How I Made Peace With das Christkind

This post is part of the “First Friday link-up” at:

http://www.catholiccravings.com/2013/12/05/december-first-friday-link/

“Alle Jahre wieder kommt das Christuskind!” was one of the first things I learned about the celebration of Christmas in Germany – “Every year the Christ Child comes again!” I was a Protestant back then, and while the German concept of Sankt Nikolaus didn’t strike me as too terribly odd – he was a dead ringer for Santa, though he didn’t seem to understand that Christmas takes place on the 25^th, and chose to make an appearance each year on the 6^th instead – the excitement over the strange being known as the “Christkind” really rubbed me the wrong way. “Christkind” translates literally as “Christ child,” and the idea that Germans had fictionalized the Nativity narrative, telling their children that the baby Jesus comes to earth year after year after year to, in effect, play Santa – that really got my dander up. It sounded so incredibly Catholic. If you’ll believe you can pray to dead people and work your way to Heaven, you’ll find yourself teaching your kids that the baby Jesus brought them their Christmas tree!

Imagine my shock when I learned that the originator of the Christkind hoax was none other that the Great One, Martin Luther.

Luther, you see, had a problem with St. Nicholas. The real Nicholas was a historical figure, a 4^th-century Catholic bishop who championed the divinity of Christ at the pivotal Council of Nicaea. December 6^th is his feast day, and the Germans of Luther’s time were accustomed to giving and receiving gifts on that day. Luther wanted to take the focus off the Catholic bishop as the bearer of good gifts and place it on Jesus, so he encouraged the giving on gifts on the day that “Christ’s Mass” had been celebrated, as well as encouraging the story that it was Jesus Who was responsible for the gifts.

Go figure.

Well, I didn’t care if Martin Luther had started the practice – I was against it! The very idea of encouraging the notion that the historical figure Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, was still somehow, in some way, shape or form an infant upset me. I knew that some Catholic saints such as Anthony of Padua, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Bologna and Agnes of Montepulciano had claimed to have seen the Child Jesus in visions and have interacted with Him. “Nonsense!” I insisted. “Jesus is no longer a baby!! Jesus, the grown Man, was crucified and resurrected. To claim that you’ve seen that Man with the nail prints in His hands and feet is one thing, but to claim that He appeared to you as a tiny baby? Puh-leeeze….”

That was, of course, before I began contemplating the mysteries of Jesus’ Most Sacred Heart.

My objection to the Christ Child lay in the recognition of the reality of how different I am from the babe that lay in my mother’s arms all those years ago. To say that I’ve changed is an understatement – I have become, almost literally, another person entirely. I was tainted, of course, by original sin, but as a newborn I was at least innocent of any deliberate evil. I certainly cannot say that now. This is par for the human course; boys and girls, as they grow, learn that they can get what they want by manipulating their environment. And so you lie to your mother, you steal from your siblings, you pretend you don’t hear your father calling you, you plot and connive, you conceal, you prevaricate, you defy. All this before you even start school. Once the process of organized socialization begins, you learn a whole new set of tricks from your depraved little co-conspirators. By the time God the Holy Spirit is finally able to wrestle your wanton heart into submission, it has been pitted by repeated sin; it is pock-marked, and pebbly, and distressingly worn. When you hand the sorry thing over to God, He is able to begin the process of creating in you a new heart, one free from sin – a process that will take the rest of your natural life, and quite probably a large dose of purgatory, to complete.

In this life, no, you will never be the same.

Jesus was different. The incomparably pure Heart of the Eternal Son of the Father, formed by the Holy Spirit in the Virgin Mother’s womb, substantially united to the Word of God, never experienced a stain. Jesus increased in years, in wisdom and in stature, but His innocent Heart was never compromised – It remained the Abyss of all Virtue. The Heart of the Babe in the manger was the Heart that gave Itself freely on Calvary as the Victim for our sins; the Heart that cried out “Father, forgive them” could have gone back to the manger and slept in heavenly peace. The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever, and therefore the Man Who after His resurrection appeared to His disciples in forms that they did not recognize could certainly appear to His more recent disciples as the Babe that He once was, and forever is, by virtue of the unchanging purity of His Most Sacred Heart.

And so, as a Catholic, I have made my peace with the Christ Child – not with the one Lutherans made up to deliver gifts, but with the real One, the One who allowed Sts. Agnes, Catherine, Francis and Anthony to adore Him. I hope to always be allowed to adore Him as well, in this life and in the next, and His Heart of Infinite Majesty, formed by the Holy Spirit in the Virgin Mother’s womb.

 

On the memorial of St. Nicholas of Myra

Deo omnis gloria!

In Our Wisdom

Russ Rentler over at Crossed the Tiber asks a really good question in a recent blog post: If Martin Luther, the man granted the first patent on Bible-alone theology, invoked the saints, why do modern-day Protestants feel that invoking the saints is “unbiblical”? Russ quotes Luther as saying:

When in his frailty, a man invokes the saints, he invokes Christ, and without fail he will reach Christ whenever he calls upon their names, for wherever they are, they are in Christ and Christ is in them, and their name in Christ’s name and Christ’s name in their name.

Luther, as historians will tell you, was personally devoted to the greatest saint of them all – the Blessed Virgin Mary. He taught that she was the spiritual Mother of all Christians:

Mary is the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of all of us even though it was Christ alone who reposed on her knees . . . If he is ours, we ought to be in his situation; there where he is, we ought also to be and all that he has ought to be ours, and his mother is also our mother.

On that basis, Luther had no qualms concerning the recitation of the Rosary, as long as those praying it understood Mary’s place in the economy of salvation.

We can never honor her enough. Still honor and praise must be given to her in such a way as to injure neither Christ nor the Scriptures.

Whoever possesses a good (firm) faith, says the Hail Mary without danger.

Them’s fightin’ words as far as modern-day Evangelicals are concerned, because, hey – nobody in the Bible prayed the Rosary! Paul never said that Christians ought to invoke the saints! This is all unbiblical in the extreme!

Luther’s beliefs morphed throughout his lifetime – the same man who could teach his Protestant congregation in all sincerity that they will “reach Christ” when they call upon the saints later abandoned that teaching – PROOF, Protestants say, that Luther really was sent by God to straighten Christianity out. As the years passed, so the story goes, Luther distanced himself further and further from Catholic error, and his doctrine became correspondingly more and more biblical! That supposedly accounts for the above quotes – they were uttered during Luther’s “transitional phase.” Well, Luther’s beliefs certainly did morph and fluctuate throughout his lifetime – they’ve got that right. In his earlier days he preached tolerance towards the Jews; at the end of his life Mr. Sola Scriptura, whose doctrine was allegedly becoming “more and more biblical” felt that he had Biblical backing for his desire to give the Nazis a headstart if the Jews would not convert:

What shall we Christians do with this condemned people, the Jews? We cannot tolerate their conduct, now that we know about their lying, scorn, and blasphemy. If we do, we support these things. We cannot extinguish divine wrath nor can we convert. With prayer and godly fear, we must practice sharp mercy so we can possibly save at least a few from hellfire. However, we dare not punish them ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse already has them. This is my sincere advice:

First, burn synagogues and Jewish schools, covering with dirt whatever remains. Do this so no man will ever again see these things. This will honor our Lord and Christendom. God will know we do not knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blasphemy. Whatever we unknowingly tolerated (I also was ignorant), God will pardon us. Now informed, if we protect a place, it would be the same as if we were doing these things ourselves.

