Martin Luther: Hero or villain?

[uberreiniger]

History remembers German priest Martin Luther as a good-hearted hero who stood up to the abuses of the Catholic church and in doing so began a revolution that changed the face of Christianity forever. Sadly, a few months before his death Luther reversed his lifelong stance of tolerance and compassion for Jews and began writing violent anti-Semitic rants demanding all synagogues be demolished and Jews enslaved and forced to work on farms. These tracts were seized upon and exhorted by the Third Reich and were arguably crucial in catipulting their agenda forward. In recent years, large branches of the Lutheran Church have publicly apologized for these rants of their founder, proclaiming them a shame they must bear.

I raised this point in a discussion in christianity yesterday and was pointedly smacked down by a Lutheran priest who basically wants to explain away Luther's words as the tragic byproduct of end-of-life illness and dementia. He also gave the tried and true defense that I was "taking the statements out of context." Although I'm not sure in what context the desire to demolish people's synagogues and put them into forced labor can mean anything other than what it appears to. This is Martin Luther, not Jonathan Swift. And I've never known anyone who manifested violent hatred in the last stages of illness and dementia that they didn't already have before. If your experience with the dying has differed, please let me know.

For whatever it's worth the community mod basically sided with the other guy, stating he was one of the community's two experts on Luther and that I should probably trust his knowledge.

I'm at a crossroads as to whether I can ever trust anything Luther said again. My question for myself is why do I hold him to this standard? After all, most of the musicians I listen to have publicly stated their wish to see Christianity obliterated from the Earth. Of course, when such statements are coming from guys who wear bondage gear and white makeup in plublic it's extremely hard to take even their most bloodcurdling proclamations seriously. Meanwhile, I still consider The Passion of the Christ to be one of the most beautiful films ever made even though Mel Gibson's famous drunken rant isn't that far off the mark from Luther's thoughts. Perhaps the difference is that Mel Gibson is alive in the present and we can look at him and see a lonely, tormented alcoholic with a mountain of personal problems who wants to find enemies everywhere. Not that that excuses it. I give him the benefit of the doubt in regards to his public repentance, but it's still hard for me to watch one of my favorite films in the same light now.

Anyway, we can't do that with Luther. All we have is apologists' word for it that he didn't really mean what he said. Meanwhile, churches that bear his name and that have a vested interest in weasling Luther out of the corner he painted himself into admit that it just can't be done.

Perhaps it's also different because unlike Mel Gibson or black metal bands, I was taught in church that Martin Luther was a real-life hero; the little guy who stood up for what was right, refused to back down, and changed the world because of it. Luther is German in name only. His story is very Greek: every Heracles that enters Olympus immortal and triumphant leaves a trail of innocent people, killed in fits of rage, behind him.

Comments

[catlin.livejournal.com]

Corys Great Aunt, Elenor, was the sweetest, most accepting woman I had ever met, until Dementia hit. Until then, she was not racist, she was not bigoted. Then she became very harsh, and sometimes actively hateful.

The flip side was that his rather hateful grandmother, Helen, became very quiet and kind when it hit.

Dementia really does change your personality completely, or it can anyway.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I've done some more reading this afternoon and apparently Luther was in pretty constant agony from multiple health problems during the later half of his life and these had a profound effect on his mood. Friends and loved ones were regularly shocked by his bad temper during these illnesses.

Apparently prior to the anti-Jew debacle he caused embarassment and dismay among his fellow reformers by commissioning a pamphlet of pornographic anti-papacy cartoons. He seemed to hate people pretty evenly across the board.

[catlin.livejournal.com]

ew. I don't know if that is dementia, or just severe pain wearing him down, but that had to suck for him and his family.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

This is being said on cold medicine, so my Jewdar is off.


To destroy everything Martin Luther did because of a flaw that he had is to discount a lot of amazing people.

To quote Alan Dershowitz

the virulently anti-Jewish statements of intellectuals throughout history? Their numbers included H. L. Mencken ('The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of'); George Bernard Shaw ('Stop being Jews and start being human beings'); Henry Adams ('The whole rotten carcass is rotten with Jew worms'); H.G. Wells ('A careful study of anti-Semitism, prejudice and accusations might be of great value to many Jews, who do not adequately realize the irritation they inflict'); Edgar Degas (characterized as a 'wild anti-Semite'); Denis Diderot ('Brutish people, vile and vulgar men'); Theodore Dreiser (New York is a 'kike's dream of a ghetto,' and Jews are not 'pure Americans' and 'lack integrity'); T. S. Eliot (a social as well as literary anti-Semite, even after the Holocaust); Immanuel Kant ('The Jews still cannot claim any true genius, any truly great man. All their talents and skills revolve around stratagems and low cunning ... They are a nation of swindlers.') Other famous anti-Semites include Tacitus, Cicero, Aleksander Pushkin, Pierre Renoir, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and, of course, Richard Wagner. (Dershowitz, 113).

