Encountering Protestantism

For many years I have heard countless quips, ideas, suppositions, and biases concerning Luther. It was only until I actually sat down and read a bit about him that I feel I can finally make some kind of opinion about him. As I typically do, I neither fully commend nor fully despise a man’s work.

On the one hand, Luther made great reformations upon a dire church scene. Though Germany is not Spain, St John of the Cross and St. Teresa d’Avila made many comments of how poorly the regulations of the Catholic church were. Nunneries were essentially brothels with no restrictions on who came in and who went out. Indulgences were created to collect money for a corrupt system of monasteries and nunneries. Teresa herself tried to make reformations on this corrupted institution (and she did with great success). In Germany,  Luther saw how confession was spreading the towns gossip and church events could easily be drunken parties. As a result, he swung in the opposite direction. Though it is good to flee from the very presence of evil, there is a way that one can swing too far and become a Pharisee.

Luther ran, but like any individual at times he ran too little, too far, and just right. Concerning marriage he ran far too little. Adultery and “secret marriages” were alright to him if a party was not sexual pleased. Concerning flippancy, he ran too far. One does not have to be drunk or stern to have an appropriate attitude towards God. There is a balance to be reached. Concerning Aristotle, I have said before that I have a distaste for the mixing of Greek philosophy and Eastern religion, so I may be biased. However, I think it is appropriate to say Aristotle’s works do not belong in the canon. For that matter, I think some of his viewpoints are down right un-Christian (which is fine for philosophy but problematic when people can no longer distinguish Aristotle’s words from Jesus’,Paul’s, or Moses’ words). Finally, concerning free will, I must disagree with Luther without crediting this disagreement to how he approached the situation. We simply disagree on a point that (at least to me) doesn’t seem very important in how I live my life. It seems to be a good scholarly question to wrestle with, but the wrestling is more important than being right. I have so much to learn and “be” in simply being a good follower of Jesus that I am not going to loose sleep over free will vs predestination.

Overall, I feel mixed about this Luther. I’m glad he stood up against corrupt churches (and it takes a strong personality to do that kind of thing), but was his solution better? In the end, I am glad that people could read their Bibles in their own language and thus reconsider their viewpoints about faith and God. This was a good time to wrestle with what you really believed in.