Second, you should destroy their houses because within them they pursue the same aims as in synagogues. They can live under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. Then they will know they are not our masters, as they boast, but are living in captivity, as they constantly moan before God.

Third, you should seize all their prayer books and Talmudic writings because they put forth idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy.

Fourth, you should forbid their rabbis from teaching–under penalty of death. For they have forfeited this right. They hold Jews captive with Mosaic Law. Moses clearly adds, “What they teach you in agreement with the Lord’s law.” Those villains ignore this teaching. They want only obedience, contrary to the Lord. They infuse the poor people with this poison. (In the same way, the pope also held us captive, making us believe all the lies coming from his devilish mind. He did not teach God’s word, and therefore he forfeited this right.)

There’s more, but I’ll spare you – it’s not anything present-day Evangelicals would endorse, by any means. The moral of the story? You can’t have it both ways, honey. Either Luther’s beliefs were changing to become more and more “biblical,” or they were just changing as Luther’s whims changed, blowing in the wind like a plastic grocery bag. Far from being proof that the doctrine of sola Scriptura holds water, Luther’s mutating beliefs should actually cause one to suspect that maybe the Scriptures aren’t as perspicuous as Martin in his wisdom would have liked us to believe….

Another example of this is the sad case of the Long Evangelical Snooze – the lack of Protestant outrage over the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 – occasioned by the fact that there is simply no Bible verse that states that “thou shalt not kill the unborn child in the womb.” In its wisdom, the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 passed the following amendment:

WHEREAS, Christians in the American society today are faced with difficult decisions about abortion; and

WHEREAS, Some advocate that there be no abortion legislation, thus making the decision a purely private matter between a woman and her doctor; and

WHEREAS, Others advocate no legal abortion, or would permit abortion only if the life of the mother is threatened;

Therefore, be it RESOLVED, that this Convention express the belief that society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves; and

Be it further RESOLVED, That we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.

The Convention continued pro-choicing its way through the 1970s, only beginning to take a firm stand against the murder of unborn children in the early ’80s under the influence of theologians like Francis Schaeffer. Which leads to a question:

If the theology behind the doctrine of sola Scriptura is correct, why could those who employ it not see clearly that they were facilitating the continued MURDER of unborn children for some 10 years? How many children died while Evangelicals waited for the perspicuity of Scripture to kick in?

Seriously, if sola Scriptura is all that, why didn’t it “work” when clarity on the issue of abortion was so desperately needed? And why was the Catholic Church, which supposedly wanders in error, the undisputed leader in the fight against abortion from the beginning? Not to mention the fact that to this day many Protestant denominations which claim to rely on the principle of sola Scriptura are pro-choice because, in their wisdom, they feel that because the Bible never mentions abortion, the practice must be okay in the eyes of God (see: The Biblical Basis for Being Pro-Choice).

I would like to propose that if sola Scriptura is truly the system put in place by God upon which Christians must rely for guidance, then it MUST “work” in one particular area – soteriology. All Bible-only Christians MUST be able to open up a copy of the Scriptures and come away with a clear, unequivocal answer to the Question of all Questions: What must I do to be saved?

No problem there! I would have told you when I was an Evangelical. Christians differ in their understanding of many doctrines; that’s why there are different denominations. But when it comes to The Essentials, we are all on exactly the same page – and there is nothing more essential than knowing what you have to do to gain eternal life! All Protestant denominations teach that you must have faith alone in Jesus Christ alone!

And be baptized.

Huh? Oh, yeah, well… certain Protestant denominations do in their “wisdom” teach the necessity of baptism based on verses such as Jn 3:5, Mt 28:18-20, Acts 2:38, and 1 Pet 3:18, but that doesn’t mean

And speak in tongues.

What?? Okay, there are goofy charismatics who read Romans 8:9 (“And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ”) and deduce therefrom that being filled with the Holy Spirit is necessary for salvation, and since by their estimation speaking in tongues is the visible sign that you’ve been filled, you must speak in tongues or you are not saved. I really wouldn’t put much faith in

And persevere to the end.

Now, look! I know that some Protestant denominations reject the “once-saved/always saved” understanding of Scripture, based on verses like Mt 10:22, Mt 24:13, Mk 13:13, Rom 11:19-22, 1 Cor 15:1-2, Gal 5:2-4, Col 1:21-23, 2 Pet 2:20-22, Heb 3:12, Heb 6:4-6 and Heb 10:23-29, but seriously, you have to take that kind of teaching with a grain of

In what sense is this a common Protestant soteriology? What is the one unanimous Protestant answer to the question, “What must I do to be saved?” No one can claim that Lutherans who insist on baptism based on “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you” are somehow ignoring the plain truth of the Scriptures to follow their own depraved desires! No one can claim that Methodists who insist that one can lose his salvation have no Scriptural backing for this belief: “Do not be conceited, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you, either. Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off.” If the theology behind the doctrine of sola Scriptura is correct, Protestants should be able to answer this Question of Questions WITH ONE VOICE, because if Protestants can’t tell someone how to be saved, nothing else they can tell them really matters….

Bible-only Christians need to confront the fact that while the Bible itself does not err when it teaches us what we must do to be saved, the human beings who must interpret the Bible certainly can and do err! There MUST be an infallible interpreter who can say to us, “This is the understanding of the Scriptures handed down to us by the apostles.” Otherwise, who can tell you for certain what you must do to be saved? Not Protestants – they reject the infallible interpreter, opting to rely on their own wisdom and understanding when proclaiming the word of God, resulting in many different voices teaching many different “truths,” all operating under the same sola-Scriptura premise. They fail to notice the irony of their position – the doctrine of sola Scriptura, which demands that each Christian interpret the Bible for himself or herself according to his or her understanding, runs counter to the clear command of Scripture itself: Lean not unto thine own understanding. Rather, we are enjoined to “trust the Lord with all our hearts.” The Lord established the Church. It does take a lot of trust to rely on the Church that Jesus established to interpret the Scriptures for us, the Church to which He made the promises “He who hears you, hears Me” and “The gates of hell shall not prevail against My Church” – more trust than Martin Luther could muster when he felt he had a “better idea.” But to trust in its place the Reformers’ ever-changing, work-in-progress miscarriage of the truth, or any other human being’s, for that matter, is just a case of relying on one’s own wisdom.

That splat you heard was the baby of authoritative teaching being thrown out with the Reformation bathwater. Protestant Christians surely should miss the little guy….

 

On the memorial of St. Charles Borromeo

Deo omnis gloria!

Outside the Canon and Judged Apocryphal

Reformers at Marburg

This is Part 7 of my series on the canon of Scripture. In order to follow this mystery story, you need to begin here.

Protestants have propagated many myths concerning the canon – our protagonist has just shattered Major Myth #1: “The Catholic Church ADDED 7 books to the Bible at the Council of Trent.” As our hero has discovered, John Wycliffe included the Apocrypha (with even more books than in the Catholic Bible) in his English translation of Holy Scripture 150 years BEFORE the Council of Trent supposedly added the books to the Catholic Bible. Was this a one-off? Hardly – Martin Luther insisted on including the Apocrypha in his Bible translation, although he placed those books in a special section at the end of the Old Testament, just as he placed Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation in a special section at the end of the New Testament!
ALL the early Protestant Bibles included the Apocrypha – pretty strange if those books were added to the Bible by the Catholic Church in 1546 as many Protestants claim.

