Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 212 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  There was little chivalry in the taverns. A man would tell a woman to go hang out with the priests and monks in Hettstedt “as she had doubtless done before.” “There are no more than two or three pious women in the whole of Mansfeld,” another man announced angrily. He stayed pointedly silent when his companion asked him whether he included his wife in that number. 36 Work disputes could rapidly descend into arguments about an individual’s sexual, moral, and social behavior because honor, the central social category, was both sexual and economic. During Luther’s childhood, Hans Luder would have been a force to be reckoned with. He was a physically powerful man, and once, when a pub fight broke out in his presence, he poured beer over the two combatants to separate them, clouting both on the head for good measure with a jug until the blood ran. 37 He was also not a man to be crossed lightly. We find him complaining about the high charges of the winch-winders, and about another mine operator who, he claimed, was stealing his ore (the accused countered that Luder was taking his charcoal). 38 The court books are littered with disputes between the mine operators—small wonder, with 194 shafts at the industry’s peak in the early sixteenth century in the Mansfeld and Eisleben areas, where it could be hard to know where one mine’s territory began and another ended. Time and again, the mine inspector would be called to check the location of boundary stones. Tunnels honeycombed the hills. The longest was a remarkable eight miles long, and it was rumored that a man could reach Eisleben from the castle in Mansfeld through the tunnels. It was also a world of dizzyingly complex financial arrangements. Much of the mining structures had to be maintained collectively, and the records afford a glimpse of the maze of loans, counter-loans, and securities as money circulated among the small group of mine operators, or was advanced by the capitalists of Nuremberg, and as mines were relinquished and redistributed. 39 Hans Luder would have been caught between several competing forces: the counts, who leased the mines and constantly sought to extract more money by altering the legal terms; the other mine managers, who were only too quick to seize an advantage; the miners, whose labor actually produced the wealth from the ground, and who were beginning to organize collectively; and the capitalists in faraway Nuremberg and Leipzig, who drove hard bargains and to whom it was only too easy to become irrevocably indebted. These economic relations were new, and they were complicated.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s discussions with Cajetan centered around two issues in particular: the nature of the “treasury of merits,” which underpinned the practice of indulgences, and the role of faith in the sacrament. On the first point, Cajetan accused Luther of denying that the merits of Christ were the treasury of the Church, from which indulgences could be issued to deliver sinners from Purgatory; and that this was counter to the papal bull Unigenitus . This bull was not always included in collections of canon law, and Luther suspected Cajetan of appealing to it because he thought his opponent might not know it. 37 But he did, and called the cardinal’s bluff, countering that the text of the bull in fact said that the merits of Christ “acquired” the treasury of Christ—and if this was the case, then merits and treasury could not be identical. Tempers became short. The cardinal kept shouting, “Recant! Acknowledge your error, this is what the Pope wants!” and Luther, hardly able to get a word in edgewise, started to shout as well: “If it can be shown that Extravagante teaches that Christ’s merits are the treasury of indulgences, then I will recant, as you wish!” The cardinal then seized the book of canon law, riffling through to find the page, only to discover that the text said that Christ by his merits acquired the treasury of indulgences. Luther triumphantly replied: “If Christ has acquired the treasury by his merits, then the merits are not the treasury; rather the treasury is that which the merits earned, namely the keys of the church; therefore my thesis is correct.” 38 Luther, who wrote an account of all this in a masterly letter to Spalatin, could not resist pointing out to his friend that the German monk had proved a better Latinist than Cajetan expected. This may look like semantics; the underlying issue, however, was the relationship between Church and sinner, and the nature of forgiveness. If the merits of Christ—and those of the saints, that is, their virtuous works—constituted a treasure stewarded by the Pope, then the Church was just a gigantic bank. On this view, because the treasure that had been built up by Christ and the saints exceeded what was needed to “pay” for their own salvation, the “excess” could be sold off as indulgences to the repentant sinner. But if the merits of Christ were not the same as the treasury, then the way was open to rethink the theology of repentance, and to relate Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross to the believer through the concept of grace, as Luther was beginning to do. Interestingly, Luther passed over this particular exchange in his protocol of the discussion at Augsburg, although he exploited Cajetan’s mistake to the hilt in his correspondence with Spalatin and in his report to the Elector. In any case, since Luther was now arguing for the primacy of Scripture over papal decrees, the exact wording of Unigenitus was becoming a sideshow.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism. The Jews have often been criticized for their belief that they are the Chosen People, but their critics have often been guilty of the same kind of denial that fueled the diatribes against idolatry in biblical times. All three of the monotheistic faiths have developed similar theologies of election at different times in their history, sometimes with even more devastating results than those imagined in the Book of Joshua. Western Christians have been particularly prone to the flattering belief that they are God’s elect. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Crusaders justified their holy wars against Jews and Muslims by calling themselves the new Chosen People, who had taken up the vocation that the Jews had lost. Calvinist theologies of election have been largely instrumental in encouraging Americans to believe that they are God’s own nation. As in Josiah’s Kingdom of Judah, such a belief is likely to flourish at a time of political insecurity when people are haunted by the fear of their own destruction. It is for this reason, perhaps, that it has gained a new lease of life in the various forms of fundamentalism that are rife among Jews, Christians and Muslims at this writing. A personal God like Yahweh can be manipulated to shore up the beleaguered self in this way, as an impersonal deity like Brahman can not. We should note that not all the Israelites subscribed to Deuteronomism in the years that led up to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE and the deportation of the Jews to Babylon. In 604, the year of Nebuchadnezzar’s accession, the prophet Jeremiah revived the iconoclastic perspective of Isaiah which turned the triumphalist doctrine of the Chosen People on its head: God was using Babylon as his instrument to punish Israel, and it was now Israel’s turn to be “put under a ban.” 39 They would go into exile for seventy years. When King Jehoiakim heard this oracle, he snatched the scroll from the hands of the scribe, cut it in pieces and threw it on the fire. Fearing for his life, Jeremiah was forced to go into hiding.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Manasseh had actually put up an effigy to Asherah in the Temple, where there was a flourishing fertility cult. Since most Israelites were devoted to Asherah and some thought that she was Yahweh’s wife, only the strictest Yahwists would have considered this blasphemous. Determined to promote the cult of Yahweh, however, Josiah had decided to make extensive repairs in the Temple. While the workmen were turning everything upside down, the High Priest Hilkiah is said to have discovered an ancient manuscript which purported to be an account of Moses’ last sermon to the children of Israel. He gave it to Josiah’s secretary, Shapan, who read it aloud in the king’s presence. When he heard it, the young king tore his garments in horror: no wonder Yahweh had been so angry with his ancestors! They had totally failed to obey his strict instructions to Moses. 31 It is almost certain that the “Book of the Law” discovered by Hilkiah was the core of the text that we now know as Deuteronomy. There have been various theories about its timely “discovery” by the reforming party. Some have even suggested that it had been secretly written by Hilkiah and Shapan themselves with the assistance of the prophetess Huldah, whom Josiah immediately consulted. We shall never know for certain, but the book certainly reflected an entirely new intransigence in Israel, which reflects a seventh-century perspective. In his last sermon, Moses is made to give a new centrality to the covenant and the idea of the special election of Israel. Yahweh had marked his people out from all the other nations, not because of any merit of their own but because of his great love. In return, he demanded complete loyalty and a fierce rejection of all other gods. The core of Deuteronomy includes the declaration which would later become the Jewish profession of faith: Listen (shema), Israel! Yahweh is our Elohim, Yahweh alone (ehad)! You shall love Yahweh with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words I urge upon you today be written on your hearts. 32 The election of God had set Israel apart from the goyim, so, the author makes Moses say, when they arrived in the Promised Land they were to have no dealings whatever with the native inhabitants. They “must make no covenant with them or show them any pity.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Instead of engaging in rationalistic discussion of God, the Christian should appropriate the revealed truths of scripture and make them his own. Luther showed how this should be done in the creed he composed in his Small Catechism: I believe that Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also the man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord; who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, and delivered me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with silver and gold but with his holy and precious blood and with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his, live under him and in his Kingdom and serve him in everlasting righteousness and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead and reigns to all eternity. 28 Luther had been trained in scholastic theology but had reverted to simpler forms of faith and had reacted against the arid theology of the fourteenth century, which could do nothing to calm his fears. Yet he himself could be abstruse when, for example, he tried to explain exactly how we became justified. Augustine, Luther’s hero, had taught that the righteousness bestowed upon the sinner was not his own but God’s. Luther gave this a subtle twist. Augustine had said that this divine righteousness became a part of us; Luther insisted that it remained outside the sinner but that God regarded it as though it were our own. Ironically, the Reformation would lead to greater doctrinal confusion and to the proliferation of new doctrines as the banners of the various sects which were just as rarefied and tenuous as some of those they sought to replace. Luther claimed that he had been reborn when he had formulated his doctrine of justification, but in fact it does not seem as though all his anxieties had been allayed. He remained a disturbed, angry and violent man. All the major religious traditions claim that the acid test of any spirituality is the degree to which it has been integrated into daily life. As the Buddha said, after enlightenment one should “return to the marketplace” and practice compassion for all living beings. A sense of peace, serenity and loving-kindness are the hallmarks of all true religious insight. Luther, however, was a rabid anti-Semite, a misogynist, was convulsed with a loathing and horror of sexuality and believed that all rebellious peasants should be killed. His vision of a wrathful God had filled him with personal rage, and it has been suggested that his belligerent character did great harm to the Reformation. At the beginning of his career as a Reformer many of his ideas were held by orthodox Catholics, and they could have given the Church a new vitality, but Luther’s aggressive tactics caused them to be regarded with unnecessary suspicion.