To Catholic Exchange:
Your article Nailing Christ to the Cross was interesting, but I feel it neglected to mention the reason that Luther was upset at the Church — the abuse (sale) of indulgences by the Church and the corruption in the Church at the time was a biggie! Protestants shouldn't slant a story to make them look good and neither should Catholics. Tell the WHOLE story. Luther may have been a wild guy, but he wasn't all wrong either. I am Catholic and I am not proud of much of our Catholic history (actually all history from day one is quite a picture of us humans often doing crazy things in an effort to search for Truth). Please inform us in an unbiased, factual manner. I think we are intelligent enough to figure the rest out for ourselves — that is what our reason and brains are for. I think I would have been upset at the Church like many of the reformers. Their reactions were consistent with the times they lived in. I respect them. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the real bottom line.
I thank God for other religions, Christian and non-Christian. We are all very different, unique, complicated persons and I think God knew quite well that not all people would find him in the same way and in one specific religion. I believe we Catholics have all the Truth available to our finite minds at the moment but that does not discount other beliefs which hold some truth. Luther was no mistake and I don't think Protestantism is either. Do you?
God has an amazing plan and I think all that has ever gone on and will go on in the future is making one of the most amazing tapestries ever seen. We have to have people like Luther woven into it. Imagine if there were no reformers, no Council of Trent, no Catholic Reformation. The Church cleaned up its act as a result of the outcry. But here we go again with more church corruption (as long as there are sinful people, we will have corruption). Truth will prevail and we always need people to speak it loud and clear. Don't you agree?
Thank you for a great website,
Julie
Jesus did not say, “I am A way, ONE of the truths, and a CERTAIN kind of life.” He said, “I am THE Way, THE Truth and THE Life.” Either He is a insane, a liar or He is correct.
If He is correct, then there is only one Way and one Truth. If there is only One Way, then out of the tens of thousands of “religions” in the world, only one really binds us back together. The rest don’t. If they don't bind us together, they aren't really religions.
In short, Jesus was saying that nearly all “religions” resemble a stopped clock. A stopped clock may be right twice a day, but it is right only because it happens for an instant to agree with a working clock. It is the accidental agreement that makes it right; the rest of the day it is wrong — wrong and to be avoided. The only true religion is Jesus, 24/7. Though other expressions of faith often hold some aspect of Truth, only one expression of Truth actually conforms us to Christ, to Truth, through and through. So, if we are to be healed, we must cling to the one way and toss all the others.
And therein lies the key to all of this. We all need healing. That is why reformers are necessary. Teresa of Avila was a marvelous reformer, as was St. Francis of Assisi and a myriad of other saints. But, though many people followed Luther, even his most fervent admirer could not truthfully state that he approaches Sts. Francis or Teresa in sanctity. Yet, in order to be a true reformer, this level of true sanctity is required. The careful reader will realize that the reason this is true mirrors the reasons given in the previous paragraph — if there is only one Way, one Truth, one Life, then anything else is a sham. If only Christ can heal us, then only those who mirror Christ can reform us. No one has ever called Martin Luther a mirror of Christ. Thus, he’s not a true reformer, he’s a sham. Mary Kochan (a Catholic Exchange editor) offers an excellent tape set through Saint Joseph Communications, From the Reformation to Destructive Cults: Martin Luther Exposed that explains in great detail why Luther simply cannot be considered a reformer in any sense of the word: in point of fact, he was simply a man deluded by his own sins into thinking that he was right while all other Christians were wrong. He was the real “spiritual father” of such destructive personalities as David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara and other less well-known but still-dangerous cult leaders.
Mary's work provides the opportunity for another insight as well. God does indeed weave a marvelous tapestry, but sin is not part of God’s plan. It never has been. While He is a good enough artist that He can make beauty even out of the blemishes we introduce, anyone who opposes Him, who is not like Him in every way, any such person is ultimately violating God’s design. Each of us opposes Him through our sins. In that sense, our “reforms” are too often like Luther’s — we want to reform God into our image, instead of being reformed into His image, as St. Francis and St. Teresa were. In short, if Luther and the rest of us lived as we should, we wouldn’t have needed any of the councils, and our world’s history would have been much happier and more peaceful. The great pity is that the sacraments give each of us the power to be true reformers like St. Francis and St. Teresa, but instead, we choose to live our lives as Martin Luther did. No one who has compared the two kinds of lives can say we are choosing well.
