heroic Luther defied pope and emperor by changing his name, hiding out in a remote castle and writing his own version of the New Testament, setting the tone for the present age in which we can do anything we want provided we have good intention and are sincere. It turns out that the nailing of the 95 theses may be a myth. Erwin Iserloh pointed out that the nailing of the theses to the church door may be a myth created by Philipp Melanchthon who wasn’t at Wittenberg University at the time. The story appeared for the first time after Luther's death. The grand celebrations planned for reformation day October 31, 2017 may just be the celebration of something that never happened.

Nonetheless, let us look at this hero of western culture, and the glorious legacy that he has inspired.  Much of the following is taken from Luther’s Tischreden. (Table Talk, a collection of his sayings compiled by Johannes Mathesius. Mathesius, a disciple of Luther, was a great note taker who wrote down everything, even stuff that a less diligent or delicate student would have left out. It is interesting what Luther let fly after a couple of beers.)

Luther, The Humble

Martin had a pretty high opinion of himself. He once said, “St. Augustine or St. Ambrose cannot be compared with me.” (Ref. Erlangen, Vol. 61, pg. 422). Luther added a word to the text of Scripture on which he and much of the world have based an entire religious philosophy.  In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, (3:28) we read “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”  Martin translated it to read, “a person is justified by faith ALONE.” The word “alone” doesn’t appear in the text.

When one of his students said that all Christendom was wondering why he had added a word to the text, Martin simply said, “If your Papist annoys you with the word (‘alone’), 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.” (Ref. Amic. Discussion, 1)

I guess that includes Ambrose and Augustine. Being personally infallible, Martin just assumed that he understood the phrase “works of the law” meant kindness and generosity and morality. It is a shame that he hadn’t read the Dead Sea Scrolls. The phrase “works of the law” appears in only two places as far as we know St. Paul’s letters and the Dead Sea Scroll. Allow me to quote Miqsat Ma’aseh HaTorah (Some Works of the Law, Dead Sea Scroll 4QMMT, a real page turner.) 

“And also concerning flowing liquids: we say that in these there is no purity. Even flowing liquids cannot separate unclean from clean because the moisture of flowing liquids and their containers is the same moisture.”

In other words, if you are pouring water from a clay pitcher into an unclean clay pot,  you have to destroy both the pitcher and the pot because the ritual pollution will jump up the stream of water from the pot and pollute the pitcher. The same principle applies to piddling on a power line. Don’t even try it! 

Luther somehow failed to notice that in the previous chapter, (Romans 2:6) Paul warns us that God “will repay each one according to his works.” We have untold millions of people  in the world who count themselves perfectly good Christians who cheat on their spouse, cheat in their business, cheat on everything and feel good about it because they are saved, and as Luthier also taught “Once saved, always saved!”

Gosh I hope Luther was right. If Martin is wrong, there are a lot of people in hell who are saying, “But I was saved!”  Martin just didn’t like good works at all. “It is more important to guard against good works than against sin.” (Ref. Tischreden, Wittenberg Edition, Vol. VI., p. 160). 

Martin’s dislike of good work and his personal infallibility also extended to the Commandments. The Ten Commandments were worse than pointless as far as Martin was concerned. “If we allow them (the Commandments) any influence in our conscience, they become the cloak of all evil, heresies and blasphemies” (ref. Comm. ad Galat, p.310). 

One of Martin’s more startling beliefs had to do with “thou shalt not commit adultery.”  Martin once said, “Christ committed adultery first of all with the woman 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.” (Ref. Tischreden, Weimer Edition, Vol. 2, Pg. 107.

Like I said, get a few beers in Him and the great reformer said some interesting stuff.  I bet you didn’t think people accused Jesus of sin until the current era. Guess again.  The current era is the fruit of the seeds that Martin Luther planted.

To be continued: More impolite and intolerant stuff about Luther.

Didn't we do away with Hell? part 3

Continued from last week

So, here’s my theory:  We are born as pretty selfish little creatures. From the very beginning there is a battle going on inside us. The image of God, the perfect, selfless, sacrificial God of Love in whose image we are made is at odds with the brokenness and failure that seem to be our inheritance.

What does St Paul say in Romans 7? “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” 

That pretty much sums up the human condition.  I know what’s good. I do what’s bad. If I allow the selfishness in me to take over my being, when I die, that’s pretty much who I will be forever. Eternal aloneness. Just me. Forever. Maybe the first few eons would be tolerable, but eventually even I would get bored with myself. The good news is that this eternal aloneness is actually quite avoidable.