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  22 Mass Eye Each spectral port, each human eye is shot through with a hole, and everything we know goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash the baby’s old… —Heather McHugh, “The Size of Spokane” D own in Texas, a botched cataract surgery has nearly blinded Mother, and I suggest she have the corneal transplant to repair it in Boston. Since Mr. Whitbread serves on New York Hospital’s board and likes to flex that helping muscle, Warren urges me to write him to find a doctor. I suspect (is this true?) Warren really fancies Mother’s presence will let him vanish further into work and daddy-hood. Still, I’m grateful when Mr. Whitbread right off cops for Mother an appointment with the pope’s own eye surgeon, who bumps Mother way up on the transplant list. That spring she comes to live in our dining room, waiting on a tissue match. I’ll help with my grandson, she says. I’ll look after him while you grade or write in your study. You’re blind, Mother . Not entirely. I mean, too blind to drive, but I can keep him away from sharp stuff. The first day she does babysit, but the second, Dev scampers into my study with Mother right behind, and do I want to go to the park? By the third day, Mother makes the most infuriating announcement: I don’t do kids. I sputter, You had four of them, Mother. Nobody helped me with mine. Bullshit. Daddy took me everywhere. She rolls her milky eyes toward the light fixture, saying, Here you go with that my sainted daddy shit. Your sister and I both wonder why he got a big pass for doing nothing whatsoever. Daddy never left us at the movies and didn’t pick us up. He never did anything whatsoever. He paid every bill. We lived in absolute squalor. He worked at an oil refinery, Mother. Did you fail to notice that? Ragging on Daddy is Mother’s de facto response to any complaint about our upbringing. She deftly pawns off her own failings on the desolation of her marriage. So she bitches that Daddy had been offered promotions but wouldn’t leave the union. And I counter that she’d been a Marxist when they married, and we dwindle into those niggling definitions until my fury boils over, and I lunge with the biggest weapon in my verbal sheath. I remind her that Daddy had never stood over me with a butcher knife. I say it with a forceful little puff of air so the fact lands in her like a curare dart. All talk exits the room. We face each other in this vacuumed-out bubble, and part of me knows it’s a pathetic fact that not trying to murder me was all he had to do to win the better-parent prize. Mother sucks her teeth and sits down on the low-lying futon we moved into the dining room for her.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  121 This was the first action of Operation Rescue, which declared war on mainstream culture by depicting it as inherently murderous. The imagery was militant. During the Democratic Convention in Atlanta in 1988, the movement began what Terry called the “siege of Atlanta,” in which over thirteen hundred demonstrators were arrested for blockading the city’s abortion clinics. They have since held Days of Rescue all over Canada and the United States, and held training days to lecture potential rescuers on the evils of feminism and liberal government and to give them instruction on lobbying techniques. They described their “operations” as acts of “biblical disobedience.” Unlike Falwell and Robertson, Terry was prepared to work outside the law. His aim was fundamentalist: to create “a nation where once again the Judeo-Christian ethic is the foundation for our politics, our judicial system, and our public morality; a nation not floating in the uncertain sea of humanism, but a country whose unmoving bedrock is Higher Laws.” The campaign is not just about abortion, any more than the Scopes trial was just about evolution. Like William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s, Terry and his rescuers believe that they are fighting one of the most brutal manifestations of secular modernity. Terry is convinced that if Operation Rescue does not succeed, “America is not going to make it.” But he is confident: “We have an army of people,” he insisted, and, as a result of these operations, “child- killing will fall, child pornography and pornography will follow, euthanasia, infanticide ... we’ll take back the culture.” 122 It is a war to stave off imminent catastrophe and rescue American civilization. The Reconstruction movement, founded by the Texan economist Gary North and his father-in-law, Rousas John Rushdoony, is also engaged in a war against secular humanism, in a more extreme form than that waged by the Moral Majority. Reconstructionists have abandoned the old premillennial pessimism for a more galvanizing ideology. Like Muslim fundamentalists, North and Rushdoony are principally concerned about the sovereignty of God. A Christian civilization must be established that will defeat Satan and usher in the millennial Kingdom. The key concept of Reconstructionism is Dominion. God gave Adam and later Noah the task of subduing the world. Christians have inherited this mandate and they have the responsibility of imposing Jesus’ rule on earth before the Second Coming of Christ. There will be no need, however, for Christians to take action to achieve this, since God himself will bring the modern state down in a terrible catastrophe. Christians will simply reap the victory that God will effect. In the meantime, the Reconstructionists are training themselves to take control when the secular humanist state is destroyed. 123 Their vision is a complete distortion of Christianity in its abandonment of the ethos of compassion. When the Kingdom comes, there will be no more separation of church and state; the modern heresy of democracy will be abolished, and society reorganized on strictly biblical lines.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Catholics and Protestants had come to regard “him” as a Being who was another reality added on to the world we know, overseeing our activities like a celestial Big Brother. Not surprisingly, this notion of God was quite unacceptable to many people in the postrevolutionary world, since it seemed to condemn human beings to an ignoble servitude and an unworthy dependence that was incompatible with human dignity. The atheistic philosophers of the nineteenth century rebelled against this God with good reason. Their criticisms inspired many of their contemporaries to do the same; they seemed to be saying something entirely new, yet when they addressed themselves to the question of “God,” they often unconsciously reiterated old insights by other monotheists in the past. Thus Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) evolved a philosophy which was in some respects strikingly similar to Kabbalah. This was ironic, since he regarded Judaism as an ignoble religion which was responsible for the primitive conception of God that had perpetrated great wrong. The Jewish God in Hegel’s view was a tyrant who required unquestioning submission to an intolerable Law. Jesus had tried to liberate men and women from this base servitude, but Christians had fallen into the same trap as the Jews and promoted the idea of a divine Despot. It was now time to cast this barbaric deity aside and evolve a more enlightened view of the human condition. Hegel’s highly inaccurate view of Judaism, based on the New Testament polemic, was a new type of metaphysical anti-Semitism. Like Kant, Hegel regarded Judaism as an example of everything that was wrong with religion. In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), he substituted the idea of a Spirit which was the life force of the world for the conventional deity. Yet as in Kabbalah, the Spirit was willing to suffer limitation and exile in order to achieve true spirituality and