Since I have attacked two Catholic "saints" in my blogs about Thomas More and Mother Teresa, I will now turn my attention to a Protestant icon: reformer Martin Luther. I am nothing if not an equal opportunity offender.
Martin Luther is famous for his role is the development of Protestantism. In the early 1500's, Luther, along with John Calvin and John Knox formed a new doctrine of Christianity that broke away from The Catholic Church. This is called the Reformation. The different Protestant denominations have different views on various subjects, but they all reject the authority of the pope and believed that salvation came through a person belief in Jesus as the savior and not from good works.
What is less discussed about Luther are his deranged anti Semitic rantings. In 1543, Martin Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies. Here are some samples of Luther's insights:
Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.
...but then eject them forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!
...they remain our daily murderers and bloodthirsty foes in their hearts. Their prayers and curses furnish evidence of that, as do the many stories which relate their torturing of children and all sorts of crimes for which they have often been burned at the stake or banished.
But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews' synagogues and forbid them publicly to praise God, to pray, to teach, to utter God's name? They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. For our knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it before God.
It is no wonder that a certain German leader thought of Luther as one of the great reformers.
In case you were curious, Luther also supported the massacre of 100,000 people in the Peasant's War of 1524-1525.
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