Que faisons-nous lorsque nous écrivons une biographie de Luther ? Et qu’entendons-nous faire en nous intéressant à son œuvre, à sa pensée et à sa place dans l’histoire de la Réforme et de l’Europe ? ...Dans une conférence de 1924, préludant à son maître-ouvrage, Un destin. Martin Luther, paru en 1928, Lucien Febvre établissait avec une certaine fermeté le nécessaire préalable à une telle entreprise : Il est nécessaire, pour le Luther connaître, d...
Evener discusses the the preaching program developed in the earlier Reformation by Martin Luther and Johannes Bugenhagen - a close friend of Luther's and one of the most significant leaders of the ...Lutheran Reformation. Evener explains show how Luther and Bugenhagen's efforts at discipline-by-persuasion systematically established and manipulated connections between Jews and so-called papists. Both Luther and Bugenhagen, finally, depicted Jewish history as a downward spiral into the abyss of eternal depravation of truth and damnation; Christendom, too, had fallen over the edge, only to be thrown one final lifeline. The lifeline was extended by a new prophet, Luther, but it was the very same lifeline that the "race" of Jews and papists rejected.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) repeatedly addressed the question of whether political resistance might be directed lawfully against sovereign rulers if they acted tyrannically in light of the Apostle ...Paul's admonition in Romans 13 to honor divinely ordained secular authority. The situation became acute during the 1530s, when the forces of Emperor Charles V and the German Catholic princes threatened to reimpose Catholicism in the Lutheran territories by force. Amidst the crisis, Luther accepted legal arguments delegitimizing Charles as emperor, and, in 1539, with both sides mobilized for war, he contributed the theological argument that the emperor was the mercenary of a papal Antichrist and Beerwolff. Despite viewing the struggle in such apocalyptic terms, however, Luther's own words from the 1520s until his death reveal that his insistence upon obeying “legitimate” authority never varied. Only if commanded to violate godly law were Christian subjects to disobey their rulers and suffer the consequences. After Luther's death, Lutheran resistance theory continued to evolve and interact with Calvinist theory. Thus it exerted a long-term impact both within and well beyond the church when it was appropriated by the Magdeburg pastors, French Huguenots, Dutch revolutionaries, and English Puritans, though not always as Luther would have intended.
The concept of vocation has been invoked recently in the search for significance. Some of authors in question embed significance within the concept of vocation. As a result, their accounts suffer ...from excessive individualism, devalue ordinary relationships, denigrate ordinary labor, and prove elitist. This article develops Martin Luther’s understanding of vocation to avoid the problems associated with such accounts of vocation; it argues that Luther’s account provides its own answer to the problem of significance in the modern world. This approach takes seriously both the one who calls and the concrete relationships into which he calls us.
This study argues that Luther's treatise On the Jews and Their Lies demonstrates a consistently held anti-Judaism defined by a refusal to accept that Jews could remain in the world as Jews in the ...face of the Christian gospel. This basic anti-Judaism informed his violent polemics and his supposed “friendly” work on the Jews written earlier when he believed they would soon be converted. His anti-Judaism was integrated with his political thought. Spiritually, the Jews were the worst of the opponents of salvation by grace; politically, they were a suspect people nearly always in breach of the temporal government's laws over blasphemy. Based on this anti-Judaism, in the face of his failure to convert Jews to the Reformation, Luther came to conclude that Jews must be forced by the temporal authorities to either leave or face expulsion.
Der Artikel befasst sich mit einigen Werken, die in Deutschland anlässlich des 500-jährigen Reformationsjubiläums erschienen sind. Zahlreiche Biographien des ‚Christen‘ Luther liegen vor, welche ...oftmals über Abbildungen verfügen, die der Gemeinschaft der Gläubigen die Grundsätze der Reformtheologie vermittelten. Daneben gibt es Studien, die die Reformation aus einem umfassenderen Blickwinkel nicht nur als europäisches und deutsches Problem im besonderen, sondern auch in ihren außereuropäischen Wirkungen betrachten. In diesem Zusammenhang kristallisieren sich einige Grundaspekte heraus, die viele der hier diskutierten Werke auszeichnen, so die Konzentration auf die Bedeutung, die die Reformation und der Protestantismus heute besitzen, oder die Frage, ob eine kritische Analyse der Sprengkraft, die vom Ende der Einheit der Christen in Europa ausging, auch zum Verständnis des heutigen religiösen Fundamentalismus beizutragen vermag. Die italienische Historiographie hat sich ebenfalls mit dem Thema der Reformation auseinandergesetzt, sowohl in Form von Lutherbiographien, aber auch mit überzeugenden, traditionelle Ansätze überwindenden Versuchen, über die Folgen der Reformation in Italien nachzudenken.
Johannes Cochlaeus’s
or
has been described as a “polemical invective.” This essay discusses the double title and the double characterization of the work and argues that its aim is to deconstruct ...Luther’s memory. Its effectivity derives from the combination of a polemical commentary and an invective biography. According to the
Luther’s works disgrace the author, and according to the
the author disqualifies his own works.
Men like Martin Luther and John Calvin accused Catholicism of wrongly relegating many commands of Jesus Christ to only monastic orders. Both men argued that the Sermon on the Mount should be ...understood as ethically normative for all Christians, not simply for those willing to take up 'counsels of perfection' while the Mosaic commandments sufficed for the rest of humanity. Luther insisted that such perfections, including Jesus' commands regarding nonviolence, were for all Christians. God's kingdom, he declared, could not brought about by violence but only by his Word spoken in love, even unto a death spent blessing one's persecutor: this was 'the gospel and example of Christ.' The natural law was clear that one ought to do for others as one would want done for themselves. Luther repeatedly condemned violence, quoting that those who take the sword shall perish by it, that personal wrongs must be endured, and that the Christian who returned violence for violence was at risk of rejecting Christ himself and becoming 'murderers in the sight of God.' … Calvin made similar arguments to Luther, a bit more organized and clearly systematic than Luther's contextual approach. He systematically held together arguments similar to those Luther had evolved into. For him, the Christian 'ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love.' He criticized the Catholic 'schoolmen' for turning commands like 'do not take vengeance' into mere 'counsels' by supererogation, which was for Calvin 'pestilential ignorance or malice!' For Calvin, too, those who cursed had to be blessed, those who despised had to be loved, and those who persecuted had to be prayed for—none of these were mere exhortations, but imperatives commanded by Christ.
Martin Luther was not just a great reformer and bible translator, but also an extremely pugnacious and, in his argumentation, sometimes polemical contemporary. This form of linguistic aggression is ...very clearly expressed in his pamphlet "Against the Papacy of Rome, Founded by the Devil" of 1545. This volume reveals the linguistic means that he used to implement this by undertaking a practical argumentation analysis.
PDF