To me, I can still love Renoir, love HG Wells, and adore Pushkin without agreeing with their prejudices.

But if he really was demented and angry and raving, than apologize for it. "It's such a pity he lost his mind," and all. Don't shove it under the rug, if he really went insane, just admit it.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Just a thought. For a guy with dementia, he still managed to write a 65,000-word treatise. How demented could he be?

Paul Johnson writes that "Luther was not content with verbal abuse. Even before he wrote his anti-Semitic pamphlet, he got Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them from many German towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from Brandenburg in 1543."

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

See, that was kind of my sticking point vs. the priest's arguments. A man lying in his bed cursing at the ceiling is one thing. A man penning a book with coherent grammar and sentence structure is a different animal altogether.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Even if he was a raving lunatic, his work had a terrible affect on Jewish people. If a mentally ill person starts a fire and people get burned, argue diminished mental capacity but don't ignore the victims of the fire.

And yeah, if someone is coherent enough to pen (by HAND) 65,000 words, he's sane to me.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

And yeah, if someone is coherent enough to pen (by HAND) 65,000 words, he's sane to me.

Or if I may perhaps borrow a line from the band Demons & Wizards, "I'm insane but not yet crazy."

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

And don't forget my homeboy H.P. Lovecraft. But again, Lovecraft hated absolutely everyone who wasn't a white male, so it's barely worth mentioning. Plus, much like the black metal musicians his artistic medium made his prejudices almost cute.

Some of the quotes you mention sound like they could be things taken out of context. I don't say that to dismiss the impact of what they said, only that I'm curious what led to some of these statements. And to be fair, (yet also not to make any apologies,) it's easy to forget that almost none of these men lived in the cosmopolitan melting pot society in which we live now. They were born into worlds that openly embraced an "us vs. them" mentallity that we now pretend we don't have and would rather pretend never existed. How many of them actually knew anything about Jews beyond what they'd heard?

Tacitus and Cicero I'm willing to forgive altogether. I mean, the Romans kind of thought they were superior to everyone, and Judean culture was even more outside their comprehension than most.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I don't mind HP Lovecraft. He was married to a Jewish woman and truly loved her, so I just find him confusing.

But yes, a lot of ideas of co-existence are very new. The quotes I can verify personally was that Renoir was a pill, but I still like his works. I did a whole paper on French antisemitism and was shocked to learn how many of my favorite artists and writers hated Jews.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

I think Lovecraft was confused period. He was the Renoir of alien nightmare god fiction.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I just read some advice you gave Lady Tam Li. You have just sealed your place as one of my favorite people. It was just..what I wanted to say, but even better!

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Oh my, which advice was that?

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah that advice! I'm flattered that you think so highly of my open-mindedness, but really I'm just speaking from experience. My beliefs on that area of life probably aren't what you'd expect from one of my background, but it's a topic I'm not afraid to discuss. Moreover, it's an area that's never going to progress in our society until we can speak openly and honestly about it. And we need to, desperately.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I see that in my own community. We are so holy that we don't talk about until it's too late. And there's nothing unholy about sex! Our ancestors did it! Moses had two kids, David had many wives, an entire book of the bible is erotic. I feel like we should start a chant! "Sex is holy"

I am waiting till a committed relationship, but that's because I want to do, but I know that it's a holy act!

In fact, "The Talmud specifies both the quantity and quality of sex that a man must give his wife. It specifies the frequency of sexual obligation based on the husband's occupation, although this obligation can be modified in the ketubah (marriage contract). A man may not take a vow to abstain from sex for an extended period of time, and may not take a journey for an extended period of time, because that would deprive his wife of sexual relations. In addition, a husband's consistent refusal to engage in sexual relations is grounds for compelling a man to divorce his wife, even if the couple has already fulfilled the halakhic obligation to procreate."

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

It's a shame I can't sell you my novel anymore. I think you'd have enjoyed it given that the holiness of sex is a central theme. (Its potential unholiness if misused is also there.)

And damnit I'm writing to whoever owns the copyright on Christianity and telling them they're fired for not including the Talmud!

