Luther’s Subjective Anti-Metaphysics

The Epicurean Roots of Sola Scriptura

Luther's ascent to fame was enabled by a cohort of German princes who saw in him an avenue to break free from the financial and moral constraints of the Holy Roman Empire. These rulers, eager to reinterpret the Bible for their purposes, found in Luther a willing accomplice. Erasmus' contention was not merely with Luther's theology but with his almost deified self-perception, viewing himself as the sole and ultimate interpreter of scriptures. This profound arrogance transformed Luther from a theologian into a demagogue utilized by powerful political leaders to instantiate a convenient, malleable and individualistic form of Christianity that could be reverse-engineered to support lifestyle.

Philip I of Hesse, born in 1504, was a key political figure in the Holy Roman Empire who embraced Lutheranism out of political necessity, making him one of the early Protestant rulers in Germany. Philip saw Luther as an ally in his quest to promote Protestantism in his territories and safeguard his lands and money against the levies put on him by the Catholic Church and other political rivals, as well as support for his desire to marry multiple wives. In 1524, Philip found himself in a dilemma. He was already married to Christine of Saxony, but he fell in love with Margarethe von der Saale and wanted to marry her as well. However, polygamy was prohibited by both Catholic and the Protestant doctrines at the time. In a confidential meeting held in December 1539, Philip asked Luther and another theologian, Philip Melanchthon, whether he could marry Margarethe while keeping his existing marriage to Christine. Luther and Melanchthon faced a moral and theological quandary, but decided their self-interests were more important that Biblical teachings. In an act of pure Epicureanism, which both men condemned in public, Luther and Melanchthon advised Philip that he could take a second wife secretly, as long as he didn't make it public and didn't provoke public scandal. Philip was at the heart of the alliance of Protestant Princes, and the Reformation could have been undone if Philip went ahead with this publically.

To avoid being punished for bigamy, Philip had to promise Emperor Charles V in the Treaty of Regensburg in 1541 that he would prevent France, England, and Kleves from being included in the Schmalkaldic League. Landgrave Philip selected Luther as a mouthpiece to give religious legitimacy to a Socio-Economic problem of the Papacy telling him what is and is not sin, and what he can and cannot do to make money. Protestantism was the convenient answer for many German princes looking for a way to re-interpret the Bible according to nothing but their own subjective interpretation. Luther was happy to oblige and supported Philip I’s second marriage, in exchange for the favor. The letters between these two men are included for context on the evolution of Luther’s views on the role of the State in the life of the Christian. "Here I stand, I can do no other" rings ironic and melodramatic when looking at how Luther lived his life.''

Martin Luther's rise to fame and prominence was not organic- he was deliberately chosen by a series of scrupulous German Princes who were tired of the taxes and moral teachings of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther was selected by a collection of princes who wanted a reason to be able to live without any moral code, and no financial obligations to anyone outside of the bounds of their territory. The Reformation was far from a Theological movement; it was a socio-political de-evolution driven by Lust and Greed. Luther's idea of the "Bible alone" provided the moral subjectivity these wealthy men were looking for. This is the origin of non-denominational Christianity, not a love for the Bible.

In this collection of Luther’s critical works starting with his 1517 Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, originally nailed to the door in Latin and stretching to 1530 Revocation of the Doctrine of Purgatory, we see a portrait of Luther which is complicated and dynamic. He dogmatically wrote on Christian Marriage in his 1522 on Married life, but supported his benefactor, Philip I, in marrying multiple wives. He fought for the idea of the “Bible alone”, but took out 7 deuterocanonical books unilaterally and wanted to remove several more which he believed were “inspired by Satan”. He stood against the Papacy, but submitted to it when it suited him. In the beginning, he groveled to Pope Leo the X, stating: "I will also gladly promise Your Holiness that in the future I will leave these matters of indulgences alone and remain silent... Moreover, I want to admonish the people by a public writing, so that they may understand and be moved to honor the Roman Church with right earnestness and not to impute those iniquities to it; also not to imitate my sharpness, which I have used against the Roman Church, even misused, and have done too much to it". In his early letters to Pope Leo X (1518-21) he refers to him as "Your Holiness and High Majesty", and by 1545 calls him "All Hellish Father... Your Donkeyness... the Sodomite Pope, the founder and master of all sins". 

Luther against the Radical Reformation’s Anabaptists: The Divine Word, not Intellectual Assent, is the Root of Baptism
The German title has "Sermon" in the name, but this is often translated as "Treatise" because it is not a sermon in the way a modern Anglophone would understand it. Luther never preached this "sermon". The Latin "sermon" is better rendered as "discourse" or "disputation", and here refers to the carefully ordered thought of Luther on Baptism. His two primary texts on Baptism are the Treatise on the Sacrament of Baptism/ Sermon vom Sakrament der Taufe (1519) and his Concerning Rebaptism to two Pastors / Von der Wiedertaufe, an zwei Pfarrherrn.(1528), but there is a chapter on Baptism in his Large Catechism and other Treaties. The second is myopically focused on the Anabaptists or re-baptizers (Täufer oder Wiedertäufer auf Deutsch), but he ended up having to defend his statements from all fronts.

In his 1519 work, Luther is far less confrontational than in his 1528 work as he seemed to expect the Anabaptist schism to heal itself. He expected broadly unity among the Reformers (after all, shouldn't there be absolute unity among those who agree to “only follow the Bible”?), but lived to see that there would never be any unity among Protestants. Even his right-hand man, whom he had more respect for than any other Theologian, Melanchton, rejected his statements on Predestination later in life, for example. There ended up not being any Reformers who agreed with each other in Luther's day, a de-evolution which continues to this day all the way down to Fundamentalism attempting to find some kind of theoretical rock-bottom “essentials”. The dozens of schisms in the early years of the 16th century between the Core and Radical Reformation would be hundreds by the turn of the century, and today there are roughly 30,000+ active denominations and no consensus on what exactly are the so-called "essentials”.

Even among those who rejected the Anabaptsts, disagreements arose as to how to deal with them. Zwingli was violently opposed to the Anabaptists and executed many in his hometown of Zurich (there are still statues in downtown Zurich of this murderer to this day). Luther, while passionate, rejected any physical compulsion of belief on any subject. He is strong in his rejection of the Anabaptists, but not dogmatic on many other elements of Baptism and rejected all persecution of them, a persecution which would eventually push the Radical Reformation’s Anabaptist schism to America (Baptists, Evangelicals/ Charismatics and virtually all “non-denominational” low-church Protestants). These use both Zwinglianism and Anabaptism- the worst possible mixture to Luther.

You can see a dramatic increase between his 1519 to 1528 treaties on Baptism in his frustration on not being able to keep any unity among fellow Protestants on both the big and little issues. His first treatise is gentle and thoughtful, but he starts off his second treatise swinging right out of the gate: "Hübmohr mich auch unter andern mit Namen einführet in seinem lästerlichen Büchlein von der Wiedertaufe/ "Hübmohr... mentions me by name in his blasphemous little book about rebaptism". The entire treaty is highly argumentative and polemic. He calls the Zwinglian Memorialists and the Anabaptists the "Sacramentsfeinden"/ "enemies of the sacraments" and the "Schwärmer' (fanatics) of Satan.

In his 1530 Vermahnung zum Sacrament des Leibes und Blutes des Herrn / Admonition to the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord, we see a frustrated and even crushed Luther realizing that the Reformation was careening out of control. Luther wrote this essay around the time of the Diet of Augsburg, where he saw that even his close friends whom he respected were not able to agree on basic Theological beliefs. He was attacked not by Rome, but by his fellow Reformers. In this Essay he defends the true presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, something that he thought was self-evident. If the reformers could not agree on what the simple sacraments were, how could they hope to keep cohesion long-term?

Luther’s Faith-Works Dichotomy is not as prominent as his writings of Ecclesiological authority and scripture and is a natural result of them. In his 1520 Von den Guten Werken/ Treatise on Good Works (1520), Luther expanded upon his Anthropology and Augustinian Hamartiology. He draws a line between four types of people: (A) Pious believers (B) Weak Christians using Grace as an excuse to sin (C) Evil people who must be punished by the church and state and (D) oblivious, Naïve people who need to be spiritually developed. This Anthropology was influential in his development of a secular para-church state. We can see how this area of Theology is shadowed by broader debates on very practical matters.

He notes that the Anabaptists claim that child baptism is Papist, and thus must be thrown out, to which Luther replies that if that is the sole reason why something must be dispensed of, we must also dispense with the Trinity and the whole of the Christian Gospel:

We do not irrationally reject everything that the Pope has under him; for in this way we would also reject Christianity, the temple of God, with all that it has from Christ. Instead, we challenge and reject the fact that the Pope does not want to stop with such goods of Christianity, which he inherited from the apostles, but makes his devilish addition to it and over it, and does not need such goods to improve the temple of God, but to the disturbance of keeping his commandments and ordinances higher than Christ's ordinance.

Luther repeatedly mentions that Anabaptists often get re-baptized multiple times due to an inability to tell definitively whether they have faith. For if faith (intellectual assent) is the sole basis of Baptism, then what happens when you sin, or doubt your faith? Do you have to get re-baptized? Many of the original Anabaptists would, I've watched this happen in the 21-st century with many "non-denominational" Christians I knew getting re-saved over and over, and occasionally some would want to get re-baptized. This crisis of faith is one of the staples of Evangelicalism, who are Anabaptists who don't know what Anabaptism is. This Ad Infinitum loop caused by Anabaptist logic existed in Luther's day as much as it does today. To this day, Evangelicals often get "re-saved" multiple times in their lives, and since they belief salvation as merely belief in a set of presupposition, can never figure out if they "truly" believe or not. Luther points out that all of these assumptions about faith being merely intellectual and creedal are faulty.

The Anabaptist tendency to get re-baptized correlates to the mythical idea of an "age of accountability" which is found nowhere in Christian history until the Anabaptist movement, and nowhere intuitively in Scripture despite anachronistic attempts at exegesis by the Anabaptists. And the very idea that there is a certain time or developmental point where Faith is complete and true is based on an Anselmnian penal substitutionary model of salvation, not on the ancient Christian models of Soteriology. Luther argues the fallacy of the Anabaptists is that they wrongly assume that Baptism has merely to do with a declaration of intellectual belief, when it is based on the Word of God, not the whims of personal ideology. For the convert, it is correlated to the statement of intellectual assent, but this is only the Subjective movement of the Sacrament, while to Objective reality is the initiation into the Mystery of the Divine Logos. For an individual's faith is a living, dynamic reality experienced in ebbs and flows and progressing over time, while the Divine Logos is an immutable Ontologic Prime. Luther writes: "tell me, which is greater, the Word of God, or faith? Is not the Word of God greater? For the Word does not depend upon faith, but it is faith that is dependent on God's Word. Faith wavers and changes; but the Word of God abides forever."

