A few choice quotes from Luther:

People gave ear to an upstart astrologer [Copernicus] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth. Martin Luther, "Works," Volume 22, c. 1543

The word and working of God is quite clear; that women were made to be either wives or prostitutes - Martin Luther Works 12.94

Luther claimed to have come to his Protestant views after being shocked by the "worldliness" of the Roman clergy. In short, the churchmen were taking in the cash hand over fist and were living the good life. Luther saw that what fueled this powerful money making machine was the church's ability to prey upon the guilt of wealthy parishioners - the church collected payments, called indulgences, from wealthy followers, and in return promised them a place in heaven in return for these "good works."

Considering both the power of the Catholic church and the meglomania of the popes of his time, Luther's "shock" seems to be a reasonable response. But Luther's shock did not lead him to simply speak out against the misuse of people's guilt and the insincerity of indulgences. Luther had no problem using the guilt complex as a tool to control the masses. His sole problem was that he was not an imporant player in the power structure of the church - in other words, his problem was that it wasn't him at the helm taking advantage of people's guilt. Luther's reactionary theology was influenced by the fact that he could not compete in such a world - i.e., he was more of a have-not than a have, so he realized that he would have to come up with a way to negate the power of the Catholic chruch. And the best way was to appeal to other have-nots by pointing out that what they had was the real "wealth" in the world.

Protesting Against What You Want, but Don't Have

The truth is that many protests are about nothing more than sour grapes. Luther, and others like him, were losers in the Catholic scheme of things: they didn't have the power or money to be on top. So, he proceded to do what many of us do when we realize that we are at the bottom of the pecking order - pretend that what the one's in power have really isn't important in the first place, and that, what we have, is really what does matter. Luther decided that power and money were immaterial - that they didn't really matter. Furthermore, in Luther's new religion, it was not impossible for Christians to be saved through their own efforts - salvation could come solely through the (arbitrary)¹ gift of God's grace. Therefore, faith alone saves. The Catholic church and all its money and power would be undermined, the Catholics would lose their iron grip on the power, and Luther and the other losers - those without either money or power, would go from last to first. Basically, its the same story, told a million times over - and it can be seen in the fact that many Protestants and Fundamentalists, who while outwardly claiming to realize that they are "worthless" without god's grace, will quickly give up the charade by revealing just how special they are in confessing their worthlessness.

The Influence of Luther's Pre-existing Needs on his Theology

Luther's motivation to undermine the power of the Catholic church circumscribed Luther's religious studies so that he carefully pieced together selected parts of the New Testament with the scriptually unsupported theology of Augustine in an effort to create a view that would undermine man's ability to save him from "damnation." In this research, Luther ignored various biblical passages supporting salvation through works, as well as the very words of Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount which clearly support an individual's effort for salvation (I.e. forgiving others, charity, etc., see my entry on Jesus for the Beatitudes).

The Church's Response

Of course, the Catholic church had a very obvious and serious problem with this view: you can't make (as much) money from it. You can, however, make tons of cash off "works", particulary from the guilt ridden affluent, who were willing to purchase the "indulgences", - thinly veiled bribes of god, that were supposedly capable of helping any person buy their way into heaven. (Isn't it astonishing what things people will believe on mere say-so?)

The Catholic church saw that this movement could seriously cut into revenue, so they church summoned Luther to appear before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in April 1521. He refused to recant, supposedly stating:

"Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise" (apocryphal).

Luther's Theology

Luther maintained that God interacts with human beings in two ways -

Through the Law - as in the commandments (legalistic morality) and through the Gospel. However, our understanding of the law (God's Commandments) are always distorted by human sin.

The law has two functions. It enables us to maintain some order in our own lives despite our profound alienation from God, as well as alienation from our neighbors and even ourselves due to original sin. In addition, our inability to successfully meet the law makes us aware of our need for the forgiveness of sins and thus leads us to Christ. This point was picked up on by C. S. Lewis.