[redstar826.livejournal.com]

And I've never known anyone who manifested violent hatred in the last stages of illness and dementia that they didn't already have before. If your experience with the dying has differed, please let me know.

from what I've heard from my mother, who has for the last 20 years spent a lot of time working with people who have dementia and from what I have seen with my grandmother and a woman I cared for, it seems like by the time a person gets to the point where they start spewing crack pot ideas they are already at point where they really can't care for themselves (and she's dealt with it all, from people who according to their families were once really sweet but now get really mean and angry to one lady who repeatedly insisted that she has been to the moon). The people she works with certainly aren't going to be capable of writing essays based on their ramblings. Usually people at that point have a hard time concentrating on any one subject for very long and can barely remember something that happened five minutes ago.

I could find it believable that dementia could cause him to rant and rave in ways that he didn't before. But I find it questionable that he was suffering from dementia to the point where he was losing touch with reality but supposedly was still with it enough to focus and write coherently.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was my thought. I've seen mean demented people become nice and vice versa, but never one who could write out those ideas as coherently and methodically as Luther seems to have. Maybe a lifetime of physical pain and personal disappointment made hate cloud is his vision, but I can't buy that he wasn't in his right mind.

[kakita-shisumo.livejournal.com]

Here's my question, and it's an honest one: why do you wish to privilege Luther's last-few-months-of-life-turnaround over all the things he said and did up until then?

Do we trust deathbed conversions? Should we?

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Eh, it's the church youth group culture I grew up in where Sola Scriptura ROCKS and is the best thing since sliced bread. I guess they push that angle because they figure it's something teens can relate to: righteous rebel sticking it to the establishment and all that. I haven't really thought all that seriously about Luther since I quit going to the Lutheran campus ministry at KSU over ten years ago. Really I've barely thought about him at all. But by chance I've been reminded of him lately and it's led me to this.

A lot of it is just me adjusting to reality after being taught that Luther was one of "the good guys." Kind of like when we learn that Abraham Lincoln didn't really like black people all that much. I know people are more complex than stories make them out to be, but what Luther said was so horrible that it's just impossible to wrap your mind around.

I don't know whether I trust his deathbed conversion or not, but it had very real repercussions beyond his own life and thus I can't ignore it or ignore the shadow it seems to cast on the good things he said.

[rustie25.livejournal.com]

Each good step in life deserves recognition. It people before us had not made small steps, we would not be as accepting of a nation as we are. Appreciate the good he did, and learn from his mistakes.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

That's a compelling point.

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

As the token Lutheran in your group as well as the token raving lunatic, I can say that Luther has always held a somewhat amusing place in my mind. Consider, if you will, that the man posted his 95 theses to get the Catholic church to change its ways. He wasn't starting a revolution, he was trying to point out where they got off track. Basically, anyone who tells you differently is lying to you to make Luther look better (and trust me when I say most Lutherans make a life out of doing this.)

Luther married and deflowered a nun and drank heavily and with gusto. Wrote about the joys he got from the pleasures of the flesh, and was so frozen with the guilt of sin that he had to rethink the Catholic practice of confession to assuage his belief that he was going straight to Hell for his impure thoughts. The man wasn't even close to perfect. He had more flaws than the King James Bible. He also just happened to be the guy who finally stood up to the Catholic church when they forced him into a corner and made him.

Listen, I love listening to Wagner. I think his music is transcendental in its power and majesty. I don't care that he was a hateful, bigoted human being because that's simply not important. Likewise, it's really not important that Luther was a spiteful person. What's important is looking at his ideas and deciding which we keep and which we discard.

Also, having grown up in Luther-land, I can tell you that everyone in the Lutheran church is fucking nuts about the guy. They honestly believe the bullshit about him being close to God and that he somehow was a channel by which God brought "true Christianity" to the world. In short, they differ from a cult only when they remember that Luther was a man, and no amount of wishful thinking will set him at the right hand of God.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

He was a bad man with a bad attitude, but he was the right man at the right time.

[adonijah74.livejournal.com]

Luther was a great man.

Because he may have gone mad late in life does not change that at all. I don't recall God promising in His Word that His children would be immune to mental illness or alzheimers, or whatever.

And although Luther was indeed a man with all the corruptible flesh and sin nature that the rest of us struggle with, he was also a light that shined very brightly and changed the world for the better, much in the way that Paul or John did in the time of their ministry on earth. And like them, his contribution still postively impacts the church, for those who go to church for something more than a social gathering that is.