Hilariously, he writes that the faith the Anabaptists practice "stands like butter in the sun", which is a characteristic of Luther’s writings- his insults are sometimes serious and hard, and sometimes comedic. For the Anabaptists, the baptismal procedure only makes sense if the person being baptized can already intellectually ascents. An infant is not capable of this, of course. Luther replies that their understanding of Faith as strictly presuppositional is unbiblical, for Christ Himself declared that Children were fit to be in the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 19:14), and John the Baptist believed even while as a fetus in the mother’s womb (Luke 1:41). Faith is not a one-time declaration of presuppositional axioms, but a life in the Logos of the Church, which Children have as equally as adults, and on some level to an even greater extent (Matthew 18:3). Thus baptism is not an "outward declaration of an internal change", and not response to the declaration of intellectual assent to a set of axioms, but a perpetual sacrament that transcends the infinite progression and ebbing of individual belief and unbelief. It is the power of God made manifest, not intellectual belief, which actuates the Noetic effect of Baptism (Colossians 2:12). Thus, to prevent children from the sacraments is an unthinkable sin.

Luther identifies a second misunderstanding that the Anabaptists commit as the missed correlation to Circumcision, which explains why Evangelicals have a very confused understanding of the modern-day role of Circumcision: "God made a covenant with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, Exodus. 34, 10. Some did not accept the same covenant rightly and without faith. Now if after this they have come to believe. Dear, should the covenant also have been wrong, and God would have to come to everyone anew on Mount Sinai and renew the covenant again?" Baptism replaces circumcision as a perpetual sacrament which instantiates the covenant once and for all time. This seal of the Old Covenants is given to the entire community just like the seal of the New Covenant. It is not for only those who have a certain intellectual understanding. Anabaptists don't understand this theological history, which is why Circumcision is consistently practiced across the Protestant world.

This correlation of Baptism replacing Circumcision is found throughout the Early Church Fathers (Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers and Cyprian, and also in Colossians 2:11-12: "In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead."

Luther, ironically, sees this as a development of Medieval Catholic Scholastic thought, which is ironic because Anabaptists today think that baptizing infants is "Catholic", which in fact is exactly the opposite. It is the "believer's baptism" logic that is a purification of Medieval Catholic & Enlightenment Rationalism. Credobaptism over-emphasizes the subjective, and depreciates the objective, which relies on the 'Opus Operatum' of Scholasticism. Luther makes a historical argument in addition to a Scriptural one, pointing out that there has never been a "believer's baptism" in the 1,400 years up to that point, and even before Christianity in the Jewish Essene sect from which Baptism was adopted, who also Baptized infants. Entire Families are mentioned being baptized, including children, explicitly in the New Testament in Acts 2:39; 16:15 and 33 and 1 Corinthians 1:16. All mentions of Baptism in the Ancient church including Origen, Cyprian, Chrysostom, and Augustin (Melanchthon mentions) all mention Baptism as inclusive of Christians. Rather, there is not a single example of a Christian family refraining from Baptism until the 16th century Anabaptist schism of the Radical Reformation. Luther acknowledges this historical fact:

Either there must have been no church before, or baptism has been of no value nor effective. But it is impossible that no Christian church has existed for 1,400 years; therefore the baptism of children must be strong... Because our baptism has been and has been practiced from the beginning of Christianity, that children are baptized, and no one with a good conscience can prove that there was no faith, so one should not change this and build on such an uncertain foundation. For what one wants to change or overthrow has been used since ancient times, one should and must constantly prove that it is against the word of God.

Luther, despite his largely unorthodox and subjective teachings, clings to the Orthodox teaching on Baptism against the Zwinglian error.  Luther doesn't pull any punches on those Christian families who commit the Radical Reformation's Anabaptist heresy and do not baptize their children as infants, as the Apostles commanded:

The man who bases his baptism on faith, is not only uncertain, but he is a godless and hypocritical Christian; for he puts his trust in what is not his own, a gift from God, and not alone in the Word of God, just as another builds upon his strength, wisdom, power, holiness, which, nevertheless, are gifts which God has given us… In short, the Anabaptists are too outrageous and impertinent. For they regard baptism not as a divine ordinance or command, but as if it were a human act; how many other ecclesiastical rites are under the Pope than of consecrating salt, water, herbs. For where they considered it a divine ordinance and commandment, they would not speak of it so blasphemously and shamefully if it were used unjustly. But now that they are in the mad opinion that baptism is the same thing as consecrating water and salt, or wearing caps and plates; so they come out, and are called a dog bath, item, a handful of water, and the dreadful words much more. God's Word builds and establishes; moreover, faith is fickle and changeable; but God's Word endures forever.

To summarize Luther's' views on Anabaptists in a sentence: they wrongly assume intellectual assent is the essential animating reality of the act of Baptism, when it is actually a reliance on the Word of God, participation in the Logos, and a 'perpetual sacrament' meant to replace the rite of circumcision. To say this simply; baptizing children is Biblical and Apostolic in origin, waiting until some vague age of intellectual assent to baptize children is heretical and Medieval in origin.

Luther's Inverted Deification of Holy Writ

These writings are the core texts of Luther’s analysis of scripture and the theological substructure on his Exegesis rests. They exhibit Luther’s interpretive framework, pre-conceived theological assumptions, and subsequent worldview. In his 1530 ‘Letter on the Interpreting and Intercession of the Saints’ (Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen und Fürbitte der Heiligen), Luther defends his additions to scripture, criticizes the practice of prayers to the dead, and attacks his critics. This text is critical as its Luther’s clearest explanation of how he interpreted the Bible from the Vulgate. His non-literal interpretation has been the template used by subsequent Protestant versions of the Bible, including the NIV and ESV, which use the same tactic of interpreting key verses through pre-conceived Evangelical frameworks.
This was written 8 years after publishing his Lutherbible, which received considerable criticism for its addition of words into the text which do not exist in ancient manuscripts. His Theological position about prayers to Saints is Tautological since he removed I and II Maccabees from his version, which clearly talks about prayers to the dead, and then argues that there is nowhere in the Bible that talks about prayers to the dead. When you remove the sections that talk about what you don’t like, Scripture tends to match your beliefs perfectly. Intercessory prayers to ‘Saints” was a Second-Temple Jewish practice that was continued by the Apostles, but Luther argues it’s a later addition to the church, despite claiming that the Apostles had a “pure and perfect” faith. He gives no historical evidence for when or where this addition occurred.
He justifies his changes to the texts of Scripture by invoking the difficulty of the German language, but side-steps the accusations of reverse-engineering his personal Theology into the Bible:

…but I don't see that it nevertheless corresponds to the meaning of the text, and if you want to translate it clearly and powerfully into German, then it belongs there because I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek when I wanted to speak German had made to me when interpreting.

His megalomania shines through in these texts, as he refers to himself as equal to the Apostles, and anyone who criticizes him as “unwashed donkeys”:

And as Paul defended himself against his great saints, so will I defend myself against these asses of mine.

Perhaps the most profound impact Luther has had on the modern world is the changes he made to the Protestant Bible. One of the more unfounded yet universal beliefs about Luther is that he translated his Bible from ancient texts. But Luther used the Vulgate as his primary text and only referred to Erasmus’ Greek NT (Novum Instrumentum omne) with the help of Melanchthon. Even within the Novum Instrumentum omne, Erasmus translated some verses into Greek from the Vulgate (in Revelations, specifically), so it was not a direct translation either. The Vulgate was the foundation of all European translations either directly or indirectly. In fact, we have the specific physical copy of the Vulgate Bible one of his scribes probably used: it’s called the Stuttgart Vulgate (“Die Stuttgarter Vulgata”) and was found in a library in 1995. It is unanimously recognized in academic circles, and in German Lutheran circles, that he used the Vulgate and only referenced the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek occasionally. This makes sense: Luther did not speak any of these languages well, but he was a trained Augustinian who knew Latin very well (his conversations wErasmus were completely in Latin).
According to the Evangelical Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland), Luther relied heavily on the Vulgate and not on the original Greek: “Luther übersetzte Nach dem lateinischen Text.”/ "Luther translated according to the Latin text." The consensus of the Modern Lutheran church is that Luther overlayed pre-existing Lutheran Theology on the text, particularly in the book of Romans, and the 2017 version has added footnotes on Romans 1:17; Romans 2:13, Romans 3:21, Romans 3:28 which warn about the deliberate mistranslation. Significant changes correcting Luther’s translations were made in the 2017 version of the Luther Bible. Luther did not speak Greek fluently, and when he referenced the Greek New Testament, he relied on his friend Melancthon and several other philologists. Luther developed his theological beliefs from reading the Vulgate translation alone- no German text was available to him in his youth (although they did exist), and no Greek version of the NT existed either at the time.
There is significant mythologization around Luther’s translation of the Bible into German; on of these beliefs that has survived is that Die Lutherbibel is the first low German-language Bible. But there were at least 18 German-language Bibles before Luther was written in High and Low Dialects. Gothic and medieval translations ranging from the translation of Wulfila of 311 to the Augsburger Bible of 1350 and the Wenceslas Bible of 1389 existed in high-german. Johannes Mentelin printed a complete high-german bible in 1466. Günther Zainer printed two German editions of the Bible in the 1470s- both in Niederdeutsch (more specifically in the Low Rhenish and Low Saxon dialects). Anton Koberger used these prints to reproduce more in the 1480s including the famous Nuremberg Bible of 1483. The Lubecker Bible of 1494 was written in the dialect of Lübeck and the 1522 Halberstadt Bible in Low-Saxon. Zainer's 1475 and 1477 versions were instrumental in Luther’s translation. These were rough translations from the Vulgate. And Zwingli technically published his translation into Swiss German (the Froschauer Bible/ Zürcher Bibel/ Zwinglibibel) before Luther did in 1525, although he stole some of Luther’s translations to do so. And again, Luther did not have access to these until much later in his life, and he developed his theological beliefs from the Catholic Vulgate he studied.

One of the most famous changes Luther made in his Lutherbible is adding "allein" into Romans 3:23. Anglican apologist Alister McGrath writes on this more broadly:

"Luther insisted that Paul’s doctrine of 'justification by faith was definitive for Christianity. And to make sure that there were no understandings about this, he added the word “alone” lest anyone see faith as one among a number of causes of justification-including works. This addition caused a furor. Catholics pointed out that the NT nowhere taught “justification by faith alone”; indeed, the Letter of James explicitly condemned the idea. Luther responded by making the point that his slogan encapsulated neatly the substance of the NT even if it did not use precisely its original words. And as for the letter of James, was it not “an epistle of straw” that ought not to be in the NT anyway? This second argument caused considerable unease within Protestant circles and was not maintained by Luther’s successors."