self-consciousness. As in Kabbalah again, the Spirit was dependent upon the world and upon human beings for its fulfillment. Hegel had thus asserted the old monotheistic insight—characteristic also of Christianity and Islam—that “God” was not separate from mundane reality, an optional extra in a world of his own, but was inextricably bound up with humanity. Like Blake, he expressed this insight dialectically, seeing humanity and Spirit, finite and infinite, as two halves of a single truth which are mutually interdependent and involved in the same process of self-realization. Instead of pacifying a distant deity by observing an alien, unwanted Law, Hegel had in effect declared that the divine was a dimension of our humanity. Indeed, Hegel’s view of the kenosis of the Spirit, which empties itself to become immanent and incarnate in the world, has much in common with the Incarnational theologies that have developed in all three faiths. Hegel was a man of the Enlightenment as well as a Romantic, however, and he therefore valued reason more than the imagination. Again, he unwittingly echoed the insights of the past.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Before the first formal encounter, Serralonga, the Italian churchman appointed as mediator, advised Luther to appear before the cardinal and admit his errors. When Luther objected, the Italian repeatedly asked: “Do you want to stage a tournament?”36 Cajetan, however, had carefully planned the meetings to avoid an undignified verbal slanging match; he intended to speak to Luther in a “fatherly” way, admonish him for his errors, set him on the right path, and avoid a trial in Rome. Yet Luther was fresh from trouncing his former teachers Trutfetter and Usingen at Heidelberg and the paternal approach was bound to enrage him, not least because he had arrived at his own sense of identity by falling out with his father. Indeed, time and again when writing about the meeting, Luther expressed his annoyance with the cardinal, who kept calling him his “dear son.” Moreover, Cajetan, a Dominican so enthusiastic a follower of Aquinas that he had adopted his first name, Thomas, symbolized the scholasticism that Luther now detested. Consequently, while the cardinal tried to avoid debate by setting out clearly where Luther’s theses departed from Church doctrine, Luther refused to be instructed unless he could be shown where he was wrong—a somewhat different thing. Not surprisingly, the first meeting failed. Despite his well-meaning intentions, Cajetan ended up shouting Luther down and laughing with his Italian supporters at the German monk’s arguments. What Luther did next is extraordinary. He appeared at the second meeting the next day not on his own but accompanied by four imperial counselors, the newly arrived Staupitz, and a group of witnesses. He also brought a notary. Luther opened the interview by reading out a document stating that he would submit to the “judgment and the lawful conclusion of the Holy Church and of all who are better informed than I,” but denying that he had said anything contrary to Holy Scripture, the Church Fathers, or papal decrees. He then refused to say anything more but instead “promised to answer in writing.” Then, at the third meeting the following day, he produced a long written document setting out his position on the issues discussed together with supporting citations from Scripture, concluding, “As long as these Scripture passages stand, I cannot do otherwise, for I know that one must obey God rather than men….I do not want to be compelled to affirm something contrary to my conscience.” Luther had thus turned what Cajetan had intended to be a private admonition into a public, ritualized battle, where positions were formally set out in writing rather than evolving through discussion. He had done exactly what Serralonga had warned him against: He was staging a tournament.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  He says to himself grimly, “I’ll die before I cry.” I have already pointed out that the relationship between the strong and the weak is characterized often by its amoral aspect. When hatred serves as a dimension of self-realization, the illusion of righteousness is easy to create. Often there are but thin lines between bitterness, hatred, self-realization, defiance, and righteous indignation. The logic of the strong-weak relationship is to place all moral judgment of behavior out of bounds. A type of behavior that, under normal circumstances, would call for self-condemnation can very easily, under these special circumstances, be regarded as necessary and therefore defensible. To take advantage of the strong is regarded merely as settling an account. It is open season all the time, without the operation of normal moral inhibitions. It is a form of the old lex talionis —eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Thus hatred becomes a device by which an individual seeks to protect himself against moral disintegration. He does to other human beings what he could not ordinarily do to them without losing his self-respect. This is an aspect of hatred that has almost universal application during a time of war and national crisis. Doubtless you will recall that during the last war a very interesting defense of hatred appeared in America. The reasoning ran something like this: American boys have grown up in a culture and a civilization in which they have absorbed certain broad attitudes of respect for human personality, and other traits characteristic of gentlemen of refinement and dignity. Therefore they are not prepared psychologically or emotionally to become human war machines, to make themselves conscious instruments of death. Something radical has to happen to their personality and their over-all outlook to render them more effective tools of destruction. The most effective way by which this transformation can be brought about is through discipline in hatred; for if they hate the enemy, then that hatred will immunize them from a loss of moral self-respect as they do to the enemy what is demanded of them in the successful prosecution of the war. To use a figure, a curtain was dropped in front of their moral values and their ethical integrity as human beings and Americans, and they moved around in front of that curtain to do their death-dealing work on other human beings. The curtain of protection was the disciplined hatred. A simple illustration of what I mean is this: There are some people who cannot tell you face to face precisely what they think of you unless they get angry first. Anger serves as a protection of their finer sense of values as they look you in the eye and say things which, under ordinary circumstances, they would not be able to say. When I was a boy, my mother occasionally found it necessary to punish me and my sister. My sister, when whipped, would look my mother in the face, showing no visible signs of emotional reaction.