Although it would be easy for someone like me to shy away from someone with the sectarian connotations of Luther, he could possibly be seen as a radical thinker who challenged the role of religion in society by revealing its shadow, although of course like the biblical prophets his words have been taken on by many rival systems.

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It’s surprising to read.

For one thing the William R. Russell translation I’m reading is very contemporary. “If you don’t quit it....” “No way.” Etc. Not like a Victorian edition.

And Luther doesn’t really come across to me as being as mindlessly sectarian as many people are. “And I tell you, although my enemies have caused me so great sorrow, none of them has hurt me as deeply as (my friends).”

I mean, he did go careening off the Catholic highway into the libertarian undergrowth, and he did think that the devil liked hitching people to rules, but I honestly don’t think it was a one-to-one correspondence in his mind to being a Catholic and being the devil.

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He did have hard words for the Catholics; I can’t deny that, although it wasn’t the racial hatred that developed later. It was much more like this thing for him that meant something like “the whole world”. “Oh, people would say that, wouldn’t they. Well, I guess that’s just what people are like.”

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If he was hungry, it would be “hanger”. (hangry).

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I never realized how trans-literal Luther’s translating is. “I must sometimes let the literal words go and try to learn how Germans communicate what the Hebrew expresses.”

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He was from a small principality; he was a man under siege.

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Whenever you dislike someone instead of liking them, it’s easy to want to despise them, easy to want to imagine them to be the worst sinner without exception. It would be extremely easy for me to mock Luther, you know.

And if I did, maybe he would change, right.

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You should always be careful when somebody else’s shadow is highly visible to you, because your own shadow probably isn’t nearly as visible to you.

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The editor does a nice job of bringing together a variety of topics in a short book, and I can see what a mistake it would be to simply write Luther off as a humbug. (He wrote a great thing about prayer.)

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One time I was friends with the girlie, but then the girlie decided that she was going to be a meanie so I decided to make the girlie feel sad. Girlie flipped and became the devil so after many years of decision I decided to make the girlie feel sad and to nom on her brains.

It was the only thing I could do, you guys.

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But in all seriousness, what good ever comes from proving people wrong? It’s not charity.

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Luther’s problem isn’t so much sect as theology itself’s shadow; “you are not forgiven! You are condemned! The answer to question 27 was C, dammit!”....

But it’s still a useful perspective to have, especially for religious people like me who make lots of rules for themselves. It’s just ironic that, like resting on the sabbath, grace became, too often, at least, something to browbeat people about.