As McGrath notes, Luther openly challenged the canonicity of many books of the Bible (James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelations), as did John Calvin, and sought their removal, so it is not surprising he is willing to add words into the scriptures to ensure the text says what Protestant tradition demands it must say. However, McGrath left out the fact that the Protestant world did in fact maintain many of his changes to the Old Testament. Modern Protestant Bibles rarely mention or include the deuterocanonical books and maintain Luther's bizarre beliefs about the nature of the Masoretic text. Göttert noted in an interview 

“Luther developed a certain theology and now he wants to prove this theology. He wants to show it… You can call that awesome and you can call it wrong. In any case, it does not offer a philologically clean translation of the Bible.”

Luther’s Defense: A Sola Scriptura Tautology

Luther explicitly states that he added the word not based on the text, but on his interpretation of tradition, calling his preconceptions "the matter itself":

However, I was not depending upon or following the nature of the languages alone when I inserted the word sola in Romans 3. The text itself, and Saint Paul's meaning, urgently require and demand it. For in that passage he is dealing with the main point of Christian doctrine, namely, that we are justified by faith in Christ without any works of the Law. Paul excludes all works so completely as to say that the works of the Law, though it is God's law and word, do not aid us in justification. Using Abraham as an example, he argues that Abraham was so justified without works that even the highest work, which had been commanded by God, over and above all others, namely circumcision, did not aid him in justification. Rather, Abraham was justified without circumcision and without any works, but by faith, as he says in Chapter 4: "If Abraham were justified by works, he may boast, but not before God." So, when all works are so completely rejected — which must mean faith alone justifies — whoever would speak plainly and clearly about this rejection of works will have to say "Faith alone justifies and not works." The matter itself and the nature of language requires it.

Luther argued that Holy Tradition allowed him to add this word to the scripture:

Furthermore, I am not the only one, nor the first, to say that faith alone makes one righteous. There was Ambrose, Augustine, and many others who said it before me.

Luther was cherry-picking when making these references; taking them out of the broad conversation these were made in, but it is interesting how he appeals to tradition to justify his Biblical interpretation. Despite the core teaching that a literal interpretation trumps tradition, he immediately appeals to tradition to justify his deliberate mistranslation. Even if this translation error was made a thousand times before Luther in other texts, it does not justify the intentional infidelity to the text.
Beyond his manipulation of the text, his Anselmnian-Augustinian impact on Western Christianity cannot be understated. The idea of 'Glaube allein" is Medieval Catholic in Origin- specifically from Anselm's legalistic reading of Augustine. Being downstream from Anselm, who used European Legal terminology to interpret the scriptures for the first time, Luther also inserted legal terminology into the text. For instance, he used a german legal term “Denkzettel” in Matthew 23.5 for the translation of the Greek word φυλακτήριον (A Phylacterie or Prayer Box): “Alle ihre Werke aber tun sie, daß sie von den Leuten gesehen werden. Sie machen ihre Denkzettel breit und die Säume an ihren Kleidern groß.” This legalistic language does not exist in the Vulgate or the Septuagint.

Arthur Schopenhauer notes that Subjectivity, i.e. Metaphysical Atheism, is at the heart of "bible-believing" Atheism:

The essence of Protestantism is individualism, which necessarily leads to subjectivism, and this, in turn, to the denial of objective truth.

Protestantism, by rejecting celibacy and actual asceticism in general, as well as its representatives, the saints, has become a blunted, or rather broken-off Christianity, lacking the pinnacle: it runs out into nothing.... by eliminating asceticism and its central point, the merit of celibacy, has actually already abandoned the innermost core of Christianity and is to that extent to be regarded as apostasy from it. This has become evident in our days in the gradual transition of Christianity into the flat rationalism, this modern Pelagianism...

This may be a good religion for comfortable, married, and enlightened Protestant pastors: but it is not Christianity.

Sola Scriptura (Claritas Scriptura- "the bible interprets itself")is the universalization of the papacy, not the repudiation of it. It moved the source of truth from one individual man, to every individual Man. Now the source of truth in self-described "Bible believing" Christianity is nothing more than the individual subjective interpretation of the Bible.

The Fallacies of Hebraica Veritas (Hebräische Wahrheit) and Ad Fontes! ('to the originals!')

A critical fact that neither Luther nor any European scholars were aware of at this time is that the bulk of the quotations in the New Testament comes from the Greek Septuagint, not any Hebrew version. Paul quotes exclusively from the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the authoritative scripture of the version of Judaism (Second Temple Judaism) which Christianity emerged from. Any Hebrew versions that existed at the time have been lost to history, but obviously contained the Deuterocanonical books since the Septuagint was a perfect copy of the Hebrew version. When Christ read from Isaiah, He read from the Septuagint or an Aramaic version. The Masoretic text did not exist in the time of Christ, nor did these Hellenized Jews broadly know Hebrew. The prophecy mentioned in Matthew 2:23 does not exist in the Hebrew Masoretic, but nobody in Europe understood this. Luther only spoke German, New Latin and a handful of works in Hebrew, and none of this scholarly analysis of the text existed at the time. Both Catholic scholars and the Reformers could not have known the Old Testament references made in the New Testament reference the Septuagint books as scripture.

Luther's distrust of the Deuterocanonical books did not come out of the blue. He was taught these misunderstandings from the Latin-speaking Augustinian tradition- specifically Jerome, who sparked this idea of "Hebraica Veritas". You will notice that the criticisms leveled towards Luther by Catholic Theologians do not include this removal of the deuterocanonical books. Jerome, like Augustine, did not know Greek. Being cut off from the hundreds of years and context before him, Jerome understandably made many false assumptions, including a few about the Septuagint. One of these is that the Septuagint was not translated from Hebrew, which it was. It was translated from Hebrew texts by Hellenized Jews in the 4-3rd centuries. He attempted to learn some Hebrew and update his Vulgate translation accordingly but only made minor edits. Jerome started the idea in Western Latin-speaking Christianity that there are Hebrew texts which underlay the Old Testament, which is only partially true. The most accurate text for the Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint, which the New Testament authors themselves use (especially Paul) and there was no concern by the early Christians about the Hebrew texts. The Septuagint has always been considered the authoritative version of the Old Testament until the Latin-speaking church made wrong assumptions about non-existent "original" texts- specifically St. Jerome.

The newly developed non-messianic rabbinic version of Judaism capitalized on this misunderstanding by the West. With the creation of the Masoretic text 1,000 years after Christ, diacritics were added to intentionally change the meaning of words to disprove a Christian reading of the Messianic passages. Luther and the West assumed that the Masoretic text, simply because it was written in Hebrew, was the "original", following Jerome's fallacious "Hebraica Veritas". Luther combined Jerome's misunderstandings of the development of the canon, and his own misunderstandings of the new Masoretic text and being immersed in the obsessive Humanistic tendency of his day to "Ad Fontes"/ "To the Originals", he used this caustic mixture of half-truths as the basis to remove 7 books from his version of the Bible.

The Masoretic Text was an Excuse

To this day, the Masoretic text remains the basis of the NIV, ESV, and all low-church Protestant versions. The fallacies of theologians who only knew Latin, the Enlightenment's misunderstanding of the Masoretic, and the Humanism (Ad Fontes) of the Reformation tricked Protestantism into using a version of the Old Testament that had been specifically designed to be anti-Christian. As Erasmus documented, Luther essentially viewed himself as the sole representative of God on earth, a new pope, and established a new, purified and universal Papacy, where every individual is their own Pope. His hatred of the Papacy was not due to his love of 'sound doctrine but was little more than jealousy. It is not that he did not want one man to be in control of the church, but rather that he wanted to be that one man.
But Luther did not go through with completely removing them from the Bible because he knew this was going too far in the eyes of his sponsors and he would lose his power. While it's great he didn't go ahead and butcher the New Testament, it's almost worse in a way because he was a coward even in his heresies. He was not a "man of convictions"; he valued his own power and influence more than his (heretical) convictions. His subtle manipulation of the canon is small enough to be buried by Protestant apologists- if he had taken NT books out, I doubt that it would have gone unfixed in the following centuries. Luther's writings make it very clear that he suffered from a type of megalomania, and his reason for wanting to remove these 7 books was merely a cover story. The only reason he did not also remove Esther, Hebrews, James, Jude, Revelations and half-dozen other books he felt shouldn't be in the canon either was his inability to make a compelling argument that would stick. Erasmus perhaps said it best when he pointed out the deep hypocrisy of Luther, Calvin, and the Reformed mob in a letter to Luther:

You stipulate that we should not ask for or accept anything but Holy Scripture, but you do it in such a way as to require that we permit you to be its sole interpreter, renouncing all others. Thus, the victory will be yours if we allow you to be not the steward but the lord of Holy Scripture... You declaim bitterly… against our prayers, fasts, and Masses; and you are not content to retrench the abuses that may be in these things, but desire to abolish them entirely… Look around on this 'Evangelical' generation, and observe whether amongst them less indulgence is given to luxury, lust, or avarice, than amongst those whom you so detest. Show me any one person who by that Gospel [the Wittenburg Gospel of intellectual belief alone] has been reclaimed from drunkenness to sobriety, from fury and passion to meekness, from avarice to liberality, from reviling to well-speaking, from wantonness to modesty. I will show you a great many who have become worse through following it… The solemn prayers of the Church are abolished, but now there are very many who never pray at all...Confession to the priest is abolished, but very few now confess to God. ...They have fled from Judaism so that they may become Epicureans.

Tolstoy, in Confessions, makese the same accusation as Schopenhauer:

"to the so-called new Christians who profess salvation by faith in the atonement [Protestants]... And I realized that the faith of these people was not the faith I was looking for, that their faith was not faith, but only one of the Epicurean consolations of life. I realized that this faith was good, perhaps not for comfort, but for some scattering to the repentant Solomon on his deathbed, but it could not be good for the vast majority of humanity, which was not called to make fun of the labors of others, but to create life. In order for the whole of humanity to live, in order for it to go on living, giving it meaning, they, these billions, must have a different, real knowledge of faith. It was not the fact that Solomon and Schopenhauer and I did not kill ourselves that convinced me of the existence of faith, but the fact that these billions lived and live, and that Solomon and I were carried on the waves of life."

