(urth) Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis

[James Wynn]

Dan'l says:
>Obviously, I disagree. If others broke their oaths, that does not excuse
>him breaking his. If the Pope and all the Bishops jumped off the Wurtemberg
>tower, would that mean Luther should? As it were. Luther was setting 
>himself
>up as _better_than_ the Church hierarchy. To
>begin that project by breaking his oaths casts the whole project in doubt.

This is so far off. Where to begin?

1) Getting married was not the START of his project. The start was that 95 
Theses nailed to the door of the church. In response Luther was condemned as 
a heretic, his prospects not so different from Salmon Rushdie's after the 
fatwa and his life-style far less glamorous and much more austere. The 
condemnation occurred FOUR YEARS before he married. He had been 
excommunicated 5 years, and it was 8 years after his dramatic attempt to 
change to the direction in the Church.

2) Imagine some oneconvinced you that God had delivered a message to them 
that we all had swear an oath to live in uninsulated shacks in Alaska every 
winter. Then you learned that
a) that person was probably the last person on the planet likely to be 
receiving special messages from God about the way all Christians should 
live, and
b) that person was himself was maintaining a shack in front of a cozy 
mansion which was where he actually lived soaking in a sauna and drinking 
hot cocoa every cold winter night.
c) Finally, you knew that the one source everyone agreed was "God's Word" 
said nothing about living in shacks in Alaska at all, and this guy didn't 
bother to follow any of that either.

Would you still believe your oath had been to God and not to a con man?

To accuse him oath-breaking under his particular circumstances (as he saw 
them), is like saying the people who ran away from the Jonestown cult during 
the kool-aid party were oath breakers because their oaths had actually been 
made to God.

I repeat: AS LUTHER SAW IT. I'm not saying the RCC is a Jim Jones cult. I'm 
only saying that Luther considered his oath wrongly extracted from him based 
on his personal, visual experience in Rome and Bavaria, his knowledge of 
history, and a flat reading of the Scripture. And, for that reason, wrongly 
directed.

John says:
>This is not my experience (and I've been Catholic my whole
>life and went to Catholic school until I was 22).  I'm not sure
>I've met a Catholic under the age of 30 who would agree with
>this characterization--and maybe not under the age of 50."

I accept that your experience is more valid than my hearsay. But we're not 
talking about the last 50 years. We're talking about the early 1500s in 
Bavaria. The state of mind of the purchasers and the claims of the sellers 
are all that matter. It doesn't even matter if Purgatory is actually not 
every bit as bad as Hell, or even that it is not a "real place". It is 
sufficient that it be genuinely unpleasant and that the Church 
representatives were selling a promised sure-fire way to reduce the time 
there.

J.