Elena on Martin Luther

Oh Dear!

It seems I can't agree with Mr, Luther!! I am very ignorant but know enough to know that it is very serious to disagree with Mr. Luther! I am sitting here laughing rather nervously because I realize my poor and dear husband Mr. Haven is basically saying exactly the same things that Mr. King and Mr. Calvin say in these texts which surely are not enough to judge or understand them but at a first glance and a synthesis of his posture it is clear this is the crux of the matter! It is wonderful to meet you again Mr. Luther. Meeting you at school in my teens was not nearly as exciting as meeting you in my fifties!

Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) initiated the Protestant Reformation.^[1] As a priest and theologyprofessor, he confronted indulgencesalesman Johann Tetzel with his The Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. Luther strongly disputed their claim that freedom from God's punishment of sin could be purchased with money. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand ofPope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Edict of Wormsmeeting in 1521 resulted in hisexcommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the emperor. Martin Luther taught that salvation is not from good works, but a free gift of God, received only by grace through faith inJesus as redeemer from sin. His theologychallenged the authority of the pope of theRoman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge^[2] and opposedsacerdotalism by considering all baptised Christians to be a holy priesthood.^[3] Those who identify with Luther's teachings are called Lutherans.

His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation,^[4] and influenced the translation into English of the King James Bible.^[5] His hymns inspired the development of singing in churches.^[6] His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.^[7]

Much scholarly debate has focused on Luther's writings about the Jews. His statements that the Jews' homes should be destroyed, their synagogues burned, money confiscated, and liberty curtailed were revived and used in propaganda by the Nazisfrom 1933 to 1945.^[8] As a result of this and his revolutionary theological views, his legacy remains controversial.^[9]

E-----Wow! It’s as if he’d been the channel for everything both great and terrible!

M.L. King:  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 [:32–37]. 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.^[79]

E----This is where we separate Mr. King! All goods are common to all! It is not because we are communists but because we are one family! One people. One humanity! How we are going to share justly in the pie is what needs resolving. How are we going to work together so that we all rise in our humanity is the question.

Luther justified his opposition to the rebels on three grounds. First, in choosing violence over lawful submission to the secular government, they were ignoring Christ's counsel to "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"; St. Paul had written in his epistle to the Romans 13:1-7 that all authorities are appointed by God and therefore should not be resisted. This reference from the Bible forms the foundation for the doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings, or, in the German case, the divine right of the princes. Second, the violent actions of rebelling, robbing, and plundering placed the peasants "outside the law of God and Empire," so they deserved "death in body and soul, if only as highwaymen and murderers." Lastly, Luther charged the rebels with blasphemy for calling themselves "Christian brethren" and committing their sinful acts under the banner of the Gospel.

E-----We come close again here but not too close! Yes, violence is not justifiable but law is! You gave up studying law but I haven't given up the law. Lawfully returning our common property to our common good is not violence. It is precisely rendering unto Ceasar the things that are Ceasar's! There are no divine rights of Kings any longer. There are divine rights of each individual and the community as one. Second, robbing and plundering is an aspect of violence but rebelling is a necessary step to every movement. To oppose the status quo is to free our selves from what binds us in a fixed position and everything must change to stay alive. What was right in your time is not right today, what is right today will not be right in the future, we must be open to change so that change is willing transformation and doesn't need to adopt violent forms.

Without Luther's backing for the uprising, many rebels laid down their weapons; others felt betrayed. Their defeat by the Swabian League at the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, followed by Müntzer’s execution, brought the revolutionary stage of the Reformation to a close.^[81] Thereafter, radicalism found a refuge in the anabaptistmovement and other sects, while Luther's Reformation flourished under the wing of the secular powers.^[82]

State and religion -Martin Luther and Calvin- From Wikipedia

Doctrine of the two kingdoms

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms (or two reigns) of God teaches that God is the ruler of the whole world and that he rules in two ways.

He rules the earthly or left-hand kingdom through secular (and, though this point is often misunderstood, also churchly) government, by means of law (i.e., the sword or compulsion) and in the heavenly or righthand kingdom (his spiritual kingdom, that is, Christians insofar as they are a new creation who spontaneously and voluntarily obey) through the gospel or grace.