Luther's influence cannot be mythologized and romanticized. He was neither friend nor foe of truth; he was a politician and tactician, a Theologian but also a pragmatist. The idea that Luther "stood upon the scriptures against erring tradition" rings hollow considering his passionate hatred of any book or verse that didn't say what he wanted it to, and his willingness to add words to the text or remove entire segments as he saw fit. Luther exercised more power than any Pope ever has. He unilaterally re-wrote the entire Bible to fit the personal views he developed in ignorance of the development of the canon. When the Schmalkaldic League (Schmalkaldische Bund) formed and Luther had a defensive alliance of wealthy Protestant princes and cities in 1531, Luther became much more aggressive. Luther's benefactor, Philip I of Hesse, selected Luther as a mouthpiece to give religious legitimacy to a Socio-Economic problem. In turn, Luther supported his desire to marry multiple wives from a Theological and Biblical perspective. This unholy alliance Luther formed conveniently goes unmentioned in Protestant retellings of this period. Luther was far from the Noble figure the children of the Reformation paint him as. Erasmus, though a supporter of the need for a reformation and a frequent defender of Luther's views, paints the Reformers harshly and worse than any Papist:

All their preaching is mere stage play... if their arrogance was their only fault, it would admit some excuse; but they are at the same time so fierce and quarrelsome, that they will wrangle bloodily for the least trifle, and be so overly eager that they may times lose their game in the chase, and fright away that truth they are hunting for. Yes, self-conceit makes these nimble disputants such doughty champions, that armed with three or four closely linked syllogisms, they shall enter the lists with the greatest masters of reason, and not question the foiling of them in an irresistible babble nay, their obstinacy makes them so confident of their being in the right, that all the arguments in the world shall never convince them to the contrary.

The 16th-century and Modern Protestant Misunderstanding of the Masoretic Text

Luther had no idea that the Rabbinic Judaism of today is not the denomination of Judaism mentioned in the New Testament. Judaism has always had dozens of versions, even in the time of Christ. A few of these are mentioned in the New Testament- Pharisees and Sadducees, and indirectly the Essenes. The Dead Sea Scrolls are believed to be from an Essene library. And there are many early Christian rites such as Baptism that are found only in this sect and not in the Pharisee and Sadducee versions of Judaism (John the Baptist is thought to be an Essene). The Western idea of "Hebraica Veritas" made the mistake of thinking that Judaism is homogenous, which it never has been. Likewise, different sects used different scriptural texts and understood them very differently.

The Hebrew canon of Second Temple Judaism is not the canon of 10th-century Rabbinic Judaism. The written Torah only started being developed from the Oral Torah after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70AD, and the broader canon was in flux during early Christianity. Mainstream rabbinic Judaism codified the Hebrew Canon further in the early centuries of AD, which was only broadly agreed upon by this new Rabbinic Judaism in the 7-10th centuries. The Christian church largely relied upon the Septuagint in the canonization of the Christian Bible, as the Apostles and the 1st century Jews who became Christian followed Second Temple Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism would not exist for hundreds of years.

The existence of the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Peshitta versions of the Hebrew Scriptures demonstrate that the Hebrew canon was not homogenous and was probably in flux all the way into the 7th century AD. Additionally, the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls revealed how dramatically the Hebrew canon has shifted throughout the centuries and most of the deuterocanonical books were in the canon at the time. Various versions of the Masoretic persisted for a few hundred years until the version created by the Ben-Ascher family of Tiberias (the Codex of Aleppo from 920) became the standard. The oldest completely preserved manuscript of the Masoretic text is the Codex Leningradensis from the year 1008.
Since the Renaissance, this Tiberian-Masoretic text was considered the "original" Hebrew text across Europe, merely because the West maintained St. Jerome's ideas of Hebraica Veritas, and the Masoretic was written in Hebrew. Luther was also under this false impression and understood the Masoretic as the "original" Hebrew Scriptures. However, we now know that the Masoretic text is a medieval version of the Hebrew Bible created 1,000 years after Christ by the scribe-scholars called the Masoretes to support an anti-Christian exegesis by strategically including diacritics to shift the meaning of the text to sound non-messianic. The second-temple Judaism which Christianity evolved was a radically different type of Judaism than 10th-century Rabbinic Judaism and used the Septuagint as the authoritative scriptures, not anything resembling the Masoretic text. The Westminster Confession of Faith also operated off of this false assumption when declaring the Masoretic text the "original" authoritative text.

None of these 16th and 17th-century European Christians (Catholic or Protestant) were aware of any of these facts.

The Septuagint is as close as you get to an "original" Text

Secondly, unknown to Luther, the Hebrew Canon (the Tanakh) consists of the Law (the Torah), the Prophets (the Nevi'im), and the "other writings' ' (the Ketuvim) has been in flux through the millennia. When the Septuagint was translated into Koine Greek in the 3-2 centuries BC and the Peshitta into Syriac from the Hebrew canon(s), they created snapshots of which books were considered canonical at the time, as well as recorded their interpretation of them.

The Latin-speaking Western churches, starting with Jerome, did not understand that there is no authoritative "original" text of the Old Testament (only a theoretical "Urtext"). But as far as this can be judged, the Greek Septuagint is far more "original" than the Hebrew Masoretic text. The Septuagint is 1,200 years older than the Masoretic and was already in use 300 years before Christ. But most importantly, the true alphabet snapshots a version of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures that have been lost. "Proto-Masoretic" is an anachronistic term because it is not a direct descendent of the modern Masoretic. Certain texts were ignored in favor of others. The Masoretic canon has massive differences from the recently discovered Dead Sea scrolls, as it was deliberately changed by the Masoretes to support a non-messianic reading. However, the Greek Masoretic utilizing a script that records vowels (a true alphabet), is a far more accurate snapshot of ancient Hebrew than the Masoretic text. Because Greek is a true alphabet, it records the intended meaning of the authors at the time and is less subject to interpretation than consonant-only Hebrew. We do not have the "original texts" of the Old Testament. We have older and younger fragments, the oldest from the Dead Sea scrolls. So the basic claim of Post-Enlightenment Humanism's amplification of Jerome's faulty idea of Hebraica Veritas which Luther utilizes, that we should go back to the "original" Hebrew, is nonsense. There are no "original" manuscripts, and the Masoretic version is not the "original"- it is merely a version of the Old Testament interpreted through the application of diacritics.

Because the Masoretic contains not only the consonants (Ketib) but also the vowel diacritics (Qere), it was used to solidify a new and specific version of Judaism, which to survive, needed to deter a Messianic interpretation of Prophecy. Examples of this are on nearly every page, but some of the most obvious is in Isaiah. For example, "virgin" In Isaiah 7:14 is cleverly translated using the addition of diacritics to "a concealed one". Psalms 21 (Ancient numbering) /22 (Western numbering) was changed from "they pierced my hands and feet'' to "there are lions at my hands and feet'' with the goal of invalidating the Prophecy fulfilled in the New Testament. Psalms 109 (110 western numberings), Isaiah 53, and dozens of other verses are stripped of the Messianic metaphors and references. The Septuagint, being written in a true alphabet, is perfect to refute these textual manipulations which are easier to do in an Abjad. The 12 disciples were Hellenized Greeks, and only a couple of them possibly spoke Hebrew (Matthew for instance). Rabbinic Judaism is not the Judaism of Second-Temple Judaism and would be unrecognizable to the sects of Second-Temple Judaism of 1st century Judea.

Justin Marty talks about this type of textual manipulation, and Rabbi Akiva in the 2nd century openly talks about the efforts to create new versions of the Hebrew Bible that prevent reading of Jesus as the promised Messiah. The Septuagint, with its true alphabet, was not as easy to manipulate, so there was an insistence by anti-Christian Jewish apologists of "going back to the Hebrew". This Western inability to understand Greek severed the tradition from the writings of the 1st-century church, and hindered understandings of critical Neo-Platonic concepts such as Logos. Jerome and the Latin-speaking fathers fell into this trap of Hebraica Veritas, and it continued in the Western tradition all the way to Luther when it was amplified by the Enlightenment's Humanistic 'Ad Fontes' ideology. Just because it's written in Hebrew doesn't mean it's more original. The Hebrew canon was written in various languages throughout time, including the Syriac Peshitta and the Samaritan language Samaritanus. The oldest copy of the book of Daniel, for instance, is written in Syriac and was translated into Hebrew later. The Septuigent was the manuscript canonized by the Christian church; it is the only text which is authoritative.

Attempts and Success at Removing Entire Books

Luther believed the books of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelations were "inspired by Satan". Not all his followers shared this belief, and he never fully removed them from the Lutherbibel (instead, he just moved Hebrews and James to the back) because he would have lost his political power. Had he fully removed these books, he would have lost his sponsorship and probably his life. He was not successful in removing the book of Esther either, which he hated. However, Luther was largely successful in removing several other books of the Old Testament and creating a new category of "books which are not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures but are useful and good to read", coining the term "Apocrypha". Into this category, he moved seven Old Testament books (Tobit, Judith, 1–2 Maccabees, Book of Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch). To gain broad acceptance for his unilateral re-organization of the Scriptures, he made the argument that these books are not found in the modern 10th-century Rabbinic Jewish Canon (the Masoretic text) This excuse made his changes to the canon easier to swallow for his followers when his letters revealed his true reason; he hated any scripture which seemed to contradict his preconceived theological opinions. He made a range of bizarre explanations on how these books made it into the Bible, including the excuse that James was written by "some Jew" who snuck it in somehow. As Erasmus noted, Luther viewed himself as a "little god" and the "Lord of Scripture". In his private letters, he talks about his desire to take out other books, but he was only able to find an excuse to take out seven.

Thus, the historic Christian Bible differs from the newer Protestant Bible. However, not all Protestant denominations are comfortable with Luther's edits since it is now known that Luther's reasoning was based on several factual inaccuracies, combined with the uncomfortable fact that a single man decided to simply remove large chunks of the Bible based on his opinion alone. Scholars now know that the New Testament explicitly refers to these "Apocryphal" books as scripture (for example, the scriptures quoted in Matthew 2:23 do not exist in the modern Masoretic texts, but only in the Septuagint) and Paul quotes extensively from the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text, though to be the "original" by Luther, is a 10th-century interpretation deliberately crafted to be non-messianic. Several historic Protestant Bibles, such as the 1611 King James and the Luther Bible, include the Deuterocanonical books. The Anglican Church regularly uses deuterocanonical books in liturgy and instruction. But most modern Protestant translations submit themselves to Luther's unilateral decision and do not include these 7 books. This history and basic facts concerning the deuterocanonical books are deliberately buried in low-church Protestantism. Very rarely will you find a "non-denominational" or "Bible-believing" Christian who knows anything about it? Exactly like the whole of post-Enlightenment Europe (including the Latin-speaking Catholic church starting with Jerome), Luther understood virtually nothing about the history of the Masoretic, Jerome's Vulgate, or the Septuagint and made several wrong assumptions.