Thus far, our hero has attempted to determine why the books of the Apocrypha were included in a section behind the Old Testament in all the 16^th-century Protestant English Bibles, and why some of those same Bibles shunted Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation to a section behind the New Testament. His quest has led him to Martin Luther, who initiated these practices, and started a trend that others continued and expanded upon….

Delving deeper, you determine that Wycliffe apparently translated the Scriptures into English from the Vulgate version of the Bible. Luther, on the other hand, translated the Old Testament into German from the Soncino Hebrew Bible used by the Jews of his day – the Apocryphal books were not in that version, and they had to be translated from the Septuagint (a Greek manuscript) and the Vulgate (a Latin translation). But why did Luther see fit to drag the Apocryphal books into his Bible at all??

The common explanation of the presence of the Apocrypha in Protestant Bibles (when you can find mention made of this at all!) seems to be that those books were there for “historical reasons,” to “provide historical background….” In the Geneva Bible you find the statement that the Apocrypha is included “as books proceeding from godly men” which “were received to be read for the advancement and furtherance of the knowledge of the history and for the instruction of godly manners, etc.” But you can’t find that “historical background” reasoning in other versions, for example, in Luther’s German Bible which predates the Geneva. Why exactly would Martin Luther go out of his way to include the Apocrypha in his German Old Testament when those books weren’t present in the Hebrew text from which he translated the canonical books? He said that he included the Apocrypha because it was “useful and good to be read.” Okay, that could be said about a lot of books… but why include them between the covers of the Holy Bible???

You find that various 16^th– and 17^th-century Bibles give differing reasons for the presence of the Apocrypha between their covers:

The Apocrypha was included in the Zurich Bible “so that no one may complain of lacking anything, and each may find what is to his taste” (which sounds to you like the smorgasbord approach to Bible publishing!)

The 1551 French de Tournes edition of the Scriptures puts the Apocrypha in a separate section, à la Luther. It goes on to inform the reader that these books are rejected by the Jews. No matter, the editor assures us: “Wherefore, reader, seeing that from all flowers the fly may draw liquor to make honey, without regarding where it is planted, whether in the field or in the garden, so from all books thou shalt be able to draw matter suitable to thy salvation without being guided by the Jews. …. Since, therefore, all have the same source and wholesome root, in spite of any
pruning the
Jews may have made on them, do not fail to read them and to take from them doctrine and edification.”

Becke’s Bible seems to indicate that the Apocryphal books are inferior to canonical books simply because they were written in the wrong language: “And although these books be not found in the Hebrew nor in the Chaldean and for that do not take of so great authority as be the other books of the Holy Bible, yet have the holy fathers always so esteemed them and worthily they call them … books of the church, or books mete to be read among the whole congregation namely for that they do agree with the other books of the Holy Bible and contain most godly examples and precepts of the fear and love of God and our neighbor. Wherefore they are diligently to be read, and the learning in them earnestly to be followed that by our good example of living our Heavenly Father throughout all nations may be praised and glorified….”

Coverdale, in his preface to the Apocrypha, states that in his opinion the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men do not belong in the Bible; “Nevertheless, both because of those that be weak and scrupulous, and for their sakes also that love such sweet songs of thanksgiving, I have not left them out, to the intent that the one should have no cause to complain, and that the other also might have the more occasion to give thanks unto God in adversity, as the three children did in the fire.”

The 1611 KJV included the Apocrypha with no comment at all concerning why it was there.

The fifth edition of the Great Bible calls the books, not Apocrypha, but merely “the fourth part of the Bible.”

Apparently the memo that the Apocrypha was being included to provide “historical background” hadn’t reached everyone yet!

So Luther was in essence a “trendsetter” – he had two “special” sections in his German translation, one in the Old Testament (for the 7 books you know are Apocrypha) and one in the New (for the 4 books you know and love as Holy Scripture!). Now you understand the references concerning “Luther’s arrangement of the New Testament canon” that you read in connection with the old English Bibles – some of the English were following Martin Luther’s lead in shunting Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation to the back of the Bible. Luther’s example started the ball rolling. In fact, the reference books tell you that low German Bibles around the year 1600 actually went so far as to label Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation “apocryphal” or even “noncanonical,” “that is, books which are not held equal to other holy Scripture.” The Swedish Gustavus Adolphus Bible of 1618 does the same, calling those books “Apocr(yphal) N.T.” The Canon of the New Testament tells you that this “threefold division of the New Testament: ‘Gospels and Acts’, ‘Epistles and Holy Apostles’, and ‘Apocryphal New Testament,” was “an arrangement that persisted for nearly a century in half a dozen or more printings.”

That’s horrible! How could such a thing be allowed to happen? Four books of inspired Scripture were presented to a generation of Bible-readers as “apocryphal,” all because Luther felt that they were somehow substandard. Who was he to sit in judgment of Holy Scripture, anyway?

Dismayed, you read on concerning the other Reformers to see if their beliefs on the NT canon were any more orthodox than Luther’s! You find that:

John Calvin called 1 John “THE Epistle of John,” and did not write commentary on the other two epistles of John the Apostle.

Ulrich Zwingli declared concerning Revelation: “With the Apocalypse we have no concern, for it is not a Biblical book” after it was used in a debate against him to support the invocation of angels. (This sounds a great deal like Luther and his rejection of 2 Maccabees!)

Luther’s colleague from Wittenburg, Andreas Karlstadt, thought that SEVEN New Testament books (Hebrews, James, II Peter, II John, III John, Jude and Revelation) were questionable, adding that there was really very little reason to include Revelation in the canon. He declared both the Epistle to the Laodiceans and the ending of the Gospel of Mark (Mk 16:9-20) to be apocryphal. He also divided the Apocryphal books of the Old Testament into two categories, declaring Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobit, and I and II Maccabees to be “holy writings,” while 1 and 2 Esdras, Baruch, Prayer of Manasseh, and the additions to Daniel were “obviously apocryphal.”

“The second Martin,” Martin Chemnitz, also declared the books of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude and Revelation to be disputed, insisting that they be used “for edification,” but that “no dogma ought to be drawn out of these books which does not have reliable and clear foundations in other canonical books.”

Johannes Brenz calls the seven books “apocryphal,” asking by what right they should be put on the same level as the canonical Scriptures. He considered them, however, “valuable for reading.”

Mathias Haffenreffer, in speaking of the seven disputed New Testament books, said, “These apocryphal books, although they do not have canonical authority in judging of doctrine, yet because they make for instruction and edification, contain many things and can be read privately and publicly recited in the church with usefulness and profit.”

Andreas Osiander insisted that the seven books “do not have in themselves value for establishing doctrine.”

Johannes Oecolampadius had no problem with Hebrews, but stated that “we do not compare the Apocalypse, the Epistles of James and Jude, and 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John with the rest.”

Aegidius Hunnius remarked that the seven disputed NT books “are outside the Canon and are judged apocryphal.”