Luther held that God makes himself known through earthly (limited) forms rather than in his pure divinity. Thus, God revealed himself in Jesus Christ; he speaks his word to us in the human words of the New Testament writers and we experience his "body" through the Eucharist. Human beings are only instruments of God, who works in the world through them, as tools, they are incapable of apprehending God by means of their methods of understanding the world, such as philosophy or ethics; they must let God be God and see him only where he chooses to make himself known. God reveals his wisdom and his power through suffering, and the secret of meaningful life through Christ's death on the cross. As we will see directly, both this masochistic relationship to God, and the egotistical belief of man as the center of God's universe would be shocked to the core.

Response to Luther's Claim of a Logic and Empirical Reading of the Bible

The event that served more than any other to break the first link in the long chain of despotic ignorance of the Dark Ages, is that known by the name of the Reformation by Luther. From that time, though it does not appear to have made any part of the intention of Luther, or of those who are called Reformers, the Sciences began to revive, and Liberality, their natural associate, began to appear. This was the only public good the Reformation did; for, with respect to religious good, it might as well not have taken place.
- Thomas Paine, "The Age of Reason"

"What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church [...]a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."-- Martin Luther

Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God." --
Martin Luther

More on Luther's views of Reason and Faith

"The anabaptists pretend that children, not as yet having reason, ought not to receive baptism. I answer: That reason in no way contributes to faith. Nay, in that children are destitute of reason, they are all the more fit and proper recipients of baptism. For reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but - more frequently than not - struggles against the Divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God. If God can communicate the Holy Ghost to grown persons, he can, a fortiori, communicate it to young children. Faith comes of the Word of God, when this is heard; little children hear that Word when they receive baptism, and therewith they receive also faith. - Martin Luther , Table Talk CCCLIII [1569] .

"There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason...Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God." -- -Martin Luther (Works Vol. 12)" The first two sentences are found quoted by Walter Kaufmann, _The Faith of a Heretic_, (Garden city, NY, doubleday, 1963), p. 75

Here Luther tells us that reason cannot take us to 'god', so we must rely on faith:

This is the highest degree of faith - to believe that He is merciful, who saves so few and damns so many (Belief contra logic) ; to believe Him just, who according to His own will, makes us necessarily damnable, that He may seem, as Erasmus says, 'to delight in the torments of the miserable, and to be an object of hatred rather than of love.' If, therefore, I could by any means comprehend how that same God can be merciful and just, who carries the appearance of so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no need of faith. But now, since that cannot be comprehended, there is room for exercising faith, while such things are preached and openly proclaimed: in the same manner as, while God kills, the faith of life is exercised in death. Suffice it to have said thus much upon your PREFACE.

Original quote: 'Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem qui tam paucos salvat tam multos damnat; credere justum qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit; ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum, et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur possem ulla ratione comprehendere quomodo is Deus misericors et justus, qui tantum iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide.' " -- -Martin Luther (Works Vol. 12)"

“Whoever wishes to be a Christian, let him pluck out the eyes of his reason.” -- -Martin Luther (Works Vol. 12)"

In the paragraph from which this quote is drawn, Luther cites 1 Corinthians 2:9: “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,’ these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

Here Luther openly states that reason led people to heresy (bold part 1), because god knowledge is secret and hidden and only open through revelation to those who love him (bold parts 2 and 3). The citations prove that the quote listed above them is clearly in context with the rest of the passage. In fact, the quote practically reads as the conclusion to a syllogism.

Next:

The full sentence of the “pluck out your eye” quote contains a citation to Matthew 5:29:

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell”

Why cite this? Because there is a similar concept being explicated upon here. In the Matthew citation, it is held that it is better to pluck out your eye if seeing leads you to sin and then hell. The same goes for the eye of reason: better to pluck it out if reasoning leads you to heresy and then hell.

So Luther is doing anything other than giving a rational argument. He's beginning with a special plead fallacy. He arguing that there is 'god knowledge' but that it is secret and hidden and not open to reason. Classic special plead fallacy. He then begs the question that our inability to make any sense of 'God claims' must mean that the problem is reason itself. Classic circular logic. Reason would actually dictate that the problem lies in the "God claim" and not with reason itself. Luther's conclusion that one must pluck out they eye of reason is therefore bankrupt nonsense.

