Alan Hirsch is right: Martin Luther’s record of anti-semitism was deplorable.
Towards the end of his life in, “On the Jews and their Lies” (1543), he wrote:
Jews’ synagogues should be set on fire, prayerbooks destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes “smashed and destroyed,” property seized, money confiscated, and that these “poisonous envenomed worms” be drafted into forced labor or expelled “for all time.”
Wikipedia
His stance is not only contrary to Scripture but also to his own writings as shown in the original quote:
Do you know what the Devil thinks when he sees men use violence to propagate the gospel? He sits with folded arms behind the fire of hell, and says with malignant looks and frightful grin: ’Ah, how wise these madmen are to play my game! Let them go on; I shall reap the benefit. I delight in it.’ But when he sees the Word running and contending alone on the battle-field, then he shudders and shakes for fear. The Word is almighty, and takes captive the hearts.
Luther teaches us that even a great founder (as he was) can fall (as he did). Luther was a great founder. We can learn from his greatness and we can be warned by his failure to finish well.
8 Comments
Hi Steve
Like what you say about Martin Luther and leadership. Isn’t it interesting how we are able now to find out all the quotes people make compare them with other quotes they make and then cast judgement on them. I believe Martin Luther was a great leader. I however, also believe he finished well. There are a lot of areas Martin Luther was weak in eg never really able to split from Catholic influences and his views on Jews was inexcusable. I still think it is bit of a stretch to say he didn’t finish well. He seemed to leave quite a legacy of a movement that continued to grow after he died and still influences Christianity today. Aren’t they signs of finishing well?
His influence goes on but he may not have finished well personally. In fact he finished poorly. David is another example of that. Moses didn’t make the promised land. Bobby Cllinton is the best resource for what it takes for a leader to finish well:
http://www.bobbyclinton.com
Any other sources for your quote besides Wikipedia???
No offense to Wiki, but it is certainly not a scholarly source, particularly if you’re going to accuse someone of anti-semitism and a contradiction of their moral principles.
To Johanthan, Luther’s sentiments on the matter of the Jews is well known bro. The writing is as Steve has said “On the Jews and their Lies”.
BTW, I for one actually like Luther. He was an out of the box theologian. And I am more Lutheran in emphaisis than I am a Calvinist. But he was not an apostolic leader. He was a very reluctant theologian-leader. His reformation was one basically of theology and not of the mission of the church. But he certainly achieved much in his life and was used greatly by God.
Jonathan here’s a link to the full text of what Luther had to say: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/1543-Luther-JewsandLies-full.html
Here are shorter excerpts: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/luther-jews.html
Luther was passionate about most everything. His world had little room for shades of gray. Still, he went waaaay overboard on the anti-Jewish issue.
But let us not overlook the fact that much of the NT could be regarded as anti-semtic, too. The well known text, John 1:11, for example would offend many Jews. “He came unto his own and his own received him not, but….”
What could have been more anti-semetic than for Jesus to foretell the destruction of the Temple? And what could have been more offensive than for Him to despute with certain Jews (not all Jews) that Satan, not Abraham, was their father? Ouch.
May the Lord keep us from error.
If the NT can be contrued as antisemetic we need only remember that it is largely written by Jews. In this way, they fit within the OT prophetic critique found in the prophets. Zane, when a non-Jew who happens to hate Jews writes it, it has a totally different flavor to the NT.
I would not gloss over Luther’s very severe tract concerning the Jews, and as others well observe it reminds us of the fallibility and frailty of leaders (we all are prone to blindspots and these can and do have serious consequences). Here he displayed very un-Christlike attitudes, and ones we should utterly reject.
It is helpful though to also frame Luther’s biting vitriolic words in his own time (one alien to our own). As a creature of his day Luther reflected the attitudes of late medieval Catholic writings that were unpleasant and unkind towards Jews. In much the same way as his Catholic counterparts, Luther viewed non-Christians as a social menace. Lamentably Jews were all too often made social scape-goats for all kinds of calamities (e.g. the Black Death did not create as many fatalities among the Jews as they had their kashrut laws on hygiene that lessened the impact of infection; the fact that Jews were surviving was easily used in social panics to blame them as the cause of the infection).
At the level of Luther’s personal life, the tract was composed in 1542 just 4 years before his death at a time in his life when physical ailments (“the stones” – kidney or gall we don’t know) and old age made him miserable. This does not excuse his reaction and attitude but does help somewhat in understanding why he was crotchety.
Luther also had some naive expectations relative to his reforming of doctrine about justification. He could not figure out why the Jews were not receptive to the gospel being preached (since the Catholic errors had been purged).
In his calls about confiscating wealth his stance was based on his suspicion that usury (interest on loaned money) was an unjust way of gaining wealth. Indeed he called this practice “sinful”. Again we are so removed in time and culture we forget that the economic structure of the medieval and then Renaissance times were not as they are today.
The medieval monasteries produced an approach to economics that emphasised that the earth was God’s gift. The monastics were “guardians” of the earth (the biblical sense of stewardship/dominion) and developed sustianable forms of agriculture grounded in a spirituality of the earth. Land was a gift from God and it had to be preserved and maintained. By and large the medieval church advocated sanctions against the purchase and sale of land for personal gain and for lending money with interest rates attached to it. These values could have shaped economics in a direction quite different from what we know today. However the Church found itself soon as a large landholder and redefined relations between people and with the natural realm. The Franciscans and Dominicans for example stood out as those still supporting guardianship but by the Reformation era all these things began to swiftly subside as a new market economy model was born.
In Luther’s view the monies he advocated taking off wealthy Jews were to be held in trust for aged and ill Jews who became Christian. He supported the idea of returning Jews to Palestine since it was their traditional territory by right, or if that did not happen, then shifting their vocation away from money-lending and back to agriculture. His prefatory words to the tract show that he did not support vengeance toward Jews but cautioned Christians to act with compassion.
Now I still do not want to whitewash Luther in what I have jotted down here. I think he was seriously astray, and the general Christian irrationality of hating Jews as Christ-killers is part of the dark side we cannot gloss over. In our sobering reflections we need to always pinch ourselves when looking at the past from our own era — we were not there, and if we were would we have been any different? We might indeed detect a huge “beam” in Luther’s eye on the Jews; but what beams (not specks) do we have in our eyes?