Martin Luther podcast

[DrZoidberg]

Here's a good talk on Martin Luther by a couple of history academics. No rose tinted spectacles. Just a run down of the man's life.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archiv...s/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3729

There's some excellent quotes:

"He was not a logical thinker. He argued with strong emotional intensity"

"Martin Luther said of his writing that he only wrote after he first made himself intensely angry. A quality we today associate with Donald Trump"

They go on to talk a lot about the context and the world he lived in. They also explain the humour of Martin Luther. Apparently he was a very funny writer which is something that gets lost on us today. Modern readers will mostly think he comes across as a lunatic rather than witty.

anyhoo. recommend it. Really good.

 

[J842P]

So, I think the answer is clearly fundamentalist reactionary.

 

[DrZoidberg]

So, I think the answer is clearly fundamentalist reactionary.

Was he a reactionary? Reactionary is something we associate with wanting to go back to an earlier age. His belief was that Christianity had started out in a way and become corrupted over time by the Catholic church. But this "original" Christianity had never existed. It was a new invention.

Nah, he wasn't a reactionary. He was the opposite. He was a revolutionary. He wanted radical change. Radical break with the past. Utopianism was nothing new in his day. But he wanted to make Christianity Utopian. This was new to Christianity.

Yes, he was a fundamentalist. He invented the modern usage of the term. But anybody who knows anything about how the Bible came to be knows how absurd that notion is for the Bible. The idea that there exists any kind of original Bible to go back to was a complete fantasy. To modern ears his fundamentalism just comes across as comical.

Also fun fact, he was convinced the second coming of Christ was imminent and the end was near. When will these apocalyptics learn to hedge their bets?

 

[DrZoidberg]

They also had a fun digression where they argued about exactly how the 95 theses had been attached to the church door of Wittenberg. Gave a window into the Medieval world and the limits to our knowledge of the practicalities of that period.

One fun detail was that the surface upon which he attached these theses (wherever it was physically) was the village noticeboard. Just cracks me up thinking of these radical passages attacking the papacy hanging next to notices like "have you seen my brown cat? Answers to Milly" or "Who stole my wheelbarrow on the night of 5/5 1517 . Return it immediately!"