Heinrich Bullinger was the first major Reformer to write a commentary on the book of Revelation as other Reformers considered the book to be either substandard or outright unbiblical. (Calvin’s position on Revelation is unclear – he may simply have died before he could write any commentary on it, or he may have concurred with other Reformers and considered it apocryphal.)

In the years following the Reformation, various individuals questioned the presence of the Song of Solomon, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Luke, and Acts in their Bibles….

And you note that several German Bible editions of the 16th century included the “Epistle to the Laodiceans” in their New Testament, as did editions of Wycliffe’s translation, as well as Czech Bibles….

You cradle your aching head in your hands. You don’t even know who some of those guys were, but you get the main idea: the Reformers had no more of a clue concerning what was Scripture (and what wasn’t) than Wycliffe and Luther did. So many of them treated Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation as if they were Apocrypha – placing them in a “special” section, with no “canonical authority in judging of doctrine” but “valuable for reading,” just like Luther’s “useful and good to be read.” How did they justify this unholy nonsense?

Luther used his “true touchstone,” his system of which books “preached Christ” to determine which New Testament books to segregate, a rather subjective system that seems pretty dangerous to you. It seems obvious that Luther decided his doctrine FIRST based on his understanding of “the just shall live by faith,” then looked for it in the books of the New Testament. Whenever he couldn’t find this doctrine explained as clearly as he would have liked in certain books, he declared them deficient, perhaps not even really Scripture. In fact, the Hastings Dictionary of the Bible, in discussing Luther’s system, says as much:

Thus the doctrine of justification by faith is not accepted because it is found in the Bible; but the Bible is accepted because it contains this doctrine.

You shake your head. This is backwards – we don’t form our theology first and then pick and choose among the books of Scripture! That makes US the final arbiter of truth, doesn’t it? Let’s say you started pondering New Testament truths such as Jesus’ statement “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you,” and then began noticing Old Testament passages which seemed to preach a different message. If you went into your church on Sunday and announced to the pastor that you had decided, based on your reading of the Gospels, that God is love and therefore the Old Testament is obviously not really Scripture – after all, it presents God as telling Israel to wipe the Canaanites off the face of the earth! Your pastor would sit you down and have “a little talk” with you! We do not sit in judgment of the Scriptures, he would insist – we allow Scripture to teach us! If sections of Scripture seem to be in conflict with each other, there are whole reference books devoted to harmonizing them! Once we know that a book is Holy Scripture, we must acknowledge that any discrepancies or “errors” in that book can be reconciled with what we find in the rest of Scripture. That is apparently what Protestants who lived after the Reformation eventually did; ignoring Luther’s qualms, they reconciled James’ insistence that “by works a man is justified, and not by faith only” with Paul’s “we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law,” because both of these books are Holy Scripture!!!

Why did the Reformers feel the need to fiddle with Scripture???

The question remains, did the other Reformers follow Luther’s “true touchstone,” his odd justification for cutting and pasting books of the Bible into his own little arrangement using the criterion of how well a given book “preached Christ,” or did they have their own justifications for cobbling together their custom-made canons?

Do you really want to know?

For Part Eight, please click here

 

On the memorial of St. Anthony of Egypt

Deo omnis gloria!

The True Touchstone

Part Six of my series on the canon continues here. Please begin at the beginning, or you won’t be able to follow along with the mystery.

Few Protestants have been made aware of the fact that the Great Reformer, Martin Luther, actually ADDED a word to his translation of Holy Scripture to make a point. When heretical groups commit this gross SIN, Christians are rightly appalled. Martin Luther, however, has inexplicably gotten a historical free pass from his fellow Protestants….

Our Protestant protagonist is understandably shaken when he learns about the insertion of the extra word “alone” into Luther’s Bible translation, but his original questions remain: Where did the Apocrypha come from? Why were those books added to Catholic Bibles? And why were they in the first Protestant Bibles?? What does Martin Luther have to do with all this?

If you are trying to solve this mystery along with our hero, pay special attention to Luther’s attitude towards the books of James and Esther – this will play an important role later on in the story!

Luther’s approach to the translation of the New Testament was interesting, to say the least. Again, according to the Hastings Dictionary of the Bible:

Moreover, the Bible is sorted and arranged in grades according as it does so more or less clearly, and to Luther there is ‘a NT within the NT,’ a kernel of all Scripture, consisting of those books which he sees most clearly set forth the gospel. Thus he wrote: ‘John’s Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, especially Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter—these are the books which show thee Christ, and teach all that it is needful and blessed for thee to know even if you never see or hear any other book, or any other doctrine. Therefore is the Epistle of James a mere epistle of straw (eine rechte stroherne Epistel) since it has no character of the gospel in it’ (Preface to NT, 1522; the passage was omitted from later editions).

Luther did not merely accept the books that he found in the New Testament; he graded them. Jesus said in John 5:39 that the Scriptures bear witness to Him. Luther applied this criterion to the books that he translated and ranked them according to how faithfully he felt that they “preached Christ.” Luther used this criterion to dismiss certain books as less worthy of their place in the Bible. As he explains in his original preface to the book of James:

The true touchstone for testing every book is to discover whether it emphasizes the prominence of Christ or not.

He further explained:

That which does not preach Christ is not apostolic, though it be the work of Peter or Paul, and conversely that which does teach Christ is apostolic even though it be written by Judas, Annas, Pilate or Herod.

The epistle of James, in Luther’s view, did not pass that test! He wrote:

Therefore St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.

In his Table Talk, written many years later, Luther is quoted expressing his misgivings about the Book of James:

We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school, for it doesn’t amount to much. It contains not a syllable about Christ. Not once does it mention Christ, except at the beginning [Jas. 1:1; 2:1]. I maintain that some Jew wrote it who probably heard about Christian people but never encountered any. Since he heard that Christians place great weight on faith in Christ, he thought, ‘Wait a moment! I’ll oppose them and urge works alone.’ This he did. He wrote not a word about the suffering and resurrection of Christ, although this is what all the apostles preached about. Besides, there’s no order or method in the epistle. Now he discusses clothing and then he writes about wrath and is constantly shifting from one to the other. He presents a comparison: ‘As the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead’ [Jas. 2:26]. O Mary, mother of God! What a terrible comparison that is! James compares faith with the body when he should rather have compared faith with the soul! The ancients recognized this, too, and therefore they didn’t acknowledge this letter as one of the catholic epistles.

Luther used this reasoning to shunt the book of James out of the main body of the New Testament, out of its place between Hebrews and I Peter, into a “special section” at the end of the New Testament. And James was not alone there, for Luther (and according to him, the “ancients” as well) had misgivings concerning three other New Testament books, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation! Although Luther considered Hebrews to be “a marvelously fine Epistle,” and felt that Christians should “accept this fine teaching with all honor” he insisted that “to be sure, we cannot put it on the same level with the apostolic epistles.” This was his reasoning:

The fact that Hebrews is not an epistle of St. Paul, or of any other apostle, is proved by what it says in chapter 2, that through those who had themselves heard it from the Lord this doctrine has come to us and remained among us. It is thereby made clear that he is speaking about the apostles, as a disciple to whom this doctrine has come from the apostles, perhaps long after them. For St. Paul, in Galatians 1, testifies powerfully that he has his gospel from no man, neither through men, but from God himself.