Contents  [hide] 1 On Secular Authority 2 Response and influence 3 In Roman Catholicism 4 References 5 See also 6 External links

[edit]On Secular Authority

Martin Luther's book, On Secular Authority, was an ardent expression of the principle of Liberty of Conscience. “Liberty of conscience” is the principle that forbids human authorities from coercing people’s spiritual beliefs. In this book, Luther insisted that God requires voluntary religious beliefs. Compelled or coerced faith is insincere and must never be allowed. Luther insisted that “liberty of conscience” was one of Jesus Christ’s principles. According to Luther, the civil government’s role is simply to keep outward peace in society. The civil government has no business enforcing spiritual laws. “The laws of worldly government extend no farther than to life and property and what is external upon earth,” Luther insisted. Echoing Luther, writing on religious liberty, Thomas Jeffersonstated “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.” Jefferson may not have had Luther specifically in mind, but was perhaps an heir to the Protestant tradition which gave birth to this sentiment. Addressing the question of whether the state should permit its citizens to believe religious views which are heterodox, Luther said, “heresy can never be prevented by force... heresy is a spiritual matter which no iron can strike, no fire burn, no water drown.” In other words, it is folly to legislate and enforce religious beliefs.

Luther’s articulation of the parameters of civil government was a monumental step in the development of the separation of church and state. He argued for a clear distinction between two separate spheres: civil and spiritual. This is known as the Doctrine of the two kingdoms. The civil sphere deals with man’s physical life in society as he interacts with other human beings; in this, man is subject to human governments. The spiritual sphere deals with man’s soul, which is eternal, and which is subject only to God. The Doctrine of the two kingdoms is articulated by Luther in these terms:

God has ordained the two governments: the spiritual, which by the Holy Spirit under Christ makes Christians and pious people; and the secular, which restrains the unchristian and wicked so that they are obliged to keep the peace outwardly... The laws of worldly government extend no farther than to life and property and what is external upon earth. For over the soul God can and will let no one rule but himself. Therefore, where temporal power presumes to prescribe laws for the soul, it encroaches upon God’s government and only misleads and destroys souls. We desire to make this so clear that every one shall grasp it, and that the princes and bishops may see what fools they are when they seek to coerce the people with their laws and commandments into believing one thing or another.

Luther encouraged civil disobedience toward any government which would encroach the line of separation between the civil and the sacred:

We are to be subject to governmental power and do what it bids, as long as it does not bind our conscience but legislates only concerning outward matters.... But if it invades the spiritual domain and constrains the conscience, over which God only must preside and rule, we should not obey it at all but rather lose our necks. Temporal authority and government extend no further than to matters which are external and corporeal.

[edit]Response and influence

James Madison explicitly credited Martin Luther as the theorist who “led the way” in providing the proper distinction between the civil and the ecclesiastical spheres.^[1]

John Calvin echoed Luther's "two kingdoms" teaching in his Institutes of the Christian Religion:

There are two governments: the one religious, by which the conscience is trained to piety and divine worship; the other civil, by which the individual is instructed in those duties which, as men and citizens, we are bound to perform. To these two forms are commonly given the not inappropriate names of spiritual and temporal jurisdiction, intimating that the former species has reference to the life of the soul, while the latter relates to matters of the present life, not only to food and clothing, but to the enacting of laws which require a man to live among his fellows purely honorably, and modestly. The former has its seat within the soul, the latter only regulates the external conduct. We may call the one the religious, the other the civil kingdom. Now, these two, as we have divided them, are always to be viewed apart from each other. Let us now return to human laws. If they are imposed for the purpose of forming a religious obligation, as if the observance of them was in itself necessary, we say that the restraint thus laid on the conscience is unlawful. Our consciences have not to do with men but with God only. Hence the common distinction between the earthly forum and the forum of conscience.

Luther and Calvin's distinction was adopted by John Milton and John Locke. Milton wrote A Treatise of Civil Power. Locke later echoed the "two kingdoms" doctrine:

There is a twofold society, of which almost all men in the world are members, and from that twofold concernment they have to attain a twofold happiness; viz. That of this world and that of the other: and hence there arises these two following societies, viz. religious and civil.^[2]

[edit]In Roman Catholicism

The Roman Catholic Church has a very similar doctrine called the doctrine of the two swords, that pre-dates Martin Luther, in the bull Unam Sanctam by pope Boniface. In this bull, Boniface teaches that there is only one Kingdom, the Church, and that the Church controls the spiritual sword, while the temporal sword is controlled by the State, although the temporal sword is hierarchically lower than the spiritual sword, allowing for Church influence in politics and society at large.

State and religion -Investiture Controversy- From Wikipedia

Investiture Controversy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations forverification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)

A medieval king investing a bishop with the symbols of office. From Mediaeval and Modern History by Philip Van Ness Myers, 1905

The Investiture Controversy or Investiture Contest was the most significant conflict betweenChurch and state in medieval Europe. In the 11th and 12th centuries, a series of popes challenged the authority of European monarchies over control of appointments, or investitures, of church officials such as bishops and abbots. Although the principal conflict began in 1075 between Pope Gregory VIIand Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, a brief but significant struggle over investiture also occurred between Henry I of England and the papacy ofPaschal II in the years 1103 to 1107, and the issue played a minor role in the struggles between church and state in France as well. The entire controversy was finally resolved by the Concordat of Worms in 1122.

