Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Created Our World (Hinges of History Book 6) by Cahill Thomas

Author:Cahill, Thomas [Cahill, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780385534161
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

In stumbling upon this last insight, the brooding, often morose Luther confided that “I felt myself absolutely reborn, as though I had entered into the open gates of paradise itself.”

There are, of course, many subsidiary developments beyond these three, but virtually all additional developments are built upon these central insights. Soon enough, for instance, Luther, provoked by the pope’s unyielding high-handedness, will begin to mock him as a diabolical temptation, the Whore of Babylon and/or the Antichrist prophesied in Revelation. On another front, he will elaborate on his theory that the local prince, whoever he may be, acts as the mouthpiece and enforcer of God’s will, following occasional Pauline affirmations that appear to point in the same direction. Luther, however, seems normally to find the prince more reliable than any church official. His teaching on predestination—that God has willed from all eternity that some shall be saved, others damned—will wobble back and forth over time. In later life, he will recommend not thinking about the difficult subject at all, if one can banish it from one’s mind. But all these positions seem to me to lack the centrality of the first three, especially given the mutability of the subsidiary positions—or at least their evolution—over time.

Even Luther’s seemingly strict adherence to the truth of the Bible has its limits. Though no infants are baptized in the course of the New Testament, Luther will continue to insist on infant baptism throughout his life, as well as on many other traditional beliefs unprovable from Scripture, such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In a letter of 1528 to two radical pastors, he will indeed demonstrate that he continues to stand up for almost the entirety of Roman Catholic tradition: “We confess that under the papacy much Christian good, indeed all Christian good, is, and so it has come to us. Namely, we confess with the papacy that there is a correct Holy Scripture, a correct baptism, a correct sacrament of the altar, a correct key to the forgiveness of sin, a correct teaching office, a correct catechism, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the articles of faith [of the traditional creeds].” Quite a mouthful from the world’s first Protestant.

The best route to understanding Luther’s theological positions may lie in appreciating the man’s psychology. He was a natural conservative, someone who preferred black-and-white statements to unnecessarily clever and elusive formulations, someone more at home with the literal than the metaphorical, someone who respected tradition and wished only for necessary changes and adjustments.8 This corner of his psyche he may be said to share with a great many men and women throughout history.

But there is another corner that seems to belong only to the period that begins in his time and continues into ours, for in Luther we sense—for the very first time in biographical history—what may best be called existential terror or what Marius labels Luther’s “devouring fear of death.” Luther, commenting on the Fifth Psalm, finds the life of the believer filled with “pain, temptation, doubt, and fear.

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