He had the same poor opinion of the book of Jude:

Concerning the epistle of St. Jude, no one can deny that it is an extract or copy of St. Peter’s second epistle, so very like it are all the words. He also speaks of the apostles like a disciple who comes long after them [Jude 17] and cites sayings and incidents that are found nowhere else in the Scriptures [Jude 9, 14]. This moved the ancient Fathers to exclude this epistle from the main body of the Scriptures.
Moreover the Apostle Jude did not go to Greek-speaking lands, but to Persia, as it is said, so that he did not write Greek. Therefore,
although I value this book, it is an epistle that need not be counted among the chief books which are supposed to lay the foundations of faith.

And concerning Revelation, Luther stated:

Let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is not taught or known in it. But to teach Christ is the thing which an Apostle is bound above all else to do, as Christ says in Acts 1:8, ‘Ye shall be my witnesses,’ Therefore I stick to the books which give me Christ, clearly and purely.” “About this book of the Revelation of John, I leave everyone free to hold his own ideas, and would bind no man to my opinion or judgment; I say what I feel. I miss more than one thing in this book, and this makes me hold it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic . . .. And so I think of it almost as I do of the Fourth Book of Esdras, and can nohow detect that the Holy Spirit produced it . . . . It is just the same as if we had it not, and there are many far better books for us to keep.

And so, using his “true touchstone,” Luther single-handedly decided which books to “keep” – and Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation were eased out of their places into what one author calls a “kind of bibliographical ghetto” at the back of the Bible. The Canon of the New Testament tells you:

Luther’s lower estimate of four books of the New Testament is disclosed in the Table of Contents, where the first twenty-three books from Matthew to 3 John are each assigned a number, whereas, after a blank space, the column of titles, without numbers, continues with Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation.

This, you read, was the same way Luther dealt with the Apocryphal books of the Old Testament; he segregated them in a section between the Old and New Testament.

You had almost forgotten about the Apocrypha in your concern over the New Testament books. In his 1534 Preface to the Apocrypha, Luther wrote: “The books of the Apocrypha are not to be regarded as Holy Scripture, yet they are useful and good to be read”.

So the Apocrypha is “useful and good to be read,” but is NOT Holy Scripture – but as you just read in his preface to Revelation, Luther wrote “I think of it [Revelation] almost as I do of the Fourth Book of Esdras, and can nohow detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.” According to him, Revelation was “neither apostolic nor prophetic.” It certainly sounds like Luther put the book of Revelation, along with Hebrews, James and Jude, if not on the same level with the Apocrypha, then maybe just one step up!

The Old Testament apparently fared better than the New under Luther’s handling, although he felt that the books of I and II Kings were “a hundred thousand steps in advance” of I and II Chronicles, and “deserved more credit.” He expressed unhappiness with certain aspects of the books of Jeremiah, Jonah and the Song of Solomon. The book of Esther, however, he disparaged, saying that it “deserves more than all the rest in my judgment to be regarded as noncanonical.” He is further quoted (in Table Talk) as stating that “I so hate Esther and 2 Maccabees that I wish they did not exist. There is too much Judaism in them and not a little heathenism.”

Hmm… it certainly sounds like Luther is tossing the baby out with the bathwater. He would like to get rid of Esther, which everyone knows is Holy Scripture, along with 2 Maccabees, which everyone knows is not Holy Scripture! Obviously, his system of picking and choosing among the books of the Bible isn’t working very well!

You learn that Luther apparently had no real problem with 2 Maccabees or any of the other Apocryphal books, quoting from them as if he considered them to be Holy Scripture, until a debate opponent used a verse in 2 Maccabees to try to prove Luther wrong on the subject of purgatory. Luther’s response is his first recorded objection to an Apocryphal book, referring to 2 Maccabees as “not being in the Canon.”

The custom of segregating the Apocrypha in a section between the Old and New Testament began with Luther’s translation, you read. Both Wycliffe and Luther had Apocryphal books in their Bible translation, although Wycliffe included 1 Esdras in his Bible (as did the KJV), a book which Luther declined to translate. Wycliffe (who died 100 years before Luther was born) did not segregate the Apocrypha; he had the Apocryphal books mixed in among the rest of the books of the Old Testament.

This is bewildering – why would Wycliffe do that??? Does that mean that Wycliffe translated from a Bible manuscript that included the Apocrypha as if it were Scripture when he translated the Old Testament? Where did he find something like that???

For Part Seven please click here

 

On the memorial of St. Arnold Janssen

Deo omnis gloria!

Something Very, Very Strange

I was born and raised a Protestant. One question I never asked myself was “Where did the Bible come from?” I mean, I knew that God inspired men to write historical accounts, songs and letters that have been collected together in the Book that we call the Bible. But what was the collection process like? Who did the collecting, and how did they know which books belonged in the Bible, and which did not? I just never bothered my pretty little head about it….

This is Part Five of my series on the canon of Scripture (Part One is here), and fortunately our hero has a better head on his shoulders than I did as a Protestant! In his search for the answers, he has come across some very disturbing information concerning the presence of the Apocrypha in early Protestant Bibles….

As you sort back through what you have learned, you feel the frustration mounting. So far your Protestant sources have told you that at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) seven books were added to the Catholic version of the Bible. The Catholics call these books “deuterocanonical” – Protestants call them the Apocrypha. However, all the Bible encyclopedias that you have checked assure you that the early English-language Bibles, from Wycliffe’s translation in 1384 to the KJV, all contained an Apocryphal section, although those sections varied in content – all with more Apocryphal books than are found in Catholic Bibles!

This makes no sense!!! If the Catholic Church ADDED books to the Bible at the Council of Trent, what in heaven’s name were Protestants doing when they also added these books to their Protestant Bibles??? Come to think of it, Wycliffe’s translation predates the Council of Trent by some 160 years – so he had this odd idea to add the Apocrypha to the Bible WAY before the Catholics thought of it! Something very, very strange was going on with the Apocrypha back in 14^th, 15^th, 16^th and 17^th-century England!

What you find particularly frustrating is that when you search online at Protestant sites that allow you to view English Bibles from the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, it’s hard to find a site that mentions the Apocryphal books that were included in those Bibles, let alone includes them for viewing. It’s as if the online Bibles have been “sanitized”. It’s as if it all never happened….

What’s up with that? Those Bibles did contain Apocryphal books – it’s a historical fact mentioned in Bible encyclopedia after Bible encyclopedia! At least some mention should be made of that on the websites….

And then there’s the New Testament problem. The Apocrypha is a collection of Old Testament books purporting to be Holy Scripture. But in your reading you’ve come across Wycliffe’s Protestant New Testament translation containing the book of “Laodiceans” – supposedly an epistle written by Paul! How did that get in there???

Wycliffe’s Bible at least keeps a normal New Testament order of the books, but you’ve found several 16^th-century Protestant New Testaments in which Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation have been segregated from the rest of the books in a separate section at the end, as if the editors felt that they weren’t “ready for prime time!” For Heaven’s sake, what was up with that???

