Over the next years, Luther entered into more disputes, many of which divided friends and enemies. When unrest resulted in the Peasants' War of —, he condemned the peasants and exhorted the princes to crush the revolt. He married a runaway nun, Katharina von Bora, which scandalized many. For Luther, the shock was waking up in the morning with "pigtails on the pillow next to me. He mocked fellow reformers, especially Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, and used vulgar language in doing so.
In fact, the older he became, the more cantankerous he was. In his later years, he said some nasty things about, among others, Jews and popes and theological enemies, with words that are not fit to print.
Nonetheless, his lasting accomplishments also mounted: the translation of the Bible into German which remains a literary and biblical hallmark ; the writing of the hymn "A Mighty Fortress is Our God"; and publishing his Larger and Smaller Catechism , which have guided not just Lutherans but many others since. His later years were spent often in both illness and furious activity in , though he was sick for six months and suffered from exhaustion, he preached sermons, wrote 15 tracts, worked on his Old Testament translation, and took a number of trips.
But in , he finally wore out. Luther's legacy is immense and cannot be adequately summarized. On a larger canvas, his reform unleashed forces that ended the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern era. It has been said that in most libraries, books by and about Martin Luther occupy more shelves than those concerned with any other figure except Jesus of Nazareth.
Though difficult to verify, one can understand why it is likely to be true. Sections Home. Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives. Is the Church a collective that passively depends on its constituents members appropriating the message? The rather obvious problem is that the message must be preached by a real person.
There is no getting around that reality, and Luther rightly knew that the Gospel does not float in the ether as some disembodied concept. The only way any person is a Christian is because someone else — a friend, neighbor, grandmother, missionary — shared the message of Christ. A relationship, even a fleeting one, came first. The Bible, likewise, does not float in the ether. It is a material object that has been and continues to be praise God passed on by real, fleshy hands from person to person.
This, I hasten to interject, is the very meaning of tradition cf. Yves Congar. He preached his last sermon in Eisleben only three days before his death. Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. I will rule, protect, and save you well.
For they vex him greatly; they mangle the sacrament and the church, and set themselves up in God's place and want themselves to be masters. The warnings of God's judgment on those who would improve on God's way of doing things must be clear. The chief offense of the wise in their improvement on the ways of God is their neglect of preaching and the sacraments. The power of God works through those ordinary and apparently weak instruments of the shouted word preaching and the visible word sacraments.
In a statement that is really vintage Luther, we can see his lament for the foolishness of people in their efforts to be wise:. In times past we would have run to the ends of the world if we had known of a place where we could have heard God speak. But now that we hear this every day in sermons, indeed, now that all books are full of it, we do not see this happening. In Christianity and the Social Crisis, Rauschenbusch traced the social gospel back to the lives of the Hebrew prophets.
Williams , and father, King , Sr. King, Sr. In his unpublished autobiography, King, Sr. King took to task those churches that separated the secular realities of daily life from spiritual needs.
King remained a proponent of the social gospel despite the many setbacks the civil rights movement suffered in the later s. Introduction, in Papers , 10 , 14 , 34 , Introduction, in Papers
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