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There were parallels with contemporary Western developments, however. A new type of Twelver Shiism had become the state religion in Iran under the Safavids, and this marks the beginning of a hostility between the Shiah and the Sunnah which was unprecedented. Hitherto Shiis had had much in common with the more intellectual or mystical Sunnis. But during the sixteenth century, the two formed rival camps that were unhappily similar to the sectarian wars in Europe at this time. Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, had come to power in Azerbaijan in 1503 and had extended his power into western Iran and Iraq. He was determined to wipe out Sunnism and forced the Shiah on his subjects with a ruthlessness rarely attempted before. He saw himself as the Imam of his generation. This movement had similarities with the Protestant Reformation in Europe: both had their roots in traditions of protest, both were against the aristocracy and associated with the establishment of royal governments. The reformed Shiis abolished the Sufi tariqas in their territories in a way that recalls the Protestant dissolution of the monasteries. Not surprisingly, they inspired a similar intransigence among the Sunnis of the Ottoman empire, who suppressed the Shiah in their territories. Seeing themselves on the front line of the latest holy war against the crusading West, the Ottomans also cultivated a new intransigence toward their Christian subjects. It would, however, be a mistake to see the whole of the Iranian establishment as fanatical. The Shii ulema of Iran looked askance at this reformed Shiah: unlike their Sunni counterparts, they refused to “close the gates of ijtihad” and insisted on their right to interpret Islam independently of the shahs. They refused to accept the Safavi—and later the Qajar—dynasty as the successor of the Imams. Instead they allied themselves with the people against the rulers and became the champions of the ummab against royal oppression in Isfahan and, later, Teheran. They developed a tradition of upholding the rights of the merchants and of the poor against the encroachments of the shahs, and it was this that enabled them to mobilize the people against Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s corrupt regime in 1979. The Shiis of Iran also developed their own Falsafah, which continued the mystical traditions of Suhrawardi. Mir Damad (d. 1631), the founder of this Shii Falsafah, was a scientist as well as a theologian. He identified the divine Light with the enlightenment of such symbolic figures as Muhammad and the Imams. Like Suhrawardi, he emphasized the unconscious, psychological element of religious experience. The supreme exponent of this Iranian school, however, was Mir Damad’s disciple Sadr al-Din Shirazi, who is usually known as Mulla Sadra (ca. 1571–1640). Many Muslims today regard him as the most profound of all the Islamic thinkers, claiming that his work epitomizes the fusion of metaphysics and spirituality that had come to characterize Muslim philosophy.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It was of the essence of the prophet to be solitary. A figure like Amos was on his own; he had broken with the rhythms and duties of his past. This was not something he had chosen but something that had happened to him. It seemed as though he had been jerked out of the normal patterns of consciousness and could no longer operate the usual controls. He was forced to prophesy, whether he wanted to or not. As Amos put it: The lion roars; who can help feeling afraid? The Lord Yahweh speaks: who can refuse to prophesy?16 Amos had not been absorbed like the Buddha into the selfless annihilation of nirvana; instead, Yahweh had taken the place of his ego and snatched him into another world. Amos was the first of the prophets to emphasize the importance of social justice and compassion. Like the Buddha, he was acutely aware of the agony of suffering humanity. In Amos’s oracles, Yahweh was speaking on behalf of the oppressed, giving voice to the voiceless, impotent suffering of the poor. In the very first line of his prophecy as it has come down to us, Yahweh is roaring with horror from his Temple in Jerusalem as he contemplates the misery in all the countries of the Near East, including Judah and Israel. The people of Israel were just as bad as the goyim, the Gentiles: they might be able to ignore the cruelty and oppression of the poor, but Yahweh could not. He noted every instance of swindling, exploitation and breathtaking lack of compassion: “Yahweh swears it by the pride of Jacob: ‘Never will I forget a single thing that you have done.’ ”17 Did they really have the temerity to look forward to the Day of the Lord, when Yahweh would exalt Israel and humiliate the goyim? They had a shock coming: “What will this Day of Yahweh mean to you? It will mean darkness, not light!”18 They thought they were God’s Chosen People? They had entirely misunderstood the nature of the covenant, which meant responsibility, not privilege: “Listen sons of Israel, to this oracle Yahweh speaks against you!” Amos cried, “against the whole family I brought out of the land of Egypt: You alone, of all the families of the earth, have I acknowledged, therefore it is for your sins that I mean to punish you.”19 The covenant meant that all the people of Israel were God’s elect and had, therefore, to be treated decently. God did not simply intervene in history to glorify Israel but to secure social justice. This was his stake in history and, if need be, he would use the Assyrian army to enforce justice in his own land.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  There were even further strains, too, in the critical friendship with Melanchthon that underpinned the Reformation, although on the face of it, the personal bonds between the two men were stronger than ever.62 In fact, each considered the other to have saved his life. When Luther was suffering from urine retention at Schmalkalden in 1537, Melanchthon had insisted that he wait a day before traveling on to Gotha because the astrological signs were not auspicious. Luther had laughed at his credulousness, but the jolting cart dislodged his stone and enabled him to pass large quantities of urine, saving his life.63 When in 1540 Melanchthon had fallen into a feverish melancholy and refused to eat after the debacle of Philip of Hesse’s bigamy, Luther had traveled straight to Weimar to see him, threatening, “You must eat, or else I’ll excommunicate you.” He was convinced that Melanchthon’s illness was a variety of melancholic Anfechtung, and that his prayer had saved his friend.64 Luther rarely had anything but praise for the younger man, and freely admitted that Melanchthon’s intellect was more systematic and his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew better than his own. Increasingly, however, Melanchthon worked around Luther, as he