In frustration, you try a change of tack. You’ve already got your library’s copy of Metzger’s Canon of the New Testament, and you begin to search through the your Bible reference books while trying to remember everything you know about Martin Luther. Fortunately only a few weeks ago your church celebrated Reformation Sunday, and your pastor preached on the Great Reformer. He spoke glowingly of how Luther rescued the Christian Church from the darkness of the Middle Ages, from the clutches of the pope, and brought the church back to its original form (hence the term “Reformation”). He did issue a disclaimer, warning you that Luther was no “saint” – he was criticized by his fellow Reformers for his uncontrolled ego, his bad temper, and his foul language (the pastor said he couldn’t even repeat to you some of the things Luther said in his sermons). And Luther certainly espoused some odd doctrines, such as a belief that the Bible sanctioned polygamy (which Luther himself felt couldn’t be forbidden in certain situations!). But sola fide (faith alone!) and sola Scriptura (Scripture alone!), the rallying cries of the Reformation, are something that all Protestants owe to Martin Luther. It just goes to show, your pastor emphasized, how God can use anyone.

“Scripture alone!” sounded so great when you heard it several Sundays ago, but now somehow it rings slightly off-key when compared to what these Bible encyclopedias are saying. “Sola Scriptura” sounds wonderful – but only if you know what is Scripture and what isn’t – and the English Protestants of the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries certainly seem to have had no idea, with their Apocryphal books and their “segregation” of Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation in the back of their Bibles! How could they have fallen into such serious error?

Well, hopefully Martin Luther can shed some light in this darkness!

You remember your pastor telling you that, while there had been 18 previous Catholic translations of the Bible into German, Martin Luther’s translation into his native language was so beautifully done that it set the literary standard for hundreds of years. You begin to search for articles on Luther in the Bible encyclopedias you have spread out on your library table, and in the books on the Reformation that you’ve found. You learn that he translated the New Testament into German in a version that was published in 1522. Luther’s theology could be summed up in the Reformation’s battle-cry of “justification by faith alone!” Luther derived this understanding of Scripture from the apostle Paul’s declaration that “the just shall live by faith” in Romans 1:16-17. The Hastings Dictionary of the Bible describes it this way:

With Luther the Reformation was based on justification by faith. This truth Luther held to be confirmed (a) by its necessity, nothing else availing, and (b) by its effects, since in practice it brought peace, assurance, and the new life. Then those Scriptures which manifestly supported the fundamental principle were held to be ipso facto inspired, and the measure of their support of it determined the degree of their authority. Thus the doctrine of justification by faith is not accepted because it is found in the Bible; but the Bible is accepted because it contains this doctrine.

Because of his belief that justification was by faith alone, Luther felt compelled to actually add the word “alone” (“sola” in Latin) into the text of his German translation in Romans 3:28 to cause it to read “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith alone without the deeds of the law.”

What???

You quickly grab the KJV you have lying on the table. Romans 3:28 reads “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.”

You feel a sudden chill. Luther added a word to his German translation of Holy Scripture to prove his doctrinal point? You read his justification for this in his Open Letter on Translating (1530):

Let this be the answer to your first question. Please do not give these donkeys any other answer to their useless braying about that word sola than simply this: ‘Luther will have it so, and he says that he is a doctor above all the doctors of the pope.’ Let it rest there…..

Boy, your pastor wasn’t kidding about Luther’s ego problems! Mr. Humility continues:

I know very well that in Romans 3 the word solum is not in the Greek or Latin text — the papists did not have to teach me that. It is fact that the letters s-o-l-a are not there. And these blockheads stare at them like cows at a new gate, while at the same time they do not recognize that it conveys the sense of the text — if the translation is to be clear and vigorous, it belongs there. I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, since it was German I had set about to speak in the translation.

Luther goes on to insist that the German version just sounds better with the word “alone” in the passage in question, and then states:

However, I was not depending upon or following the nature of the languages alone when I inserted the word solum 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..

The text itself, and St. Paul’s meaning, urgently require and demand it?

“The matter itself and the nature of language requires it,” Luther assures you later in the text.

So Luther knew that the word “alone” was not in the original text, but because he considered “justification by faith alone” to be, as he put it “the main point of Christian doctrine,” he convinced himself that “the matter itself and the nature of language requires it.”

That’s news to you – you were under the impression that no one is ever allowed to ADD words to Scripture, no matter how strongly they feel that the addition proves the point that the Bible is trying to make! After all, isn’t that what the Apocrypha problem is all about – books being ADDED to the Bible?

The temperature in the library seems to have dipped precipitously. You shiver. You decide to wrap this investigation up quickly and head home. You’ve already made too many unpleasant historical discoveries….

 

For Part Six, please click here

On the feast of the Baptism of the Lord

Deo omnis gloria!

What’s to celebrate?

This coming Sunday will be marked in many Evangelical churches by sermons on the topic of the Reformation, sermons in praise of Martin Luther. Certainly the celebration of Martin Luther’s stand against the authority of the Catholic Church makes sense in a Lutheran context; after all, if Lutherans won’t get excited about the founder of their belief system, why should anyone else? But Evangelicals too wax eloquent on the greatness of the man, praising his life and works, his faith, and his refusal to bend his knee to the authority of the Catholic Church. If they could, many an Evangelical congregation would gladly issue an invite to the Great Reformer, asking him to do them the honor of gracing their pulpit on Reformation Sunday morning. Of course, that might not turn out exactly the way they envision it….

As most people know, Luther was a man of strong opinions. He insisted that HIS interpretation of the Bible and HIS teachings were not only correct, but “God’s teaching,” and went so far as to say that “whoever does not accept my teaching may not be saved,” so certain was he that he was preaching the pure Gospel.

This bodes ill for the Evangelical congregation that invites Luther to preach on Reformation Sunday. Luther was an unwavering proponent of infant baptism and baptismal regeneration. His views on Holy Communion were also pretty inflexible. He insisted that Jesus was actually present alongside the bread and the wine. Other Reformers thought differently. The Reformer Ulrich Zwingli famously set forth his opinion on communion: that the bread and the wine are mere symbols of the body and blood of Christ. Luther minced no words – the beliefs of the Zwinglians were a “pestiferous teaching.” Zwingli was promulgating the doctrines of baptism as a symbol and Holy Communion as a symbol and, of course, so do Evangelicals….

Evangelicals subscribe to Luther’s doctrine of sola Scriptura, “the Bible alone,” so that should be a point of agreement. Luther championed this belief, which allowed him to simultaneously reject Church authority over him and set himself up as a theological authority. So set was he on the principle of “the Bible, and nothing but the Bible” that he came to the conclusion that bigamy could not be prevented. “My faithful warning and advice is that no man, Christians in particular, should have more than one wife” he wrote, but he was careful to spell out that this was his personal preference and opinion, not the teaching of Scripture. “If a man wishes to marry more than one wife, he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God.” Luther felt that there were certain cases which necessitated taking a second wife: “if the wife develops leprosy or becomes otherwise unfit to live with her husband… But this permission is always to be restricted to such cases as severe necessity.” This would probably be hard to explain to the poor wife afflicted with leprosy that this was a case of “severe necessity,” that not only was she forced to suffer from a dread disease, but that her husband, who vowed to care for her “in sickness and in health” felt that in this “necessity” he just had to take unto himself a second wife. Were Luther to preach in an Evangelical pulpit this Sunday, perhaps he could encourage sola-Scriptura Evangelicals to have the courage of their convictions, as he did: “I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture.” Evangelicals, of course, not taking sola Scriptura to its natural conclusion, believe that the Bible teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman, leprosy or no leprosy….