By undercutting the Imperial power established by the Salian emperors, the controversy led to nearly 50 years of civil war in Germany, the triumph of the great dukes andabbots, and although Imperial power was reestablished under the Hohenstaufendynasty, the damage to the position of the Holy Roman Emperor was so great that the goal of unifying Germany could not be achieved until the Holy Roman Empire was dismantled in the 19th century and Prussia was able to fill the resulting vacuum.

Contents  [hide] 1 Origins 2 Investiture Controversy 3 English investiture controversy of 1103 to 1107 4 Concordat of London, 1107 5 Concordat of Worms and its significance 6 Notes 7 Bibliography 8 See also 9 External links 9.1 Sources

[edit]Origins

After the decline of the Roman Empire, and prior to the Investiture Controversy, the appointment of church officials, while theoretically a task of the Roman Catholic Churchwas in practice performed by secular authorities.^[1] Since a substantial amount of wealth and land was usually associated with the office of bishop or abbot, the sale of Church offices (a practice known as simony) was an important source of income for secular leaders.^{[citation needed]} Since bishops and abbots were themselves usually part of the secular governments, due to their literate administrative resources or due to an outright family relationship, it was beneficial for a secular ruler to appoint (or sell the office to) someone who would be loyal.^[1]

The crisis began when a group within the church, members of the Gregorian Reform, decided to address the sin of simony by restoring the power of investiture to the Church. The Gregorian reformers knew this would not be possible so long as the emperor maintained the ability to appoint the pope, so their first step was to liberate the papacy from the control of the emperor. An opportunity came in 1056 when Henry IV became German king at six years of age. The reformers seized the opportunity to free the papacy while he was still a child and could not react. In 1059 a church council in Rome declared, with In Nomine Domini, that secular leaders would play no part in the selection of popes and created the College of Cardinals as a body of electors made up entirely of church officials. To this day the College of Cardinals selects the pope, and once Rome regained control of the election of the pope it was ready to attack the practice of secular investiture on a broad front.

[edit]Investiture Controversy

In 1075 Pope Gregory VII asserted in the Dictatus Papae^[2] that as the Roman church was founded by God alone; that the papal power (the auctoritas of Pope Gelasius) was the sole universal power; in particular, a council held in the Lateran from February 24 to 28 of the same year,^[3] decreed that the pope alone could appoint or depose churchmen or move them from see to see. This radical departure from the balance of power of theEarly Middle Ages, among the other Gregorian reforms, eliminated the practice of investiture, the divinely-appointed monarch's right to invest a prelate with the symbols of power, both secular and spiritual. By this time, Henry IV was no longer a child, and he reacted to this declaration by sending Gregory VII a letter in which he rescinded his imperial support of Gregory as pope in no uncertain terms: the letter was headed Henry, king not through usurpation but through the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk. It called for the election of a new pope. His letter ends:

I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down, and be damned throughout the ages.

The situation was made even more dire when Henry IV installed his chaplain as Bishop of Milan, when a candidate had already been chosen in Rome. In 1076 Gregory responded by excommunicating the king, removing him from the Church and deposing him as German king. This was the first time a king of his stature had been deposed since the 4th century.

Enforcing these declarations was a different matter, but the advantage gradually came to be on the side of Gregory VII. The German aristocracy was happy to hear of the king's deposition. They used the cover of religion as an excuse to continue the rebellion started at the First Battle of Langensalza in 1075, and for seizure of royal holdings. Aristocrats claimed local lordships over peasants and property, built forts, which had previously been outlawed, and built up localized fiefdoms to secure their autonomy from the empire.

Henry IV requests mediation fromMatilda of Tuscany and abbot Hugh of Cluny.

Thus, due to these combining factors, Henry IV had no choice but to back down, needing time to marshal his forces to fight the rebellion. In 1077 he traveled to Canossa in northern Italy to meet the pope and apologize in person. As penance for his sins, and echoing his own punishment of the Saxons after the First Battle of Langensalza, he dramatically wore a hairshirt and stood in the snow barefoot in the middle of winter in what has become known as the Walk to Canossa. Gregory lifted the excommunication, but the German aristocrats, whose rebellion became known as the Great Saxon Revolt, were not so willing to give up their opportunity. They elected a rival king, Rudolf von Rheinfeld.