Luther's Deep Aristotelian-Medieval Augustinian Roots

For roughly a decade from 1522 to 1534, Luther and Desiderius Erasmus von Rotterdam corresponded and debated via letters, however they never met in person. The relationship was complicated, as Erasmus was a reformer who agreed broadly with the 95 Theses and the condemnation of Indulgences, however defended the need for a papacy. Luther's circle used Erasmus's Greek New Testament to shape the Lutherbible. Melanchthon, in his history on Luther, mentions that Erasmus defended Luther from his harsher critics in the Catholic Church including directly to the Emperor Charles V. After a couple years of correspondence on matters of the Reformation, a more public debate erupted between the two men. Erasmus responded to Luther's Assertio omnium articulorum M. Lutheri per Bullam Leonis X novissimam damnatorum (or in German "Grund und Ursache aller Artikel D. Martin Luthers, so durch römische Bulle unrechtlich verdammt sind") with a 1524 work titled De libero arbitrio (On Free Will). Both men were Humanists who were deeply indebted to Enlightenment rationality, but Luther fanatically loved Catholicism's version of Augustinian Original Sin, and repeatable fought for the idea. His Fatalism was a direct result of the Enlightenment’s Materialistic spin on Augustinian Original Sin. Hence, Augustine’s treatise on Original Sin are also included in this volume as he saw these two topics as indistinguishable.

Erasmus’ 'In Praise of Folly' (Moriae encomium), first published in 1511, is an Oceanic critique and commentary of the Humanistic European world writ large and specifically against the irrational and self-referent dogmatism of both Catholic and Reformation figures. An ‘Encomium’ is a tribute or praise of something, and in this case Erasmus writes from the perspective of the goddess Stultitia- the personification of Foolishness- to ‘praise’ the fanatical pride of all of the religious dogmatists of his day. Against the pride of both the Magisterium, and the Magisterium 2.0 (the Reformers), Erasmus turns to a didactic comedy to undermine and expose the intellectual pride undergirding the entire Catholic-Protestant schism and expose the devotees on both sides as worshipers of the pagan goddess Folly. It is a Christian iteration of Horatian Roman satire. It is a broad critique of Politicians, Intellectuals, Scholastic Philosophers (Thomists, Albertists, Scotists etc), Catholic Clergy and the Reformers, but perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this encomium is that he turns his gaze towards himself and criticizes his own intellectual arrogance. Despite being one of the most Erudite personalities of his century, he confesses his inability to fully understand the scriptures, and admits his own proclivity towards Pride, and invites his readers to walk away from Folly's temple together.

Bishop Erasmus did 'pave the way' for the Reformation but only in a parallel manner. He agreed on many points of Luther's objections to the excesses of the Church, encouraged lay access to the Bible (one of the major efforts of his life- publishing the Novum Instrumentum omne) and pushed for Reform passionately. Although The Complutensian was the first printed Greek Bible (a Greek Latin-Hebrew Interlinear), Erasmus' Novum Instrumentum Omne was the second and was used as the foundation of the Reformation- Luther translated it into German, and Tyndale into English, and eventually The Great Bible of 1539, the Geneva Bible of 1557 and the King James Bible. He agreed with all of Luther's 95 theses (as does the modern Catholic Church) but bitterly disagrees with the Epistemology of Protestantism- that is, the individual can automatically come to the correct interpretation of Scripture without the Holy Tradition of the Apostles.

In Human, All too Human, Nietzsche has this pose poetry summarizing the Melanchthon-Luther relationship titled "What is truth?":

Schwarzert (Melanchthon): "One often preaches one's faith when one has just lost it and is looking for it in all the alleys, - and one does not preach it worst then!"
Luther: "You speak true like an angel today, brother!"
Schwarzert: "But it is the thought of your enemies, and they make the useful application to you."
Luther: So it was a lie from the devil's back.

Augustine's Anachronistic 'Response' to Luther

Luther constantly praised Augustine and had to defend himself against accusations that he put Augustine's works on a par with Scripture. He was an Augustinian monk who based much of his theology on the medieval reading of St Augustine. However, Augustine would not have supported Luther's views and would probably have called him a heretical Manichean. In his 388 AD work entitled De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis "On the Free Choice of the Will", Augustine argues against determinism and for free will. He denounced the denial of free will as a Manichean heresy. Luther prefers to cherry-pick quotes from Augustine's contra-Pelagian works, which use strongly worded language around the sovereignty of God. Luther rather uses the medieval Catholic version of Augustine filtered through Anselmian penal substitutionary atonement, a 13th century idea.

De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis is an early Platonic dialogue by Augustine as sophist with a student named Evodius written shortly after Augustine converted around 388. There is no other work that puts on display so clearly his total dedication to Platonic rationalism and education. The very structure is a pure Platonic dialogue using sequential rationality. Here he is attempting to refute the apologetics of Manichaeism. Throughout his life, Augustine balanced between the opposite heresies of Pelagianism and Manichaeism. These two Cosmologies which generate very different Anthropologies are still alive and well today in different versions of Protestantism. The heresy of Manichean Dualistic Anthropology was resurrected in Calvin under a new name (Unconditional Election), and Pelagian understanding of the Will was reborn in Antinominalist Protestantism that is still alive in some forms of Evangelicalism. On Free choice of the Will is focused exclusively on Manichaeism, but Augustine tempers his simplistic statements about Free Will with his later anti-Pelagian works where he writes that the Grace of God proceeds the ability for the human soul to chose faith and good works, which is the doctrine of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and many later Protestant denominations. This is a purely polemic work, and Augustine clearly over-reacts in his refutation of heresy, but De Libero is still a critical work fully within the historic Orthodoxy of the Christian faith.

This dialogue is Augustine's counter-argument to Mani from the perspective of the Privatio Boni: "Everything good comes from God. There is nothing of any kind that does not come from God....Reason has shown that we commit evil by the free choice of the will". (Book II Chapter XX) This entire book, written soon after Augustine's conversion, attempts to counter the dualism of Manicheanism and its subsequent belief in predestination. It was Augustine's response to the Manichean apologetic claim against Christianity that God could not be omnipotent and omnipotent. For Augustine, the Privatio Boni resolves the conflict between ex nihilo and omnibenevolence (theodicy) by arguing that evil perpetrated by human beings has no reality, that is, no form. Thus, when we speak of God's providence and sovereignty, this does not include evil, because it is a shadow, a movement of free will against Being itself. Sin is defectivus motus, a vacuum of goodness, and not a "thing" at all. So it is perfectly correct to say at the same time that God did not create or cause evil, and at the same time that he is the omnipotent sovereign of all existence. In De dono perseverantiae, Augustine writes: "I have shown that God is to be praised for all things, and that there is no reason at all for their [the Manichees'] belief that there are two co-eternal natures, one good, one evil, which coexist together". When the Pelagian heresy arose, Augustine wrote De natura et Gratia to prevent the work from justifying the opposite heresy of Pelagianism. In Retractationes he writes: "Unless the will is delivered by the grace of God from the bondage by which it has become the slave of sin ... mortal men cannot live rightly and piously". Augustine, vacillating between the twin heresies of Manichaeism and Pelagianism, maintains the orthodox position throughout his works, although he naturally over-corrects as he fights each of these heresies in specific works. We see exactly the same cosmological debate raging in the 30,000 denominations of Protestantism that began in Luther's day with the antinominalists and Calvinists. Calvinism/Reformed Theology is a modern resurgence of Manichean Anthropology, selectively highlighting Augustine's Anti-Pelagian writings to make it appear that he supported Predestination, which is balanced within Protestantism against the Anti-Nominalism (Neo-Pelagianism) found within Evangelicalism, which emphasises Augustine's Anti-Manichean works.

Later, in his forceful reproach against the British Monk Pelagius, Augustine places a strong emphasis on the Sovereign Grace of God. These passages were taken out of context to prove other heresies he spent his life fighting against, namely the heresies of the Pagan Greek religion concerning the understanding of the Biblical concept of Predestination (from a corporate, Apostolic lens to a Platonic, Individualistic lens). He does "set the scene" for Western Christianity to re-interpret Election in the Torah, Nevi'im, and Pauline Epistles in terms of a Manichean Anthropology (his introduction of Original Sin into Christendom), Rationalistic Epistemology and Individualism. He was the first early church father who did not speak Greek, and his theology reflects this. Augustine made many mistakes in this linguistic vacuum. Later, his works would be cannibalized by Catholics and Protestants trying to superimpose a Pagan conceptualization of Predestination onto the Scriptures, twisting the words of Paul to fit the opinions of the original heretics the Early Church Fathers dedicated their lives (and frequently, their deaths) to erase.

Augustine is addressing the remnants of the Greek Religions Neo-pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, the various syncretic gnostic religions such as Manichaeism, Valentinianism, Marcionism and Sethianism as well as the heresies which developed within the church, most prominently Arianism and Pelagianism. As such, De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis is a winding dialogue that explores many dead-end ideas, including Dualism. In De dono perseverantiae, Augustine writes, "I showed that God should be praised for all things and that there are no grounds at all for their belief [the Manichees] that there exists two co-eternal natures, one good, one evil, which co-exist together."

In Book I, Augustine outlines basic Hamartiological concepts about the nature of sin and answers the basic question "Where does evil come from?" Augustine clearly renounces the Pagan Platonic and Gnostic conceptions of Predestination/ Determinism, writing, "Reason has shown that we commit Evil through the free choice of the will." And since God gave mankind free will, it is understandable that God "may appear to be the cause of our evil deeds," as the Manichean heretics assert, but he promises to answer that question in the next book.
In Book II, Augustine answers the charge that God "should not" have given mankind Free Will, and that he is morally culpable for the actions of mankind, a staple argument of Manichean apologetics. Augustine dismantles this by expounding upon a body-spirit (internal-external) epistemological paradigm, arguing that the ability to reason is itself of divine origin and necessary for humans to understand common truths. Augustine has a strong sense of the Self, arguing that to know oneself is to know God and vice-versa. He touches on peripheral subjects to free will, including the punishment of crimes. If all people are predestined to commit murder, etc., how could one punish them? He was not a fan of capital punishment, but doesn't specifically condemn it:

The law which he made to govern states seems to you to make many concessions and to leave unpunished things which are avenged nonetheless by divine Providence- and rightly so. But because it does not do all things, it does not thereby follow that what it does do is to be condemned.

In book II Chapter XX he explicitly articulates the Privatio Boni argument: "Everything good is from God. There is nothing of any kind that is not from God." And he solves the conflict between Ex Nihlio and Omnibenevolence (Theodicy) by arguing that evil perpetrated by humans has no reality, ie, no form. Thus, when we speak of the Providence and sovereignty of God, this does not include evil because it is shadow, a movement of Free will against Being itself. Sin is Defectivus Motus, a vacuum of Goodness, and not a "thing" at all. Thus it is completely accurate to simultaneously state that God did not create nor cause evil, and at the same time, is the Omnipotent Sovereign over all existence.