While he was in the pulpit, Reverend Luther might explain to Evangelicals the deal about the word he ADDED to his translation of Holy Scripture to make it read the way he thought it should read. Since St. Paul hadn’t expressed himself quite clearly enough in Romans 3:28, Luther succumbed to temptation and helped the apostle state his case a little more cogently, translating this verse to read:

We hold that a man is justified without the works of the law, by faith ALONE.

The Reformer could pass out copies of his first Bible translation to eager Evangelicals, although when they noticed that he had taken James, Hebrews, Jude and Revelation out of their rightful places and shunted them to an appendix in the back, he would have some more ‘splaining to do, probably something along the lines of “Let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to these books….” Evangelicals, of course, take quite seriously the curses pronounced in the books of Deuteronomy and Revelation on anyone who fiddles with Holy Scripture….

One verse that Luther seems to have missed in his Bible reading is the admonition in Ephesians 4:29: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths.” The Reformer was known for his potty mouth. “Everyone talked that way back then,” his defenders will claim, as if poor Luther were a victim of his times. Yet Luther’s fellow reformer, Heinrich Bullinger, begged to differ:

It is as clear as daylight and undeniable that no one has ever written more vulgarly, more coarsely, more unbecomingly in matters of faith and Christian chastity and modesty and all serious matters than Luther. There are writings of Luther which would not be excused if they were written by a shepherd of swine and not by a distinguished shepherd of souls.

An odd thing to say if such profanity as Luther’s was commonplace. Even one of Luther’s Protestant biographers admits that Luther had a “special talent for obscenity.” Undoubtably, Evangelicals would learn a few new words from the man in the pulpit, for Evangelicals pride themselves on their adherence to Ephesians 5:4: Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place….

Very often Evangelicals will make the excuse that Luther “got saved” as an adult, and therefore a few “rough edges” are to be expected. Hey, nobody’s perfect! Luther lived for 29 long years after he nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, dying at age 63. According to his Protestant biographers (see below), his behavior became more objectionable the longer he lived. In his last sermon, preached three days before he died, Luther was spewing hatred against the Jewish people. Hopefully he would not choose to broach this topic from an Evangelical pulpit, as Evangelicals consider themselves staunch friends of God’s chosen people….

This coming Sunday all kinds of wackiness will be preached in honor of Herr Doktor Luther; it’s just strange that some of it will be preached by Evangelicals. The only hope for Evangelicals inviting the great Reformer to their pulpit this Sunday would be the “Luther” of Protestant hagiography and partisan fiction – a Luther of their own creation….

On the memorial of St. John Roberts

Deo omnis gloria!

Bibliography:

The following books, all written by Protestant authors, give further information on the subjects mentioned above. Martin Marty, one of the sources cited, is a Lutheran minister of over 50 years.

Paragraph 2

Luther, Martin. Against the Spiritual Estate of the Pope and the Bishops Falsely So-Called, July 1522.

Paragraph 3

Marius, Richard. Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 256. Marty, Martin. Martin Luther. Viking Penguin, 2004, pp. 134-136.

Paragraph 4

Cowie, Leonard W., Martin Luther, Leader of the Reformation. Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1969, pg. 110. Oberman, Heiko A. Luther, Man Between God and the Devil, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 284-289. Marty, Martin. Martin Luther. Viking Penguin, 2004, pp. 108, 159-160. Marius, Richard. Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 260, 391, 440.

Paragraph 5

Marius, Richard. Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 353-359. O’Connor, Henry. Letter to Wenceslaus Link in Luther’s Own Statements. 3rd edition; New York, Benziger Bros. 1884.

Paragraph 6

Oberman, Heiko A. Luther, Man Between God and the Devil, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 106-109. Marius, Richard. Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 86-87. Marty, Martin. Martin Luther. Viking Penguin, 2004, pg. 172.

Paragraph 7

Marty, Martin. Martin Luther. Viking Penguin, 2004, pg. 173. Oberman, Heiko A. Luther, Man Between God and the Devil, Yale University Press, 1989, pg. 290-295. Marius, Richard. Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death. Belknap Press, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 378-380.

Most likely available at your local library! This Reformation Sunday, why not do a little reading?

Sauce for the Gander

A few years back I devoted a great deal of time to meeting with some very nice Jehovah’s Witness ladies to discuss doctrine. These women kindly spent an hour every week sitting in my living room explaining the Jehovah’s Witness belief system to me. I, of course, did my best to present Evangelical Protestant beliefs to them (this was before I was reconciled to the Church). Jehovah’s Witnesses deny the doctrine of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is to them an impersonal force. Jesus Christ is to them, not God Incarnate, but rather “god.” He is the most perfect of all Jehovah God’s creation, and in that capacity was able to die for our sins (although he was not bodily resurrected). This Jesus is not to be worshipped, the Witnesses will tell you, since he is not God.

This, of course, is simply bad old-fashioned Arianism, a heresy condemned by the Council of Nicaea in 325. Folks who deny the Trinity draw on a passel of verses such as John 17:3, John 8:17, John 20:17, 1 Timothy 5:21, 1 Timothy 2:5, Mark 10:18, John 14:28, 1 Corinthians 8:6, 1 Corinthians 11:3, and Philippians 2: 5-11 to make their case. Using these passages, the case they make against the deity of Christ seems plausible, until they run up against the words of John 1:1 –

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Oops! The Jehovah’s Witness version of events is that this “Word” was, in his pre-human existence, Michael the Archangel – but John 1:1 states quite unequivocally that “the Word” was GOD. So what’s a frustrated Arian theologian to do in a case like this?

Publish the New World Bible!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.

The New World Bible is the Jehovah’s Witness translation of the Scriptures into English. It can be, of course, quite profitable to a group which teaches something other than the faith once revealed and faithfully preserved down through the ages to produce their own translation of Holy Scripture. Witnesses who go door-to-door can produce a Bible that provides what appears to be solid backing for their theological aberrations; all they have to do is to convince you that those words in John 1:1 are better translated as “a god.”

Taking liberties with Scripture is habit-forming, so when the New World translators got to the great creation passage in Colossians 1:15-20, they decided to embellish that as well. This passage traditionally reads:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

To bolster their “Jesus-is-a-created-being” theme, the New World translators added a little word to Colossians 1:16 -17.

…because by means of him all [other] things were created in the heavens and upon the earth, the things visible and the things invisible, no matter whether they are thrones or lordships or governments or authorities. All [other] things have been created through him and for him. Also, he is before all [other] things and by means of him all [other] things were made to exist,…

These liberties put the New World Translation on cult-buster radar. Protestant pastor and author of The Kingdom of the Cults, the late Dr. Walter Martin, fired off this blistering salvo:

“In this particular rendering, Jehovah’s Witnesses attempt one of the most clever perversions of the New Testament texts that the author has ever seen. Knowing full well that the word “other” does not occur in this text, or for that matter in any of the three verses (16, 17, 19) where it has been added, albeit in brackets, the Witnesses deliberately insert it into the translation in a vain attempt to make Christ a creature and one of the “things” He is spoken of as having created.

Attempting to justify this unheard-of travesty upon the Greek language and also upon simple honesty, the New World Bible translation committee enclosed each added “other” in brackets, which are said by them to ‘enclose words inserted to complete or clarify the sense in the English text.'”