Henry IV then proclaimed Antipope Clement IIIto be pope. In 1081 Henry IV captured and killed Rudolf, and in the same year he invaded Rome with the intent of forcibly removing Gregory VII and installing a more friendly pope. Gregory VII called on his allies theNormans in southern Italy, and they rescued him from the Germans in 1085. The Normans sacked Rome in the process, and when the citizens of Rome rose up against Gregory he was forced to flee south with the Normans. He died soon thereafter.

The Investiture Controversy continued for several decades as each succeeding pope tried to diminish imperial power by stirring up revolt in Germany. These revolts were gradually successful. Henry IV was succeeded upon his death in 1106 by his son Henry V, who had rebelled against his father in favor of the papacy, and who had gotten his father to renounce the legality of his antipopes before he died. Henry V also chose one more antipope, Gregory VIII; however, he renounced some of the rights of investiture with the Concordat of Worms, and was received back into communion and recognized as legitimate Emperor as a result.

[edit]English investiture controversy of 1103 to 1107

At the time of Henry IV's death, Henry I of England and the Gregorian papacy were also embroiled in a controversy over investiture, and its solution provided a model for the eventual solution of the issue in the Empire.

William the Conqueror had accepted a papal banner and the distant blessing of Pope Alexander II upon his invasion, but had successfully rebuffed the Pope's assertion after the successful outcome, that he should come to Rome and pay homage for his fief, under the general provisions of the "Donation of Constantine".

The ban on lay investiture in Dictatus Papae did not shake the loyalty of William's bishops and abbots. In the reign of Henry I the heat of exchanges between Westminster and Rome induced Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to give up mediating and retire to an abbey. A Norman count who was Henry's chief advisor was excommunicated, but the threat of excommunicating the king remained unplayed. The papacy needed the support of English Henry while German Henry was still unbroken. A projected crusade also required English support.

Henry I commissioned the Archbishop of York to collect and present all the relevant traditions of anointed kingship. "The resulting Anonymous of York [more often known asThe Norman Anonymous ] treaties are a delight to students of early-medieval political theory, but they in no way typify the outlook of the Anglo-Norman monarchy, which had substituted the secure foundation of administrative and legal bureaucracy for outmoded religious ideology"^[4]

[edit]Concordat of London, 1107

The Concordat of London (1107) suggested a compromise that was taken up in theConcordat of Worms. In England, as in Germany, a distinction was being made in the king's chancery between the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the prelates. Employing the distinction, Henry gave up his right to invest his bishops and abbots and reserved the custom of requiring them to come and do homage for the "temporalities" (the landed properties tied to the episcopate), directly from his hand, after the bishop had sworn homage and feudal vassalage in the ceremony called commendatio, thecommendation ceremony, like any secular vassal. The system of vassalage was not divided among great local lords in England as it was in France, for by right of theConquest the king was in control.

Henry recognized the dangers of depending on monastic scholars to staff his chancery and turned increasingly to secular scholars (who naturally held minor orders) and rewarded these men of his own making with bishoprics and abbeys. Henry expanded the system of scutage to reduce the monarchy's dependence on knights supplied from church lands. The conclusion of the brief English investiture controversy was to strengthen the secular power of the king.

[edit]Concordat of Worms and its significance

On the Continent, after 50 years of fighting, a similar compromise (but with quite different long-term results) was reached in 1122, signed on September 23 and known as the Concordat of Worms. It was agreed that investiture would be eliminated, while room would be provided for secular leaders to have unofficial but significant influence in the appointment process.

Before the monarchy was embroiled in the dispute with the Church, it declined in power and broke apart. Localized rights of lordship over peasants grew, increasing serfdom and resulting in fewer rights for the population. Local taxes and levies increased while royal coffers declined. Rights of justice became localized and courts did not have to answer to royal authority. In the long term the decline of imperial power would divide Germany until the 19th century. Similarly, in Italy the effect of the investiture controversy was to weaken the authority of the emperor and to strengthen all those local forces making for separatism.^[5]

As for the papacy, it gained strength. During the controversy, both sides had tried to marshal public opinion; as a result, lay people became engaged in religious affairs and lay piety increased, setting the stage for the Crusades and the great religious vitality of the 12th century.

The dispute did not end with the Concordat of Worms. There would be future disputes between popes and Holy Roman Emperors, until northern Italy was lost to the Empire entirely. The Church would turn the weapon of Crusade against the Holy Roman Empire under Frederick II. According to Norman Cantor:

The investiture controversy had shattered the early-medieval equilibrium and ended the interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus. Medieval kingship, which had been largely the creation of ecclesiastical ideals and personnel, was forced to develop new institutions and sanctions. The result during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, was the first instance of a secular bureaucratic state whose essential components appeared in the Anglo-Norman monarchy."^[6]