Luther Conflict And Christendom

Martin Luther was the subject of a religious controversy that never really came to an end. The Reformation was a controversy about him.

Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In this book, Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an accessible, highly contextual, and non-partisan introduction, Ocker says that religious conflict itself served as the engine of religious change. He shows that the Luther affair had a complex political anatomy which extended far beyond the borders of Germany, making the debate an international one from the very start. His study links the Reformation to pluralism within western religion and to the coexistence of religions and secularism in today's world. Luther, Conflict, and Christendom includes a detailed chronological chart.

When Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in October 1517, he had no intention of starting a revolution. But very quickly his criticism of indulgences became a rejection of the papacy and the Catholic Church emphasizing the Bible as the sole authority for Christian faith, radicalizing a continent, fracturing the Holy Roman Empire, and dividing Western civilization in ways Luther—a deeply devout professor and spiritually-anxious Augustinian friar—could have never foreseen, nor would he have ever endorsed. From Germany to England, Luther’s ideas inspired spontaneous but sustained uprisings and insurrections against civic and religious leaders alike, pitted Catholics against Protestants, and because the Reformation movement extended far beyond the man who inspired it, Protestants against Protestants. The ensuing disruptions prompted responses that gave shape to the modern world, and the unintended and unanticipated consequences of the Reformation continue to influence the very communities, religions, and beliefs that surround us today. How Luther inadvertently fractured the Catholic Church and reconfigured Western civilization is at the heart of renowned historian Brad Gregory’s Rebel in the Ranks. While recasting the portrait of Luther as a deliberate revolutionary, Gregory describes the cultural, political, and intellectual trends that informed him and helped give rise to the Reformation, which led to conflicting interpretations of the Bible, as well as the rise of competing churches, political conflicts, and social upheavals across Europe. Over the next five hundred years, as Gregory’s account shows, these conflicts eventually contributed to further epochal changes—from the Enlightenment and self-determination to moral relativism, modern capitalism, and consumerism, and in a cruel twist to Luther’s legacy, the freedom of every man and woman to practice no religion at all. With the scholarship of a world-class historian and the keen eye of a biographer, Gregory offers readers an in-depth portrait of Martin Luther, a reluctant rebel in the ranks, and a detailed examination of the Reformation to explain how the events that transpired five centuries ago still resonate—and influence us—today.

A comprehensive look at the background and context, the content, and the impact of Martin Luther's Theology, written by an international team of theologians and historians.

Martin Luther remains a popular, oft-quoted, referenced, lauded historical figure. He is often seen as the fulcrum upon which the medieval turned into the modern, the last great medieval or the first great modern; or, he is the Protestant hero, the virulent anti-Semite; the destroyer of Catholic decadence, or the betrayer of the peasant cause. An important but contested figure, he was all of these things. Understanding Luther's context helps us to comprehend how a single man could be so many seemingly contradictory things simultaneously. Martin Luther in Context explores the world around Luther in order to make the man and the Reformation movement more understandable. Written by an international team of leading scholars, it includes over forty short, accessible essays, all specially commissioned for this volume, which reconstruct the life and world of Martin Luther. The volume also contextualizes the scholarship and reception of Luther in the popular mind.

This collection of essays offers a series of rigorously focused art-historical, historical, and philosophical studies that examine ways in which materiality has posed and still poses a religious and cultural problem. The volume examines the material agency of objects, artifacts, and environments: art, ritual, pilgrimage, food, and philosophy. It studies the variable "senses” of materiality, the place of materiality in the formation of modern Western religion, and its role in Christianity’s dialogue with non-Western religions. The essays present new interpretations of religious rites and outlooks through the focus on their material components. They also suggest how material engagement theory - a new movement in cultural anthropology and archeology - may shed light on the cultural history of Christianity in medieval and early modern Europe and the Americas. It thus fills an important lacuna in the study of western religion by highlighting the longue durée, from the Middles Ages to the Modern Period, of a current dilemma, namely the divide between materialistic and what might broadly be called hermeneutical or cultural-critical approaches to religion and human subjectivity.

It's not always easy to find the human Martin Luther underneath the centuries of accumulated myth. A World Ablaze focuses on the drama and uncertainty of the first few critical years of Luther's rise, when his personal struggles with salvation were transformed into a crisis of Christendom.

Mark A. Noll presents a fresh and accessible history of Protestantism from the era of Martin Luther to the present day. Beginning with the founding of Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist churches in the sixteenth-century Reformation, he also considers the rise of other important Christian movements like Methodism and Pentecostalism. Focussing on worldwide developments, rather than just the familiar European and American histories, he considers the recent expansion of Protestant movements in Africa, China, India, and Latin America, emphasising the on-going and rapidly expanding story of Protestants worldwide. Noll examines the contributions from well-known figures including Martin Luther and John Calvin, along with many others, and explores why Protestant energies have flagged recently in the Western world yet expanded so dramatically elsewhere. Highlighting the key points of Protestant commonality including the message of Christian salvation, reliance on the Bible, and organization through personal initiative, he also explores the reasons for Protestantism's extraordinary diversity. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Martin Luther: A Life tells the dramatic story of the renegade monk whose heroic personal struggle ignited a revolution and shook Christendom to its foundations. Through vivid anecdotes and lively historical descriptions, Martin Luther: A Life captures the turbulent times and historic events through which Luther lived as well as his profound vision of God. A fast-moving narrative, it shows how his stinging criticisms of the Christian church struck a deep and liberating chord in the German people and led to the momentous change we know as the Reformation. For all who wish to understand Luther the man, the rebel, and the visionary, James Nestingen's account also offers insight into Luther's momentous contributions to the Western world and his personal encounter with God, the Christian scriptures, and the relentless demands of his own conscience.

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.