started to delegate more of the difficult correspondence and issues on which he was asked to take a view. He and Chancellor Brück increasingly controlled the flow of letters, deciding, for example, whether to show the irascible reformer letters from Bucer that might further darken his mood. Where once it had been Luther who had encouraged Melanchthon, and given him direction and support, now it was the younger man who was managing the older, trying to prevent the worst excesses of Luther’s temper.65 Luther, however, was not easily managed, and the attempt had its cost in that it aroused his suspicions even about Melanchthon. In 1544, when Hermann von der Wied instituted a program of reformation in Cologne, which had been a Catholic stronghold, Luther did not at first read the draft, leaving it to Melanchthon. Amsdorf alerted Luther to an apparent lack of backbone on the issue of the Real Presence, and Luther was outraged, convinced that Melanchthon was trying to sneak a dilution of his central conviction past him.66 In the same year, the clergy in Eperies, Hungary, wrote that they had heard that the Wittenbergers were about to moderate their stance on the Real Presence because they had abolished the elevation of the Host. Luther had retained the practice because it emphasized the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, but abolished it as a “papist practice” when Karlstadt died in 1541. He sent the Hungarians a stinging reply, insisting that in Wittenberg there was no relaxation, for “we fight constantly against it here, publicly and in private, and there is no suspicion or even the least trace of this abomination, unless the Devil is lurking in some hidden corner.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He also wrote again to the cardinal: an extraordinarily rude letter that boasted of his ‘flawless obedience’: “You, Most Reverend Father, have seen — and I emphasise this — and become sufficiently acquainted with my obedience. This obedience made me undertake such a long journey and endure so many dangers — weak in body and with extremely limited means — in order to appear before you and make myself available to you.’ This was hardly likely to cut much ice with Cajetan, who, after all, had been forced to delay his own return to Rome on Luther's account for several months. Luther continued that he did not ‘want to spend time here in vain’, pointing out that ‘you . . . have ordered me, with a loud voice [my italics], not to return to your sight unless I wish to recant’ — impudently presenting his imminent departure from Augsburg as an act of ‘obedience’ to Cajetan’s ill-tempered order. He signed off as ‘your dedicated son’. 120 MARTIN LUTHER Like the letter to the archbishop of Mainz which accompanied the Ninety-Five Theses in October 1517, Luther's tone was utterly lacking in contrition, his protestations of ‘obedience’ deeply ironic. Cutting through the relations of authority, he put himself on an equal footing with the letter’s recipient. Nor could he resist another little joke, when he wrote of appealing to ‘a pope ill-informed who should be better informed’.* Although his Appellation to the Pope, written in formal legal language, was ostensibly more polite, Luther made it clear that he had no confidence in the judgement of the Church. By this point, Luther's new Augsburg friends, fearing that Rome was going to put him on trial, urged him to leave town, and on the night of 20/21 October, he apparently climbed over the city wall. The next day, his Appellation to the Pope was posted on the door of Augsburg Cathedral: an event almost certainly arranged by Luther to give his appeal legal force and make it public. It also ensured that Cajetan now had no choice but to pass on his appeal to Leo; it was no longer a matter that could be dealt with through private recon- ciliation. An incomplete version of the appeal also somehow reached Johann Froben in Basle, one of the leading printers of the day, and before long it flew all over Europe.® Once again, Luther had proved master of the dramatic act. He was also emphatically burning his bridges. The ‘tournament’ at Augsburg had a long afterlife, both in personal letters and in print. In the intervals between his meetings with Cajetan, Luther wrote a series of letters to Spalatin, Karlstadt and the Elector, explaining and justifying his behaviour but also setting out the events as a drama. He chose Karlstadt as his confidant, asking him to circu- late the letters to Melanchthon, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Luther’s colleague Otto Beckmann and ‘our theologians’.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Paid by the peasants, they were used to support the clergy, but if, as was usually the case, the tithe was owned by an individual or an institution, these would take a cut out of whatever was collected. Karlstadt, for example, had paid a lowly priest out of the income he received as archdeacon, leaving the bulk of the revenues for himself. The tithe question was also to prove a major dividing line in the Reformation in Zurich, where those who would eventually move towards Anabaptism argued that the tithe should no longer be paid. For Luther, respecting property rights in the tithe trumped even evangelical preaching. So completely did he misunderstand the ideas of the peasants that he argued that ‘evil preachers’ like Karlstadt and Miintzer were responsible for the ‘disturbances’. In fact, Miintzer’s role in the events that unfolded was unusual, and most of the peasant leaders were not pastors but laypeople. It was obvious that Luther was anxious because of the widespread taunt against him that his teachings would lead to disorder and the overthrow of authority, and he therefore argued firmly that ‘This rebellion cannot be coming from me. Rather the murder-prophets, who hate me as they hate you, have come among these people and have gone about among them for more than three years, and no one has resisted and fought against them except me.’ By collapsing the whole story of the peasant rebellion into his own personal struggle with ‘the murder-prophets’, Luther made the matter an issue of his authority and of preaching — which were certainly not the issues that concerned the peasants. He devoted a mere paragraph to discussing eight of the peasants’ articles, spending time on the ones that interested him. Meanwhile the forces of the peasants from the Bodensee and from Allgau suffered heavy losses, and in April 1525 they concluded a peace treaty with the Swabian League in which they promised to dissolve their union and obey their lords. Luther at once published its text with an introduction and conclusion written by himself, and his tone was uncompromising: ‘No one can deny that our peasantry has no just cause, but has burdened itself with serious, heavy sins and has called down God’s dreadful and unendurable anger upon themselves by breaking their oaths and duties 262 MARTIN LUTHER that they have sworn to the authorities.’ Again, Luther insisted that Miintzer and Karlstadt were to blame: “Woe and again woe to you damned false prophets that have led the poor simple people to such ruin of their souls and perhaps even loss of body and goods.” In fact, the reality was quite different. The revolts often began locally with an informal strike, as peasants simply refused to work. A meeting of the commune might be summoned by ringing the storm bell, and the heads of households would consult together, often under a tree — the kind of meeting that Luther had attended in Orlamiinde.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Bauthumely was flirting with the deeply exciting and subversive doctrine of the holiness of sin. If God was everything, sin was nothing—an assertion that Ranters like Laurence Clarkson and Alastair Coppe also tried to demonstrate by flagrantly violating the current sexual code or by swearing and blaspheming in public. Coppe was particularly famous for drunkenness and smoking. Once he had become a Ranter, he had indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and swear. We hear of him cursing for a whole hour in the pulpit of a London church and swearing at the hostess of a tavern so fearfully that she trembled for hours afterward. This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind. Fox and his Quakers insisted that sin was by no means inevitable. He certainly did not encourage his Friends to sin and hated the licentiousness of the Ranters, but he was trying to preach a more optimistic anthropology and restore the balance. In his tract A Single Eye, Laurence Clarkson argued that since God had made all things good, “sin” only existed in men’s imagination. God himself had claimed in the Bible that he would make the darkness light. Monotheists had always found it difficult to accommodate the reality of sin, though mystics had tried to discover a more holistic vision. Julian of Norwich had believed that sin was “behovely” and somehow necessary. Kabbalists had suggested that sin was mysteriously rooted in God. The extreme libertarianism of Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson can be seen as a rough and ready attempt to shake off an oppressive Christianity which had terrorized the faithful with its doctrine of an angry, vengeful God. Rationalists and “enlightened” Christians were also trying to shake off the fetters of a religion which had presented God as a cruel authority figure, and to discover a milder deity.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In early October 1530, Luther finally arrived back in Wittenberg, having spent half a year in the ‘desert’ of Coburg, surrounded by the cawing of the jackdaws. He longed to see his companions: ‘Just come home!’, he had written to the Augsburg delegation in mid-July.” He brushed off rumours of illness, and to prove his point he upbraided Katharina: ‘you can see for yourself the books that I’m writing’.” Luther had indeed been remarkably creative during his exile amongst the birds; he had finished the translation of the Old Testa- ment, on which he had worked for twelve long years. But much of his creativity was powered by anger and hate. As Melanchthon sought to pacify, Luther poured out A Revocation of Purgatory — ironic, of course — the Letter to the Cardinal Archbishop of Mainz, and the Propos- itions Against the Whole School of Satan and All the Gates of Hell — all attacking Catholic theology and, when sold in Augsburg, giving him AUGSBURG 341 a voice at the Diet." In Warning to his Dear Germans (written in October but not printed until 1531), he laid into ‘the shameless mouth and bloodthirsty sophist’, his old enemy Dr Eck, and excoriated the extra- vagance and splendour of the Diet ‘that would have shamed even Lord Envy and Mr Liar’.® But the very fluency of Luther's pen sprang from the ease with which he articulated familiar rhetoric. He repeated arguments he had first developed ten years before, now clothed in bitter polemic. He was increasingly speaking to the converted, not to those wrestling with doubt. Indeed, he now risked becoming a parochial thinker. From the outset he had focused on his ‘dear Germans’ in contrast to the hated “welsch,’ or Latins, and this always limited his ability to think about the Church as a whole.* This had been a strength, of course, for the Elector’s manoeuvring had comprehensively excluded Zwingli and 342 MARTIN LUTHER the sacramentarians from the Diet and allowed Luther’s supporters to negotiate without the need to take their opinions into account. But in the longer term it showed a fateful lack of vision, for as the sacra- mentarian cause was taken up and spread further by John Calvin, their exclusion from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, just as they had been excluded in 1530, made that treaty utterly unworkable, contributing eventually to the Thirty Years War. 16 Consolidation The Diet of Augsburg appeared to have resulted in a complete polit- ical impasse. But in the years that followed, efforts to defend Protes- tantism, avoid war and find a way forward continued. In February 1531, the Lutherans, under the leadership of electoral Saxony and Hesse, formed a defensive league, which became known as the League of Schmalkalden. It grew rapidly over the following years as more areas joined, and it soon became a major political force.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Wollam in the Christian Workers Magazine, “when the evangelistic forces of this country, primarily the Bible Institutes, should not only rise up in defense of the faith, but should become a united and offensive power.” In the same issue, James M. Gray agreed, calling for the need “for an offensive and defensive alliance in the Church.” 23 At a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1920, Curtis Lee Laws defined the “fundamentalist” as one who was ready to regain territory which had been lost to Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.” 24 Riley went further. This was not just an isolated battle, “it is a war from which there is no discharge.” 25 The fundamentalists’ next objective was to expel the liberals from the denominations. Most of the fundamentalists were either Baptists or Presbyterians, and it was here that the fiercest battles were fought. In his celebrated book Christianity and Liberalism (1923), the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), the most intellectual of the fundamentalists, argued that the liberals were pagans, who, by denying the literal truth of such core doctrines as the Virgin Birth, denied Christianity itself. There were horrific fights in the general assemblies of the denominations, when fundamentalist Presbyterians tried to impose their five-point creed on the church; after a particularly bitter dispute, Riley seceded from the Baptist Assembly to found his own Bible Baptist Union of hard-liners. Some fundamentalist Baptists remained in the mainline denomination, hoping to effect reform from within, only to earn Riley’s undying hatred. 