Translation:

Footnotes are one thing, but when you add words to the actual text of Scripture, even words in brackets, you have crossed the line! No matter what your interpretation of a passage may lead you to believe, you can’t add in words that are simply not there in the original language and then claim that they have been inserted “to complete or clarify the sense in the English text”!

Unheard-of travesty, indeed!

Hang on, there – maybe not exactly unheard of….

Back in the 16th century, an Augustinian monk had a revelation. He believed that justification was not by faith (which was the teaching of the Church up until that time), but by faith ALONE. He could see this principle soooo clearly in Scripture. The only problem was, other people were having trouble buying into this, always wanting to bring up that pesky James 2:24:

You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.

After people read that verse, they had qualms about the “faith ALONE” direction that Luther was headed in. There were no other verses in the Bible that contained the phrase “faith alone.” Luther found his new doctrine to be a hard sell….

So what’s a frustrated Reformer to do in a case like this?

Publish Luther’s translation of Holy Scripture into German!

Romans 3:28 as Luther translated it read:

Wir halten, daß der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werk ALLEIN durch den Glauben.

For the German-impaired, Luther’s version said:

We hold that a man is justified without the works of the law, by faith ALONE.

Predictably, there was something of a stir….

Luther wrote a letter called “Ein Sendbrief D. M. Luthers. Vom Dolmetzschen und Fürbitte der Heiligen” (Open Letter on Translating), explaining why he had taking it upon himself to add a word to Holy Scripture:

In the first place, you ask why in translating the words of Paul in the 3rd chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, Arbitramur hominem iustificari ex fide absque operibus, I rendered them, “We hold that a man is justified without the works of the law, by faith alone,” and you also tell me that the papists are causing a great fuss because Paul’s text does not contain the word sola (alone), and that my addition to the words of God is not to be tolerated….

(rails about how all the Papists put together couldn’t accurately translate one chapter of Scripture, then insists that no one is being forced to read his translation, then repeats his first complaint. Goes off into a rant about how another man’s translation of Scripture was preferred to his by a German ruler – claims that the other translator plagiarized his work…)

(898 English words later…)

But I will return to the subject at hand. If your papist wishes to make a great fuss about the word sola (alone), say this to him: “Dr. Martin Luther will have it so, and he says that a papist and a donkey are the same thing.” Sic volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. For we are not going to be students and disciples of the papists. Rather, we will become their teachers and judges. For once, we also are going to be proud and brag, with these blockheads; and just as Paul brags against his mad raving saints, I will brag against these donkeys of mine! Are they doctors? So am I. Are they scholars? So am I. Are they preachers? So am I. Are they theologians? So am I. Are they debaters? So am I. Are they philosophers? So am I. Are they logicians? So am I. Do they lecture? So do I. Do they write books? So do I.

I will go even further with my boasting: I can expound the psalms and the prophets, and they cannot. I can translate, and they cannot. I can read the Holy Scriptures, and they cannot. I can pray, they cannot. Coming down to their level, I can use their rhetoric and philosophy better than all of them put together. Plus I know that not one of them understands his Aristotle. If any one of them can correctly understand one preface or chapter of Aristotle, I will eat my hat!

(I sense hostility)

Let this be the answer to your first question. Please do not give these donkeys any other answer to their useless braying about that word sola than simply this: “Luther will have it so, and he says that he is a doctor above all the doctors of the pope.” Let it rest there. I will from now on hold them in contempt, and have already held them in contempt, as long as they are the kind of people (or rather donkeys) that they are. And there are brazen idiots among them who have never even learned their own art of sophistry, like Dr. Schmidt and Dr. Snot-Nose, and such like them, who set themselves against me in this matter, which not only transcends sophistry, but as Paul writes, all the wisdom and understanding in the world as well. Truly a donkey does not have to sing much, because he is already known by his ears.

For you and our people, however, I shall show why I used the [German equivalent of the] word sola — even though in Romans 3 it was not [the equivalent of] sola I used but solum or tantum. That is how closely those donkeys have looked at my text! Nevertheless I have used sola fides elsewhere; I want to use both solum and sola. I have always tried to translate in a pure and clear German.

(digresses into the subject of how hard it is to translate well and how much effort he has taken to make the text really flow in German, so as not to give the people a clunky translation that would offend their ears. Starts moaning about how nobody really appreciates all his hard work…)

There is no such thing as earning the world’s thanks. Even God himself cannot earn thanks, not with the sun, nor with heaven and earth, nor even the death of his Son. The world simply is and remains as it is, in the devil’s name, because it will not be anything else.

(FINALLY GETS TO THE POINT)

I know very well that in Romans 3 the word solum is not in the Greek or Latin text — the papists did not have to teach me that. It is a fact that the letters s-o-l-a are not there. And these blockheads stare at them like cows at a new gate, while at the same time they do not recognize that it conveys the sense of the text — if the translation is to be clear and vigorous, it belongs there. I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, since it was German I had set about to speak in the translation. But it is the nature of our language that in speaking about two things, one which is affirmed, the other denied, we use the word allein [only] along with the word nicht [not] or kein [no]. For example, we say “the farmer brings allein grain and kein money”; or “No, I really have nicht money, but allein grain”; I have allein eaten and nicht yet drunk”; “Did you write it allein and nicht read it over?” There are countless cases like this in daily usage.

In all these phrases, this is a German usage, even though it is not the Latin or Greek usage. It is the nature of the German language to add allein in order that nicht or kein may be clearer and more complete. To be sure, I can also say, “The farmer brings grain and kein money,” but the words “kein money” do not sound as full and clear as if I were to say, “the farmer brings allein grain and kein money.” Here the word allein helps the word kein so much that it becomes a completely clear German expression. We do not have to ask the literal Latin how we are to speak German, as these donkeys do. Rather we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace. We must be guided by their language, by the way they speak, and do our translating accordingly. Then they will understand it and recognize that we are speaking German to them.

This last is a great big load of horse waste. It is NOT necessary to insert the word “alone” into the text in German. The modern-day Protestant versions of the German Bible DO NOT insert the word “allein” into the text. Despite Luther’s vehement protestations to the contrary, it is not only possible but actually preferable to translate this passage without the addition of the word “alone,” because in so doing, modern-day German Bible translators avoid the Biblical condemnation of adding to the inspired word of God!

(Luther finally explains the REAL reason why he felt compelled to alter the words of Holy Scripture)

However, I was not depending upon or following the nature of the languages alone when I inserted the word solum 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.

To paraphrase the words of Dr. Walter Martin on a very, very similar subject:

In this particular rendering, Martin Luther attempts one of the most clever perversions of the New Testament texts that the author has ever seen. Knowing full well that the word “alone” does not occur in this text where it has been added, the great Reformer deliberately inserted it into the translation in a vain attempt to make Germans believe that there was unequivocal Scriptural backing for his novel doctrine.

Attempting to justify this unheard-of travesty upon the Greek language and also upon simple honesty, Dr. Luther insists that “the text itself, and St. Paul’s meaning, urgently require and demand it – the matter itself and the nature of language requires it.”

What’s sauce for the Jehovah’s Witness goose is sauce for the great Reformer’s gander.

On the memorial of St. John of Capistrano

Deo omnis gloria!