> . Luther said the Roman Church was making up stuff.
In 1502 he received the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy.
That tells a lot about Luther.
He entered the monastery because of the brutality in his home
and his school life. He already was a big whiner at an early age.
When his best friend was killed, he was frightened from
that day of thunder and lightning. He changed his name. The
first time he saw a bible was when he was a young man.
He became very pissed when he felt he was subjected to
abysmal menial activities. He felt he was above that.
Some say he was emaciated. Some say he was happy.
Like every victim of scrupulosity, he saw nothing in himself but wickedness
and corruption. God was the minister of wrath and vengeance. His sorrow for
sin was devoid of humble charity and childlike confidence in the pardoning
mercy of God and Jesus Christ. This anger of God, which pursued him like
his shadow, could only be averted by"his own righteousness", by the
"efficacy of servile works". Such an attitude of mind was necessarily
followed by hopeless discouragement and sullen despondency, creating a
condition of soul in which he actually "hated God and was angry at him",
blasphemed God, and deplored that he was ever born. This abnormal condition
produced a brooding melancholy, physical, mental, and spiritual depression,
which later, by a strange process of reasoning, he ascribed to the teaching
of the Church concerning good works, while all the time he was living in
direct and absolute opposition to its doctrinal teaching and disciplinary
code.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09438b.htm
Poor Luther had mood swings. It is true that he
was spot on when he complained about the selling of
indulgences, but then he went wild. Rome sent him
a letter to come there. He made excuses and refused to go.
The pope again asked fr him to come to Rome to discuss his
thesis, and Luther then claimed the pope had no authority.
In the meantime Luther was saturating himself with published and unpublished
humanistic anti-clerical literature so effectually that his passionate
hatred of Rome and the pope, his genesis of Antichrist, his contemptuous
scorn for his theological opponents, his effusive professions of patriotism,
his acquisition of the literary amenities of the "Epistolae Obscurorum
Vivorum", even the bodily absorption of Hutten's arguments, not to allude to
other conspicuous earmarks of his intercourse and association with the
humanistic-political agitators, can be unerringly traced here.
Luther the reformer had become Luther the revolutionary; the religious
agitation had become a political rebellion. Luther's theological attitude at
this time, as far as a formulated cohesion can be deduced, was as follows:
a.. The Bible is the only source of faith; it contains the plenary
inspiration of God; its reading is invested with a quasi-sacramental
character.
b.. Human nature has been totally corrupted by original sin, and man,
accordingly, is deprived of free will. Whatever he does, be it good or bad,
is not his own work, but God's.
c.. Faith alone can work justification, and man is saved by confidently
believing that God will pardon him. This faith not only includes a full
pardon of sin, but also an unconditional release from its penalties.
d.. The hierarchy and priesthood are not Divinely instituted or necessary,
and ceremonial or exterior worship is not essential or useful.
Ecclesiastical vestments, pilgrimages, mortifications, monastic vows,
prayers for the dead, intercession of saints, avail the soul nothing.
e.. All sacraments, with the exception of baptism, Holy Eucharist, and
penance, are rejected, but their absence may be supplied by faith.
f.. The priesthood is universal; every Christian may assume it. A body of
specially trained and ordained men to dispense the mysteries of God is
needless and a usurpation.
g.. There is no visible Church or one specially established by God whereby
men may work out their salvation.
Germany was living on a politico-religious volcano. All walks of life were
in a convulsive state of unrest that boded ill for Church and State. Luther
by his inflammatory denunciation of pope and clergy let loose a veritable
hurricane of fierce, uncontrollable racial and religious hatred, which was
to spend itself in the bloodshed of the Peasants' War. The city of Worms
itself was within the grasp of a reign of lawlessness, debauchery, and
murder.
Left to the seclusion of his own thoughts and reflections, undisturbed by
the excitement of political and polemical agitation, he became the victim of
an interior struggle that made him writhe in the throes of racking anxiety,
distressing doubts and agonizing reproaches of conscience. With a directness
that knew no escape, he was now confronted by the poignant doubts aroused by
his headlong course: was he justified in his bold and unprecedented action;
were not his innovations diametrically opposed to the history and experience
of spiritual and human order as it prevailed from Apostolic times;
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09438b.htm
This guy was really screwed up inside his own mind.
Philosopher, bi-polar, with the ability to screw up others
as charlie manson did.
The floodgates once opened, the deluge followed. On 9 October, 1521,
thirty-nine out of the forty Augustinian Friars formally declared their
refusal to say private Mass any longer; Zwilling, one of the most rabid of
them, denounced the Mass as a devilish institution; Justus Jonas stigmatized
Masses for the dead as sacrilegious pestilences of the soul;
Luther had one prominent trait of character, which in the consensus of those
who have made him a special study, overshadowed all others. It was an
overweening confidence and unbending will, buttressed by an inflexible
dogmatism. He recognized no superior, tolerated no rival, brooked no
contradiction.
While Germany was drenched in blood, its people paralyzed with horror, the
cry of the widow and wail of the orphan throughout the land, Luther then in
his forty-second year was spending his honeymoon with Catherine von Bora,
then twenty-six (married 13 June, 1525), a Bernardine nun who had abandoned
her convent. He was regaling his friends with some coldblooded witticisms
about the horrible catastrophe uttering confessions of self-reproach and
shame, and giving circumstantial details of his connubial bliss
In the beginning of 1534, Luther after twelve years of intermittent labour,
completed and published in six parts his German translation of the entire
Bible.
Of course, another bible thumper translating it into something he alone
interpretted.
Luther's rugged health began to show marks of depleting vitality and
unchecked inroads of disease. Prolonged attacks of dyspepsia, nervous
headaches, chronic granular kidney disease, gout, sciatic rheumatism, middle
ear abscesses, above all vertigo and gall stone colic were intermittent or
chronic ailments that gradually made him the typical embodiment of a
supersensitively nervous, prematurely old man.
A whimp and a whiner.
It was while in this agony of body and torture of mind, that his
unsurpassable and irreproducible coarseness attained its culminating point
of virtuosity in his anti-Semitic and antipapal pamphlets.
His last act was, as he predicted and prayed for, an attack on the papacy.