C.S. Lewis has the devil complaining that God is such a sophist. He will save a person on the flimsiest grounds. Why, even good intentions are taken into account! As St. Augustine puts it “To wish to go is to go.” In other words, all one must do is honestly admit that he has failed and needs God, and God will teach him how to fall in love with God. It may take some time, but if I admit that I need help and ask the Lord to change my heart, then I can spend eternity at an unending wedding feast. Not only that, I am not just a guest, I am somehow part of the bride and groom. The joy of one’s own wedding is just the crudest analogy. Heaven is more than we can imagine. So, it’s up to me. Heaven or hell. The wedding feast or the outer darkness.  There is, however, a problem. To be happily married one must fall in love; really fall in love, selflessly head over heels crazy in love. Otherwise even a wedding feast can be a bit of a trial. 

If you’ve ever fallen in love, I mean really in love, the only thing that matters is the other. To love is to allow yourself to forget yourself. I remember a fellow who drove about a hundred miles every day just to have lunch with his girlfriend who was in college. To you it seems nuts. To him it seemed reasonable. 

I remember another story of a young man who married his high school sweetheart. Not long after the wedding she was injured in a terrible accident and was unable to use her arms and legs. She had also suffered some mental impairment. The years passed and he loved her no less. Every Sunday he would dress her in her finest and bring her to church. This continued as the young man slowly became an old one.  A new pastor came to the parish and was told the story of the old couple who never missed Mass together, and once as church was letting out, the pastor said to the old man, “I so admire your sacrifice.” 

The old man looked very confused, and said, “What sacrifice?”

The priest returned, “Well, every Sunday for as long as anyone can remember, you have dressed your wife in her Sunday best, and brought her here to church. It must be a great sacrifice for you to have done this all years.”

The old man looked shocked and said, “Father, it was no sacrifice! I love her.” 

You see, true sacrificial love doesn’t notice that it is sacrificial. To live for God, to die for God, when one perceives the beauty of God there is no sacrifice. How often we hear stories of martyrs rejoicing on their way to death, singing and laughing. It is as if they are on the way to a wedding, which in fact, they are. But I, sinner that I am, count the cost and begrudge every little inconvenience that my relationship with God entails. I count the cost down to the penny. The amazing thing is that God loves me so much that He will make excuses for me if only I let him do so. 
Therein lies the rub! There are people who would love to go to heaven, if they didn’t have to fall in love to do so. They have decided that they are the only person in their life really worth loving. Oh sure, they might desire another person, but they desire another person the way one might want a toy or an amusement. When the other is no longer amusing, they move on to the next recreation. There are people who have children in our times, as if somehow children were an accessory to the good life. As soon as things get tough, they find someone to do the heavy lifting for them. Some people don’t even bother with children. They convince themselves that the moral thing to do is get a pet and not burden the world with another human being.

The craze for pets in our times is astonishing. Now mind you, one of my best friends is a dog, but she is a dog. She has an owner, not a pet parent. We do not celebrate her birthday, nor does she get spa treatments. When one looks down the pet aisle in a grocery store, one cannot help but notice that things have gotten a bit out of control. Pets are wonderful. All that compassion and affection and they ask so very little…… That’s a great thing for people who want to give little. (Please don’t get too huffy about this. This does not apply to you. You have a perfectly healthy relationship with your Lhasa Apso/Rottweiler mixed-breed or your eighteen cats.)

The first step to heaven is the confession of sin. The word confess means to admit or agree. What are we agreeing with? Simple: We are agreeing with God’s opinion that we are not perfect. We have failed. We are sinners. Here is a bit of a problem. In the modern world we are trained to admit no such thing. It’s not our fault. Everyone is a winner. We give awards to everyone who runs the race. Competitive sports are frowned on in progressive schools. Medals and trophies are handed out like Kleenex lest anyone be offended. It’s not my fault!  Since the groundbreaking work of Sigmund Freud we have the luxury of explaining everything away as the result of poor potty training or being frightened by a circus clown at the age of three. It’s not my fault that I am an axe murderer. I just developed a fondness for sharp objects because Poppa once cut himself while shaving and asked me to go get a band aid. 

It’s not my fault that I am a sinner. I really have no free will. I can’t resist the compulsion to pick the wings off flies and throw cats out the window. God made me who I am. It’s His fault. God has got a lot to answer for. Poor people and sick children and concentration camps and freight trains stopped at railroad crossings in heavy traffic! Who does God think He is to judge me? If there actually is a God, He is going to have to explain a few things when I get my hands on Him. How dare He? God is just going to have to get over Himself and get with the times.

If I am right that narcissism is the sure fire way to go to hell, then the current age may be the very school of hell. We have our 1.8 children all of whom are definitely above average and all of whom are so gorgeous that parents are sure they should all have made a fortune modeling for baby food commercials. We convince our kids that the universe was somehow incomplete until they arrived. And guess what? The little prima donnas believe us. They walk around with their electronic devices taking pictures of themselves and wondering why the world doesn’t realize that they are geniuses who should never actually have to do an honest day’s work. They are unable to commit themselves to hard work or to stable relationships, like marriage and parenthood. 