In Part III, Augustine takes closer aim at the excuses that Determinists use to justify their creed. The Platonic and Gnostic Determinists Augustine is replying to insist (as do virtually all Determinists), that their philosophy does not negate moral responsibility and the agency of humankind. Augustine takes aim at this dodge, stating that no denial of real free will can result in mankind being truly responsible for their own evil. Hard Determinism (Soteriological or Cosmological) must result in God being inherently evil, which in the Christian tradition is blasphemy. Manicheans argued this thoroughly, an argument still raging between Calvinists and Hyper-Calvinists. He writes in Book II, Chapter IV and in chapter XVII:

God's knowledge that man will sin is not the cause of sin. Hence punishment for sin is just.... God's foreknowledge of future events does not compel them to take place... either the will is the first cause of sin, or there is no first cause. If someone says that a stone sins because it falls down through its weight, I will not say he is more senseless than a stone; he is simply insane. But we accuse a spirit of sin when we prove that it has preferred to enjoy lower goods and has abandoned higher ones… No man is forced to sin, either by his nature or another's'... If you wish to attribute sin to the Creator, you will acquit the sinner of his sin. Sin cannot be rightly imputed to anyone but the sinner.

Augustine dogmatically upholds the Biblical teaching of Free Will, both cosmologically and Soteriological, at the individual level. He later avoids Semi-Pelagianism by emphasizing that Free Will exists by the Grace of God. Millennia later, Luther, a student of the Augustinian school, would define sin both as original sin as a pretemporal entity which damns the human soul to be subject to its inherited materialist nature. He demanded that Erasmus submit to his “superior” opinion but refused to accept the opinion of his own beloved Augustine. The private and public debates between Erasmus and Luther over these issues of human agencies and divine will are a fascinating discussion between two of the most influential minds of the 16th century. Erasmus was a rabid Ecumenicist, and sought reconciliation of the warring parties until the very end. He wrote the document De sarcienda ecclesiae concordia before he died where he sought reconciliation between all parties.

Luther the Proto-Nazi: The Deification of Luther in the Third Reich

Luther swung wildly in his opinion on the Jews. In his early Magnifiant (1521) he wrote "Therefore, we should not treat the Jews so unkindly, for there are still future Christians among them and will be every day." Luther corresponded with several Jewish scholars, and his letters are largely polite.  Luther's 1543 On the Jews and Their Lies (Von den Jüden und iren Lügen) is exactly what the title suggests, and is so antisemitic, it can't be re-printed here, even in a Systematic of Luther. The work is as bad as the title suggests. It advocates for violence against Jews, their semi-humanity, and Protestantism's inherent opposition to them. They are to Luther the actual agents of satan on earth. It's not merely racist, but openly genocidal. This book was widely printed and distributed by the Nazis out of the central press in Berlin, and historians have argued it had a significant impact on creating the conditions of the Holocaust.
Followers of Luther still celebrate Reformation Day, which mythologizes and venerates Luther as a proud, stoic, and heroic figure. When the reality is that he abandoned Christian morality and beliefs the second it fit his schemes to gain more power and influence. He saw no difference between his interpretations and “absolute truth”. He instantiated a deeply anti-metaphysical, materialistic worldview which would lay the foundation of modern Atheism. His megalomania writes “I will exercise my office and bring the matter to light. How I have brought the truth”. Without Luther and the Reformation, it is conceivable that there might have been a Holocaust, no slave trade, and no de-humanization of unborn children, as these are the result of the State defining moralities and Protestantism using the “Bible alone” to ignore the morals of the Apostles.

Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Reich Ministry of the Nazi party, was one of the chief ideologues of the regime. He published many books, most notably "The Myth of the 20th century: An evaluation of the Spiritual Intellectual Confrontations of our Age". This book was used in his trial as evidence he was instrumental in constructing the Nazi Race-Religion, and he was executed at Nürnberg on the morning of 16 October 1946. The work shows how critically important Luther and his ideas were in constructing the Nazi worldview. Rosenberg's primary argument for “Positive Christianity” (a new type of Protestantism based on Race) is that to be true to the ideals of the Reformation, the German people should return back to the teachings of Luther:

Does Martin Lüther still represent a force for the authoritative leadership of Protestantism, or has Ignatius of Loyola become the spiritual head of the confessing church?” and later “here the parallel phenomenon between Rome and the so-called, professing Protestants can be shown…What would Luther, Calvin, and Knox say to these "Protestants”?

Thus, he argues that the Protestant churches which follow the Catholic lead in opposing the Nazis are betraying the foundations of the Reformation. To prove this, he quotes a range of Protestants such as Peter Bockemühl who wrote that the Nazi party “has correctly recognized Christianity. He has recognized it as a faith which, however, has sin and grace, the inferiority of man and substitutionary dying of the Lamb of God as its content.”

Rosenberg tried to convince Protestants who were on the fence to see Nazism as not only congruent with their creeds, but the fulfillment of the Protestant Spirit/ Geist. He argues against the “character decomposition of the Reformation” and for a return to 16th-century theology. He sees the Catholic counter-reformation (römischprotestantische Gegenreformation) as an attempt to wipe out the ethno-conscious teachings of Luther. He confirms the mainstream Reformed romanticized and mythologized view of Luther, a veneration that nearly comes to the point of worship:

He childlike took the Bible as God's word and wanted to be honestly guided by it, even after he had been outraged against Rome and Papism. No matter what opinions he came to after going through the problems at that time, they were the results of a great inner cleanness and truthfulness…! Luther just as an inwardly truthful man immediately and fearlessly drew the necessary conclusions… Luther, however, demanded and fought for this Germanic freedom of conscience

Rosenberg identifies the Catholic concept of Original Sin as one of the fundamental problems with its adoption of Nazism. He cannot co-exist with the idea that “The highest Germanic people, however, belong to a fallen humanity, we all stand in the guilt community of sin”. However, Protestantism’s understanding of Hamartiology is inconsistent at best and should be “de-catholicized” to be congruent with the Third Reich. He argues that Luther’s articulation of Original Sin is simply a misstep on his part due to his Augustinian training. He argues that “original sin is not found in the Bible at all”. Catholicism Rosenberg despises bitterly and entirely (he was raised Reformed, so his Nazi ideology and Anti-Theism seem to have just amplified his pre-existing hatred for Catholicism).

Erasmus pointed out the irony of Luther condemning the Pope when Luther exercised more ecclesiological authority than any pope ever has (he successfully removed 7 books from the OT, and tried to remove Esther and Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation). No Pope has unilaterally re-written the Bible before. Rosenberg likewise acts with the same arrogant god-like attitude, believing his interpretation of history as the obvious and infallible one. His revisionism is a continuation of the Reformed historical revisionism he was taught in his youth. The Nazi Rosenberg ends his book with this final plea for Protestants to be true to their tradition:

But the tragedy is that Martin Luther's German revolution has become a house of feuding groups of pastors who, in their behavior and actions, are on the verge of squandering the great heritage of the Reformation…. the work of the German farmer's son Martin Luther will not have been in vain, but will continue to point to the future of Europe.

Perhaps the most interesting manuscript is the Deutsch Theologia. Eyn Deutsch Theologia is the name gave to a reprinting by Luther of a medieval unnamed manuscript written by a 13th century Priest of the Teutonic Order. It is a mystical text associated with figures such as Johann Tauler and Meister Eckhart and argued against the medieval mystics of the "brothers and sisters of the free spirit", who were Antinomianists who argued that there is not such thing as sin. A 16th century version of this Antinomianism arose because of the Reformation, as there were sects which argued that the Law is completely erased and there is no need for any type of moral teachings. Protestantism to this day has a chaotic understanding of the applicability of the Old Testament law amongst the 30,000 denominations of it. Luther reprinted this obscure manuscript in High German from the original german and stated that second only to the Bible and Confessions by Augustine, this was the most important text for explaining the life of a Christian. This text deeply influenced the Pietist movement and was a central text for Luthers and Anabaptists alike. But other Reformers hated the text- including Calvin who called it Satan's poison, as well as Catholicism as Pope Paul V placed it on the Roman index of forbidden books. Luther, oddly enough, thought very highly of this text, probably because it tempered the Antinomianist tendencies arising around him. In Lutheranism, Antinomianism is formally considered heresy, and has been battled in many denominations including the Reformed tradition, Methodists, Quakers, and other schisms. Luther wrote:

... has not come to me closer to the Bible and St. Augustine than a book from which I have learned more and want to (have learned) what God, Christ, man and all things are, and now find first and foremost that it be true ... I thank God that I hear and find my God in the German tongue, when I, and you with me, have not found it here, neither in Latin, Greek nor Hebrew. God grant that this little book will come to light (still) more, and we will find that the German theologians are undoubtedly the best theologians. Amen.

In 1846 Karl Marx published "Die deutsche Ideologie" Which is a polemic parody of this work against the young Hegelians Feuerbach, B. Bauer and especially Stirner, in which he refers to as "Saints" and mocks them through religious tones reminiscent of Lutheran thought. Schopenhauer briefly mentions this book in relation to Eckhard and the mystical strain of medieval Christianity:

and in the justly famous book "The German Theology", of which Luther, Luther, in the preface written for it, says that from no book, with the exception of the Bible and Augustine, did he learn more about God, Christ and man than from this book, the genuine and unadulterated text of which, however, we only received in 1851 in the Stuttgart edition by Pfeiffer. The prescriptions and teachings given therein are the most complete discussion, arising from the deepest inner conviction, of that which I have presented as the negation of the will to life. There, therefore, one has to get to know it more closely, before one speaks about it with Jewish-Protestant confidence. Written in the same excellent spirit, although not to be appreciated quite as much as that work, is Tauler's "Pursuit of the Poor Life of Christ", together with his "Medulla animae". In my opinion, the teachings of these genuine Christian mystics relate to those of the New Testament as wine does to the spirit of wine. Or: what in the New Testament is visible to us as through veil and mist , in the works of the mystics appears to us without a cover, in full clarity and distinctness. Finally, one could also consider the New Testament as the first, the mystics as the second consecration - σμιϰϱα ϰαι μεαλα μυστηϱια."