26 The campaigns continued; feeling escalated to such a point that any attempt at mediation only made matters worse. When the liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), a peaceable man and one of the most influential American clergymen of the time, pleaded for tolerance in a sermon delivered at the Baptist Convention of 1922 (later published in The Baptist as “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”), the rancor of the response showed the visceral disgust that these liberal ideas inspired. 27 It spread to other denominations. After the sermon, there seemed to be a landslide movement toward the fundamentalist camp: the more conservative Disciples of Christ, Seventh-Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and the Salvation Army rallied to the fundamentalist cause. Even Methodists and Episcopalians, who had remained aloof from the controversy, were challenged by the conservatives in their ranks to define and make obligatory “the vital and eternal truths of the Christian religion.” 28 By 1923, it looked as though the fundamentalists would indeed win and that they would rid the denominations of the liberal danger. But then a new campaign caught the attention of the nation and eventually brought the whole fundamentalist movement into disrepute. In 1920, the Democratic politician and Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) had launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He was excluded from the talks with Cardinal Contarini at the Diet of Regensburg in 1541, when the emperor attempted once more to reach unity between the Catholics and the Lutherans. Melanchthon took part and the two sides reached agreement on justification, but not on papal primacy or on the Eucharist. Luther thundered from the sidelines, warning that ‘man is justified by faith apart from works of law... Let the Devil, Eck, Mainz, Heinz and anyone else rage against this. We shall see what they win.’ His lack of interest in the proceed- ings at Regensburg reflected his increasingly parochial understanding of the Church. At the meetings which resulted in the Wittenberg concord, Luther had acted out his role as ‘the father’ of the movement, the title even the sacramentarians accorded him.” In reality, however, much of the leadership of the Reformation had long since been ceded to Melanch- thon. When the English representatives of Henry VIII wanted to reach an accord with the Saxons, and when the French envoys of Francis I embarked on negotiations, it was to Melanchthon they wanted to speak, not Luther.® His ill health held the movement to ransom, as negotiations had to be broken off or rescheduled because of his infir- mities. Anger had always been allied to his greatest spurts of creativity, but now his irascibility made him a liability as a leader. 17 Friends and Enemies Within Wittenberg, Luther had no direct institutional power; he held no positions other than that of town preacher and professor in the theology faculty. But he did have direct access to the Elector and other members of the ruling family,’ and he had his loyal inner circle — Justus Jonas, Johannes Bugenhagen, Philipp Melanchthon, Veit Dietrich, Georg Rérer, the young theologian Caspar Cruciger — whom he called the ‘Wittenbergers’* Spalatin in Altenburg and Johann Agricola in Bisleben were close enough to be part of this group. Wenzeslaus Linck in Nuremberg was a friend from the very first days, whom Luther described as ‘one of my dearest friends on earth’? Jonas, who had once worshipped Erasmus, transferred his affection wholesale to Luther, whom he always respectfully addressed as ‘father’; part of the strength of their bond derived from their shared experience of melan- choly.* No stranger to grief, seven of Jonas’s thirteen children by his first marriage had died, his thirteen-year-old son drowning in the River Saale in 1541 and his wife dying in childbirth the following year, together with the baby. Luther, who scarcely left Wittenberg in his last years, lived inside these protective circles of friends and allies just as his Saxon Church existed within the safety of the Elector’s lands. The friendships mixed private interaction with an overriding sense of duty to the new Church, in Wittenberg and beyond.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In July, Duke Johann and his son passed through Allstedt, again staying in the castle, and Miintzer seized the chance to preach in front of them. He chose as his text the second chapter of the book of Daniel, which he interpreted to mean that secular princes must root out the ungodly. “God is your shield,’ he told the princes, “and will train you for the battle against his enemies . . . But at the same time you will have to endure a heavy cross and a time of trial, so that the fear of God may be manifest in you. That cannot happen without suffering.’ If they did not heed the call, he threatened, ‘the sword will be taken from them’.* This was seditious. But Miintzer did not stop there, and had the sermon — with a long passage on dreams added ~ printed at Allstedt. Not surprisingly, he and several of his supporters were summoned to appear at Weimar to answer for their actions in late July. On 24 July, in an increasingly fraught situation, Miintzer appealed to the people of Allstedt to form a league, urging them to swear a formal oath. Over 500 of his supporters did so, which included not only citizens of Allstedt but peasants from the surrounding country- side and miners from Luther’s own Mansfeld as well. Council members and even the duke’s official were impelled to join in a covenant with God that replaced earthly political allegiances. This was a revolutionary reconfiguration of politics, and it brought ducal officials, townsfolk, miners and peasants together in a shared sense of communal belonging that overcame class antagonism. But when Miintzer and the Allstedt authorities (many of them his allies) were interrogated at Weimar, his supporters caved in, blaming Miintzer alone for the disturbances. The local ducal official too switched sides and took action, shutting down the printer, ordering Mintzer to refrain from incendiary preaching, and disbanding the league. In early August, having been effectively silenced and feeling betrayed by his supporters who turned out to be ‘Judases’, Miintzer decided that the cause in Allstedt was lost and left in the middle of the night, leaving his wife and child behind. With THE BLACK BEAR INN 253 one of his followers, he escaped to the small imperial town of Miihlhausen. Despite the similarities in their apocalyptic outlook, Karlstadt parted company with Miintzer when it came to the use of violence: Miintzer believed that the divine kingdom should be ushered in by the use of the sword, while Karlstadt insisted on non-violence.