Hell may have no one in it, but it seems that a lot of people are applying for entrance these days. I have heard that all you have in heaven is what you gave away on earth, and conversely, all the useless stuff you cling to will eventually drag you down to hell.

Freedom? What was God thinking when He gave us freedom? Shouldn’t God make us happy whether we want to be happy or not, just like our parents try to do? Isn’t it His job to give us all the stuff we want just like mommy and daddy and daddy’s new boyfriend so we won’t be sad? Shouldn’t He support us when we shack up with our significant other and not mention the word sin? After all, we wouldn’t want Him to hurt our feelings.  Jesus never hurt anyone’s feelings. (For the humor impaired, this is sarcasm.) 

I think Bishop Barron is quite correct. He says that since freedom is essential for love, hell must exist. If there is no chance to say “No!” to God’s love and forgiveness, there can be neither love nor forgiveness. You cannot be forced to love.  We may well hope there is no one in hell, but Bishop Barron, whom I regard as a very great man and quite possibly a genius, is quite correct. There is a hell. And it is quite possible that I might end up there if I don’t admit my need for God and ask Him to change my heart.

Rev. Know-it-all

Didn't we do away with hell? part 2

Continued from last week….

I have heard it said that the Catholic Doctrine of original sin is the most obviously true of all its doctrines. Remember what sin is. In its root meaning, the Greek word “hamartia” is a term that comes from the world of sports. It simply means to miss the target. Were I shooting arrows for example, and missed the target, I would say, were I an ancient Greek, “Oh! I’ve sinned!!” (Of course I would say it in ancient Greek.)  

The New Testament, I maintain written by the Holy Spirit, gives a moral connotation to a common word.  “I have failed.” In the New Testament this means that I have failed morally. Is there a person alive who thinks that it’s all good? Everything we do seems motivated by and riddled with failure. We are not happy. So we make a lot of money. We are still not happy.  We are not happy. We go from bed to bed, intimacy to intimacy. We are still not happy. It seems that the best we can do is to keep busy. We keep trying failed strategies; “If only I had a little more money, a little more sex, a little more time, a little more sleep, a little more TV, a better car, a bigger house, nicer furniture….then I would be happy. 

I am a history geek. I love to watch videos of war as the war is ending. The end of war is for me the ultimate happy ending; the slave being set free; the tyrant perishing; the veteran returning home; the prisoner surviving the concentration camp. Face it, happy endings aren’t really part of the story.
People of African descent were re-enslaved by the Jim Crow laws; the ousted tyrant is usually replaced by a new tyrant; the veteran returns home and faces alienation from his family and post-traumatic stress disorder; and the few Jews who were released from concentration camps were pretty much abandoned by the world. They returned to their homes and found other people living in them. 

I remember the story of a Jew who returned to his old village home only to find a local man occupying it. The local said, "You’re here for money you’ve hidden!”  

The survivor said, “No, I don’t want to move back. I just want to see the old home.” 

The squatter refused to let the Jew back into his old home. After the Jew went away the man systematically destroyed the house looking for the treasure he was convinced the Jews had hidden in the walls, and ultimately the house was destroyed and abandoned. The Jew was met only with sorrow after his liberation and the squatter was destroyed by wanting more than he had already been able to steal.  

We seem designed for unhappiness. We fight horrible injustice only to replace injustice with injustice. St. Paul sums it up pretty well:

 “For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want, so I find this law at work. Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.  What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans, 7th Chapter)

We are a mess, personally and politically. We want peace, but make war. We want harmony but we argue. We want love but we pick at each other finding fault. The great humor of the current age is that the “tolerant” increasingly lodge civil and even criminal charges against the “intolerant.”  We all have a sense of failure in a failed world, and think that if we just tried a little harder, if we just lowered our moral standards a little, if we could just fight the war to end all wars. Remember one of the definitions of insanity:  “keep doing what you’ve always done but this time, expect different results.” 

Jesus has a completely different approach to the whole matter. “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.” (John 12:25)  This sounds crazy. It’s like the thing about turning the car’s steering wheel in the direction of the skid on an icy road. It sounds crazy. Crazy, but it works if done right. We in the world are already crazy. Maybe we should try Jesus’ advice. What we are doing now doesn’t work. 

What can Jesus possibly mean when he tells us to hate our lives so we might gain it? I think C.S. Lewis explains it nicely in the 14th chapter of the Screwtape Letters:

“(God) wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love, a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy (God); He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.” 

This is what I mean by saying that God doesn’t send us to hell; He finds us there. We are in love with ourselves, and thus unable to love ourselves. There is a wonderful song “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.” 

In the beauty of Christ’s love on the cross you can find a happiness that will not go sour.

Next week, more hell.