The Schwabach Articles are a proto-Augsburgian Confession created by Melanchthon and Luther in 1529. They were presented at the Convention of Schwabach (a Bavarian town) in October of 1529. They served as a confession of faith for the Theologians residing in Wittenberg. These were synced with the Torgau Articles to form the Augsburg Confession. These are the earliest confessional writings of the Protestant Tradition. These had a political motivation- Margrave George of Brandenburg-Ansbach wanted a joint confession to give legitimacy to the alliance of Lutheran states against Emperor Charles V.When this confession was shaped into the larger Augsburg confession, which was presented a year later to Charles V in Augsburg by Philipp Melanchthon, they were followed by the drafting of the Schmalkaldic Articles in December of that year and the creation of a military alliance called the Schmalkaldischer Bund. Luther's benefactor Landgrave Philipp von Hessen was one of the core organizers of the League. This military alliance was designed to check the power of Emperor Charles V. Zwingli's brutal failure of attacking the Five Points ending in his death in 1531, the alliance took on a more Lutheran nature. The Schmalkaldic League became the principal Political and military organization that organized the Protestant princes. Theological differences were largely ignored under the immediate military threat, but Zwinglianism was eventually largely eliminated.

The Schmalkaldischer Bund was eventually disbanded by internal and external forces. But the failure of the Protestant forces, Zwinglian and Lutheran, only exposed the inability of the emperor to eliminate Protestantism itself. The reality that Protestantism could not be destroyed from a military perspective ultimately led to the Peace of Augsburg which ended the medieval idea of empire and began the modern idea of independent nation-states. Die Konkordienformel, The Formula of Concord, is the last in these complex, reactionary and political creeds. It was created at the request of Elector Augustus of Saxony in 1577 to further define Lutheranism and the influence of Melanchthonianism, which eventually died out. It was intended as an inn-Lutheran consensus confession. It is the capstone of the 1590 Book of Concord, the authoritative doctrine book of the Lutheran church.

Luther's Tischreden, or "after dinner" talks are postscripts and notes that were collected by acquaintances and guests in Luther's home. They were originally compiled and published not long after his death in 1566 by his pupil Johannes Aurifaber. Initially, Pastor Konrad Cordatus started taking notes during meals on Luther's diatribes on a whole range of topics, and many others followed suit. The original scripts are in low-German, the Thuringian dialect, with some Latin mixed in. Luther did not authorize these, so they are a unique insight into Luther the man, as well as the development of his thinking over the years. The idiosyncrasy of Luther's thoughts come through in the reproductions. It is the most intimate portrait of Luther the man second only to Philip Melanchthons' biography on Luther titled "Die Historie vom Leben und Geschichten des ehrwürdigen Herrn Dr. Martin Luthers" in 1546.There have been many versions of Luther's Table Talks printed over the years. This version translated here is the Erlangen edition, which is only one version of many. There is no combined, deconflicted and complete version yet.

Luther's words here are often negative and insulting, as he rips into other Protestant camps to a sharper degree than even Catholicism. There is foreboding in his words- fear that Protestantism will careen out of control. With 30,000+ versions of "Bible Believing" Protestantism and counting today, many non-trinitarian and Zwinglian in their Sacramental Theology, history has proven his concern was well merited. His hatred for his opponents shines through in these texts, which is contrasted by the worship and reverence that he is held with. It is a bizarre situation how racist, hateful, and spiteful men are mythologized by Protestants, and this dichotomy is on full display here. He is called a "Great" Theologian, despite supporting Philip I's polyamory, advocating for violent warfare, genocide against Jews, removing books from the Bible and desiring to remove more. Could you imagine if a modern preacher said and did these things? He would be a heretic of the first order. But because of the Mythologization of the Reformers, he is revered as a Saint, in a branch of Christianity which pretends to not have "Saints" apart from believers. But clearly, Luther is in his own category of deified humans alongside Calvin and Beza.

Reformed theology, including this new popular Americanized version, anachronistically mythologizes and sanctifies the reformers through historical revisionism that romanticizes a group of deeply violent, theologically disparate, power-hungry, racist anti-Semites who literally took scissors to the Scriptures to make them fit their medieval Catholic beliefs. The reformation was anything but glorious or coherent. It was violent and ignorant, political and anything but noble. The "principles" of the reformation espoused today are pure anachronisms. The historical reality is that there were no Solas in the 16th century; there was not a single belief held in common between the major reformation figures other than the negations of Roman dogmas. Even the emphasis of Scripture "alone" was understood a thousand different ways. It was a kaleidoscope of thousands of personality-driven reformations, not one coherent movement. No reformer wanted Scripture to be more important than their own teachings, certainly not Luther. They wanted their personal interpretation to reign supreme and had little to no reverence for the ancient context of the early church- and outright rejected the Early Church Fathers wherever they contradicted their own anachronistic hermeneutics. There is only reverence for the past if it is perceived to harmonize with the preconceptions of the cause. There are more icons of these anti-theologians in Reformed bookstores and in the stained-glass windows of Reformed churches than images of the apostles. There are more statues of Luther and Calvin than there are of the Mother of God in Germany and Switzerland. Erasmus perhaps said it best:

They have fled from Judaism so that they may become Epicureans... The Gospel, the word of God, faith, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these words are always on their lips; look at their lives, and they speak quite another language.

Luther composed a vast number of materials, including hymns which are still used today, entire hymnbooks (Kirchenlieder), extensive commentaries on many books of the Bible, translated and reprinted medieval manuscripts, and even wrote fables. This final volume in The Essential Luther presents all of his remaining major and minor works not covered in the earlier topical volumes. This includes hundreds of his personal letters to a vast range of personalities, including his political benefactors and close friends, which gives insights into his feelings, desires, plans, and academic work. These letters give us a window into what he was reading and how it was impacting his thinking. Some of these are Polemic, but some of them are topical Missives explaining his position on certain topics found nowhere else in his work. One of them is a letter to Gustav I, the King of Sweden.

Luther's Wittenberger Predigten, presented from 1522 to 1524, were given after Luther the Monk became Luther the Preacher, and he appeared in secular clothing in public for the first time. He was Wittenberg's preacher for these two years and oversaw changes to the city and gave some of his most poignant sermons. His early speeches before these exhibit Scholastic and Augustinian thought, which evolved into his own version of Scholasticism. The initial success of the publication of his early sermons in 1518/19 was followed by the success of his Small Catechism and various pamphlets, which gave him celebrity status before he became famous for his Polemics.

Claritas Scripturae as the Individualization of Scholastic Metaphysics

The hermeneutic and exegetical watershed development of Luther's thought is his extra-Biblical concept of Claritas Scripturae, the clarity of Scripture, a metaphysical position steeped in the collapse of the Subject-Object paradigm brought on by the Nominalism of Medieval Catholic Scholasticism. In his first Sermon on the Psalms in 1512, he interpreted the Bible beyond the scholastic tradition and conflated his interpretation of the text with what the text "actually" says". In his treatise on indulgences, he largely agreed with the Prevailing Aristotelian Scholasticism, but he moved beyond this with a medieval-mystical understanding of the Self which would influence the Cartesian understanding of the self. Although he is seen by Protestants as turning against Scholasticism by Protestants, his concept of Theologia Crucis is a further purification of the Medieval-Aristotelian Theologia Crucis. Sola Scriptura rests upon the idea that the Bible can be interpreted apart from cognitive bias. In other words, it assumes Claritas Scripturae, a further development of Medieval Nominalism. Without Luther, there would be no Enlightenment.

The 'double clarity' of the verbum internum/ verbum externum idea further refined Scholasticism from the collective to the individual. Luther states that the reader can only understand Scripture when one encounters the words in Claritas Externa and is moved in their will by Claritas Interna. Ultimately, there is no abstract "correct" interpretation apart from the movement of the individual's will. For the first time in Christian history, the doctrine was completely severed from the teachings of the Apostles, and subject only to the individual's will and personal interpretation. The Reformed will say things like "it doesn't matter what you feel the Bible says, but only what it actually says", which is a declaration of belief in the Medieval-Catholic idea of Claritas Scripturae. Yet the emotional Evangelical approach and the stoic Reformed approach are metaphysically indistinguishable in their implicit assumption of Luther's collapse of the Subject-Object paradigm and the individualization of Medieval-Aristotelian Scholastic thought. Likewise, Luther did not "reject" Humanism, but created a new version of it. Claritas Scripturae is absurd when using the Neoplatonic metaphysics utilized by the Apostles and 1-Century Hellenized Christians.

The belief that "Scripture interprets itself" was already in the form of Catholicism Luther was taught. This mystical idea that the reader can approach the text of the Bible- or any text for that matter- without any preconceived conceptions and biases influencing them, in part comes from Luther's medieval piety vis-à-vis Johannes Tauler and the 'Unio Mystica" of the Teutonic Order and other mystical forms of Aristotelianism which Luther was a big fan of. He loved this medieval mysticism so much, he simply reprinted the 13th-century anonymous text Eyn Deutsch Theologia verbatim in low German. This is in part where the mystical elevation of the individual above the cognitive effects of the material world originated.

You declaim bitterly… against our prayers, fasts, and Masses; and you are not content to fix the partial errors that may be in these things, but desire to abolish them entirely… Look around on this 'Evangelical' generation, and observe whether amongst them less indulgence is given to luxury, lust, or avarice, than amongst those whom you so detest. Show me any one person who by that Gospel [the Wittenburg Gospel of intellectual ascent alone] has been reclaimed from drunkenness to sobriety, from fury and passion to meekness, from avarice to liberality... and I will show you a great many who have become worse through following it. The solemn prayers of the Church are abolished, but now there are very many who never pray at all. Whoever beheld in any of their meetings, any one of them grieving for his sins? Confession to the priest is abolished, but very few now confess to God... They have fled from Judaism so that they may become Epicureans... The Gospel, the word of God, faith, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these words are always on their lips; look at their lives, and they speak quite another language.

Luther did not do away with indulgences; he just made them free. You no longer have to pay- you just have to "accept the free gift of God". Protestantism permanently codified the Medieval concept of indulges in doctrine.

Luther assumed that Sola Scriptura and the underlying Claritas Scripturae would bring unity to all those who believed in these extra-Biblical concepts. After all, shouldn't there be total unity among those who only use the Bible as a source of doctrine? The reality is that Luther spent the rest of his life in violent and spiteful polemic debates with his fellow "Bible-believing" Christians. His final months were spent in polemic attacks and renewed calls for removing more books from the Bible (particularly Revelations, which he really hated). Melanchthon, a meek and pious sidekick to the furious and angry Luther, wrote about this failed projection, and mused that they (the reformers) had not done away with the Papacy, but universalized and individualized it. With the hope of unity fading away, the reality that the tradition of "Bible alone" cannot maintain a coherent form of faith set in, and Melanchthon doubted their premises of Claritas Scripturae and Sola Scriptura. Because these ideas are themselves tradition, they create an Epistemological Tautology rendering them merely fantasy and self-deception, for the "Bible-believing" Christian is subject to tradition as much as a Roman Catholic is. Luther believed that one's personal interpretation of the Bible was more authoritative than the interpretation of those who wrote and canonized the Bible and faithfully defined, defended, and transmitted the "faith of the apostles once and for all time". In other words, Luther and the Reformers continued the Medieval Catholic teaching, solidified at Vatican II, that Jesus is not the "author and perfecter" of the faith, but in fact, the faith can be changed by the individual will.