Yours in Christ,
Steve Kellmeyer
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Steve Kellmeyer answers:
Dear Julie,
You have made several good points that certainly need to be addressed. If I may summarize your approach, you seem to be making four points:
1) Luther made a good faith effort to halt an abuse in the Church;
2) He was approaching a corrupt Church, and consequently, the whole affair got out of hand and the Church shattered into pieces in the Protestant Reformation;
3) Because it is good to have several modes of religious expression, this shattering was essentially a good thing. Since God made each of us to be unique, we should expect many kinds of religion, both Christian and non-Christian.
4) Reformers are necessary because people are corrupt. Luther was a reformer. Therefore, Luther was necessary.
Let’s deal with them one at a time.
Did Luther make a good faith effort to dialogue with the Church? Good people can have different opinions on this. It is true that university professors often posted propositions the way Luther did. Professors often did this just to start debates — posting theses didn’t mean they believed them. Some argue that Luther just wanted to start a discussion about what was and was not appropriate. It’s an interesting argument, but hard to reconcile with the facts.
The fact is, Luther wouldn’t discuss anything. Tetzel tried to engage him in a public discussion: Luther refused. Eck tried it; Cajetan tried it. He didn’t debate them, he simply began insulting his opponents in a way that even his contemporaries found shocking. This casts some doubt on his good faith.
But still, wasn’t the Church corrupt? Well, no. The Church had long forbidden the sale of grace: the Acts of the Apostles describes the fate of the first man who tried it, and popes and councils consistently forbade it in the 1500 years following. Indeed, abuses of indulgences had been condemned quite consistently by the papal office in nearly every generation for the three hundred years preceding Luther. The teaching of the Church was quite consistent and quite uncorrupted. A few people abused the Church's teaching, but she didn't change her teaching to accommodate them. And, in Luther's case, whether people were abusing them in his time is not relevant to Luther. On October 31, 1517, he didn’t know about any abuses. He was not attacking abuses. He was, instead, attacking the very idea that the Church had the power to dispense grace.
His own teachings were not something that inspire confidence. He was defeated time and again by the logic of the Catholic position: in front of a Church council to whom he had appealed his case, he was forced by Dr. Eck to follow his own logic to the conclusion that he did not accept the authority of Church councils! Thus embarrassed, he eventually decided, “reason is the whore of the devil” (in Luther's Table Talk).
His own spiritual director attempted to ease Luther's existential anguish with the balanced Catholic doctrine of grace. But Luther distorted the doctrine of grace to the point of arguing that if an unsaved man feeds a beggar, pulls a child from a burning building or saves a drowning person, he commits sin, for anyone not saved was a condemned sinner, and all his actions — even good ones — are totally corrupt and sinful. Conversely, his sermons taught that any man saved by faith could commit adultery or murder (or pedophilia?) a hundred times a day and still be saved, and he accepted polygamy as perfectly Scriptural. He insisted that all this was compatible with Jesus’ teaching.
But Lutheranism is just another way of praising God. Isn’t it good to have several modes of religious expression? Of course it is good to have different modes of religious expression. That’s why the Catholic Church has within her orders like the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Missionaries of Charity, etc. Each is a different religion, that is, a different way of living out the fullness of Christ’s commands.
That may sound a very odd thing to say. It isn't. Because of the Reformation, we now have a seriously flawed understanding of the word “religion.” As I pointed out in an earlier essay on Catholic Exchange, “religion” means “to bind back together.” Something can only be bound back together, it can only be fully healed, by fully living out Christ's commands. Thus, while many ways of expressing faith contain some truths, none except the Catholic Faith are truly “religion,” because no other faith contains the full Truth necessary for our healing. Only Truth can heal us, only Truth can bind our broken spirits together again. Religion has to be true, totally true, to be truly “religion.” Again, being half-right is not good enough. Just as I can’t be half-crucified, or carry my cross halfway and then stop, so following a half-right religion won’t heal me entirely. If I’m not entirely healed, what’s the point?