Luther's Racism

The magazine Christian History, Issue 39, 1993 (published by Christianity Today) devoted a whole issue to Martin Luther's life and legacy. Pages 38-39 quote his work On the Jews and Their Lies which gives us an idea about how moral Luther's views were: "Set fire to their synagogues and schools. Jewish houses should be razed and destroyed, and Jewish prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, curing, and blasphemy are taught, [should] be taken from them." Their rabbis [should] be forbidden to teach on pain of loss of life and limb." This is a man held to be a moral authority?! Luther also urged that "safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews," and that "all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them." What Jews could do was to have "a flail, an ax, a hole, a spade" put into their hands so "young, strong Jews and Jewesses" could "earn their bread in the sweat of their brow." Do you think any Fuhrer you may have heard of might have gleaned an idea or two from that last passage alone? In fact, think of Hitler while reading the next paragraph

Luther proposed seven measures of "sharp mercy" that German princes could take against Jews: (1) burn their schools and synagogues; (2) transfer Jews to community settlements; (3) confiscate all Jewish literature, which was blasphemous; (4) prohibit rabbis to teach, on pain of death; (5) deny Jews safe conduct, so as to prevent the spread of Judaism; (6) appropriate their wealth and use it to support converts and to prevent the Jews' practice of usury; (7) assign Jews to manual labor as a form of penance.

Is there no clearer blueprint for the Final Solution than the works of one of christianity's greatest reformers and moralists?

Worse yet, Luther was no paper philosopher - he advised clergy, their congregations, and all government officials to help carry out these measures. Since most Jews had been expelled from Germany before 1536, Luther's counsel was implemented by few officials. Yet a harsh anti-Jewish measure in 1543 mentioned Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies.

Both Luther's friends and his foes criticized him for proposing these measures. His best friends begged him to stop his anti-Jewish raving, but Luther continued his attacks in other treatises. He repeated as true the worst anti-Semitic charges from medieval literature: that Jews killed Christian babies; they murdered Christ over and over again by stabbing eucharistic hosts; they poised wells. As usual, he did not allow facts to deter him from his emotionally driven lies.

Luther now thought what he had accused Catholics of thinking in 1523: Jews were dogs. "We are at fault for not slaying them!" he fumed shortly before his death. Yet one more hypocricy for the master of hypocrisy.

Catholicism's Reseponse to Luther

The catholic response to Luther was to lable; him an "atheist" - Atheism was sometimes used to describe a doctrine that, if carried to its logical conclusion, would allegedly result in disbelief (in a loving, intelligent god). Montaigne, one of the most intelligent and sophisticated Catholics of the sixteenth century, had this in mind when he condemned the teachings of Martin Luther as implicitly atheistic.

And in that sense, Luther's claims are atheistic, because they lead to a loving, intelligent god as a violent, stupid god. This is a contradiction, ergo no such god exists.

Protestants had rejected the Church as an intermediate authority between God and man, arguing instead that individuals should search their own conscience for divine inspiration. But this was a dangerous innovation, according to Montaigne, because the feeble and unreliable judgments of individuals would generate diverse and conflicting religious beliefs, and eventually terminate in atheism. The "novelties of Luther" were "shaking our old religion," and this "new disease would soon degenerate into loathsome atheism."

The skinny on Luther: Luther is credited with inculcating the power of the individual, but nothing in his theology actually looks favorably upon the individual. He is seen as a logician who demands evidence, but clearly invalidates this in nearly all his works. He asks others for proof, but is willing to lie to support his own contentions. He accuses others of racism, and then commits the worst sort of racist acts imaginable. That he does so in a book called "On the Jews and Their Lies" is particularly galling considering Luther's own support for using lies to defend a cause! Luther is without any doubt one of the greatest villians in the history of mankind.

If you have the stomach to wade through the christian hatred of Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies go ahead and read them here.

1 The gift of salvation must be arbitrary, otherwise, a person would be said to have earned salvation - a contradiction in Lutherian terms.