Melanchthon pushed back on Luther on Claritas Scriptura, recognizing in his letters to Erasmus that it presupposes no gap between subject and object, i.e. Scholastic Medieval Catholic Aristotelianism, rendering Protestantism as metaphysically indistinguishable from Atheism. In other words, despite their best efforts, Protestantism became an evolution, a purification and an individualisation of Catholicism, not a rejection. And because of the Counter-Reformation's efforts to fix what went wrong, modern "Bible-believing" anti-traditional "I don't follow any church, just Jesus" non-denominational types are theologically closer to medieval Catholicism than modern Catholics. Melanchthon's caution, especially towards the end of his life, foreshadowed this.

Devotes to Folly: The Pride of Luther

Among the personalities Erasmus specifically mocks in his satire is Luther. These conversations went nowhere, because Luther essentially considered himself a god, caught in the tautology of Sola Scriptura. Erasmus eventually forced Luther to admit that he was a megalomaniac who believed that he had a special access to the Holy Spirit and dogmatically stated his interpretation of the Bible, which opposed the last 1,600 years of interpretation including those of the authors and cannonizers of the Bible (particularly Athanasius), was immutable and absolute. He followed up on this demon-like pride with removing the Deuterocanonical books from his version of the Bible (Die Lutherbible) and arguing for the removal of other books which he did not like (particularly James). It was not the scriptures he revered, but his interpretation of scripture. Against such blind, raging irrationalism and self-worship, Erasmus turns towards a didactic, intellectualized comedic script to expose the absurdity of Pride.

After these conversations, Erasmus realized Luther is the most dangerous form of Reactionary. Here he argues that Luther’s uber-dogmatic attitude is not an adherence to some obvious interpretation of the scripture which he has no option to defend if he loves Christ, but a devotion to Pride and Arrogance- a worship of the god Folly. It's not a condemnation of Luther’s specific teachings, but the origins of those teachings. He is inferring that Luther is not worshiping the God of the Scriptures, but the demon-goddess Folly (Stultitia).In reference to the Reformers' claims to exclusively live by Scripture, he writes:

They can deal with any text of scripture as with a knob of wax, knead it into what shape best suits their interest; and whatever conclusions they have dogmatically resolved upon, they would have them ratified as an absolute force as the very decree of the papal chair.

And again, history would prove Erasmus correct: the core Reformers were nearly all unrepentant murderers who attempted to re-write and edit God's Word. Zwingli drowned people who taught a believer's baptism (anabaptists) in the rivers of Zurich. Luther hated Jews bitterly and added words into the Holy Scripture to justify his beliefs (saying the Book of James is not Scripture but was written by "Some Jew"), and Calvin believed the book of James to be inspired by Satan. These men twisted the scriptures to fit their European Humanist re-interpretation of Romans, which contradicts the teachings of the Apostles. And yet, these men are revered more highly by modern Calvinists than the Apostles and Holy Martyrs of the 1st century. Luther’s Anti-Seminism would set the stage for the Holocaust. The Protestant historian Philip Schaff wrote:

“Erasmus he gave [impulse] to classical, biblical, and patristic studies, and by his satirical exposures of ecclesiastical abuses and monastic ignorance and bigotry. Protestants should never forget the immense debt of gratitude which they owe to the first editor of the Greek Testament… His exegetical opinions still receive and deserve the attention of commentators. To him we owe also the first scholarly editions of the Fathers, especially of Jerome, with whom he was most in sympathy... he cannot be charged with apostasy or even with inconsistency. He never was a Protestant, and never meant to be one. He wished to lead theology back . . . to Scriptural simplicity, and to promote an inward, spiritual piety .”

500 Years Later: The Perpetual Chaos of Protestantism

Fundamentalism (self-described "Non-denominational" Protestantism) emerged from this infinitely chaotic landscape as an attempt to return to the "basics" or "fundamentals", although there has never been broad agreement on what these mythical fundamentals are, exactly. The Augsburg confessions tried but failed to find unity between the Lutherans, the Anabaptists, and the “enemy of the sacraments” (the Zwinglians). There are hundreds of thousands of confessions and creeds by Protestant churches and para-church organizations, and 500 years later, today's Evangelicals and Calvinists still cannot decide on whether God Predestines people to hell or not, or if God is fully good or not. Every individual is their own "little god", their own Pope with their own subjective form of Christianity utilizing self-deceptive monikers to justify to themselves that they are above the insanity of Protestantism, like "deconstructivist" or "non-essentialist". Even within Lutheranism, there is vast theological and Orthopraxical diversity. Adiaphorism used to be a serious controversy in the early Lutheran church, but now it is the status quo in Protestant churches. Attempts at clearly drawing a line between the "essentials" and "non-essentials" have slowed down, as there has been no consensus in 500 years, and we shouldn't hold our breath for another 500.

The Reformers communicated with the Orthodox, but both sides spoke over each other. Philip Melanchthon, "Luther's right-hand man," worked with the Orthodox deacon Demetrius Missos to translate the Augsburg Confession into Greek. In the 1570s, as Lutherans solidified their teachings, leading Lutheran theologians wrote to the Patriarch of Constantinople, sending him a copy of the Augsburg Confession (the foundational and constitutive document of Lutheranism). These efforts were led by Jakob Andrea, one of the leading Lutheran scholars, professor of theology and chancellor of the leading Lutheran University of Tübingen, and author of several anti-Calvinist statements that culminated in the Book of Concord. So, the University of Tübingen in the 1570's, when it was under control of the Lutherans, directly communicated with the Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople and sent him a copy of the Augsburg Confession. Jakob Andrea, one of the leading Lutheran Theologians, chancellor of the University of Tübingen and one of the authors of the Book of Concord, took lead in these efforts to talk to the Orthodox.

From the Orthodox perspective, Protestantism remains as Heretical as Medieval Catholicism through the retention of the Filioque, or the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son (as opposed to the Father only), which Luther and Melanchthon both accepted and even included in his statements of faith, like the Augsburg Confession. According to the western (Protestant/ Catholic) concept, God is one because he is one essence, and for that reason it was not a problem to add the Filioque (also from the Son) to the Symbol (because there is no violation of the unity of God). But in the Apostoic pre-denomination East, in the Orthodox understanding, God is one, because he is the Father. The personality of God the Father is the only Source and Reason for the eternal existence of the Holy Trinity: He lovingly and pre-eternal begets the Son, and the Spirit proceeds from Him.

The current Nero-like complex of Modernity makes perfect sense when looking at the metaphysics of Protestantism. This shift in Marriage Protestantism made to allow for Philip's polygamy has remained the foundation of the anti-sacramental Protestant view of Marriage. Luther was the original LGBT activist, who ushered in the total se-sacritization of marriage as not a Holy Sacrament, but merely a sex contract. To this day, every denomination from Baptist to Pentacostal maintains this materialistic view of marriage and the other Sacraments, laying the foundation of modern Atheism. Protestant Fundamentalism is the foundation of Modernist and Post-Modernist sexual moral relativism and the entire LGBT worldview. Hence, the Orthodox find no camaraderie on moral issues with "Conservative Christian", who themselves are to blame for the moral depravity of the West, while wrongly viewing themselves as the antithesis of it. Reading Luther is a window in the roots of the insanity of the last 500 year of Western culture,

Sola Fide is itself an indulgence. It is the full manifestation, the apotheosis, of everything it claims to be the antithesis of. Of. Protestantism took medieval Catholicism purified into new dogmas. Instead of doing away with the entire concept of indulgences, protestantism through its idea of salvation through faith alone made indulgences free. Indulgences you just merely believe that you bought them. Merely assenting to a set of axiomatic presuppositions is itself salvation. Sola fide merely substituted belief for money but kept the entire soteriological model of the most heretical elements of medieval Catholicism fully intact. The statement "The Bible interprets itself" is a declaration of Atheism.

To the Orthodox, every Protestant teaching is not the repudiation of the errors of the Roman Schism, but a continuation and apotheosis. For the real dichotomy is between Holy Tradition and Unholy Tradition; between Apostolic, Orthodox faith and Subjective, individualistic tradition. The kernel of subjectivity implemented in the West by the Filioque reached its inevitable Anti-Metaphysical conclusion in modern day Atheism through the stepping stone of the Protestant Reformation. 

To conclude this systematic "Hauptwerke" of Luther, it is fitting to include the biography written by the man who knew Luther's life and works the best, Philip Melanchthon’s Die Historie vom Leben und Geschichten des ehrwürdigen Herrn Dr. Martin Luthers published in 1546. The letters included here are the first correspondence that Luther had with Melanchthon beginning in 1518. And the history of Luther’s life is the capstone of this lengthy relationship between the two thinkers. It's a nostalgic and elegiac look backward at Luther's eventful and tragic life, by a close friend who didn’t always agree with him, but respected and mourned his friend. It is perhaps the most intimate (albeit, biased) look at Luther the man. The young, starry-eyed Greek enthusiast arrived at the University of Wittenberg at the impressionable age of 21 and worked in Luther's shadow for the rest of his life. Melanchthon was one of the foremost experts in Europe at the time, corresponding extensively with Bishop Erasmus, who published a Greek version of the New Testament (a "New Greek" version based off of the Latin, not any ancient texts). While a student and defender of Luther util the last (Melanchthon gave the eulogy at Luther's funeral and he was buried next to him), he did disagree and push back against Luther at points, for example on his understanding of Predestination, and even on the basic dichotomies of Medieval Catholicism utilized by the Wittenberg Reformation. He doubted the narrative created by the violent reactionary reformers in his realization that the very idea of Sola Scriptura is based in the Catholicism they were trying to reform. To be more specific, the idea of Claritas Scriptura Luther created (that one can read the Bible directly without bias, thus it can be used as the Sole basis for church doctrine) is a Medieval Roman Catholic dichotomy originating in the 13th century, because it presumes no gap between the Subject and the Object, i.e. Aristotelianism, rendering Reformed and Evangelical Theology as metaphysically indistinguishable from Medieval Catholicism. In other words, despite their best efforts, Protestantism became a further development, a purification, and an individualization of Catholicism, not a repudiation. And due to the Counter-Reformation efforts to fix what went wrong, modern "bible believing" anti-tradition "I don't follow any church, just Jesus" non-denominational types are theologically closer to Medieval Catholicism than modern Catholics. Melanchthon's caution, especially near the end of his life, foreshadowed this reality-collapse