The German Reformation

Pontifex Maximus remarked that a wild boar is loose in God's vineyard concerning Luther. Luther remarked that I flatulate in the pope's general direction vis a vis the pope. As Rosenstock-Huessy wrote, all of the West was by assumption and long tradition Catholic, and then one fine day, everyone woke up to the trumpet of war and schism. Imagine a general revolt all over the West against, say, democracy and universal franchise. There you have some idea of the tectonic shift.
Luther hailed from the sands and bogs and forests of Saxony, a monk who once licked the Eucharist up off the floor of the church because it was the body of Christ, plagued by illness and pain all his life (as many then must have been), and a genius at polemic. His greatest statement may have been parallel to Cromwell's I beseech you in the bowels of Christ that you be mistaken. His manifesto was this: popes and councils may err.
Specifically, he was tormented for long years with the fear of damnation, which he gave a name to: Anfechtung. The Nightingale of Wittenberg began to sing, and, as even the Catholics say, he sang millions out of the Catholic Church. The hymns of Germany still constitute a spiritual reliquary (repository) of impressive proportions, set to the music of Bach and Handel and Haydn.
Luther followed the via moderna and the modern piety also, rejecting the scholastic and juridical tradition of the Latin West that had developed in response to the retranslation of Greek theology and philosophy (through the Muslim outpost of Cordova) into Latin. The intellectualist tradition of Aquinas and Duns Scotus had been overturned by William of Ockham in the via moderna, which placed a heavy emphasis on volition and will as opposed to right reason. The late devotional manuals of the Middle Ages contained more emphasis on emotion than previously. The Augustinian canon to which he belonged taught all these things, and Luther kept his hatred for the "schoolmen" (as he called the legal and juridical scholastics) all his life.
Still, while the Reformation rejected legalism in soteriology, it retained it in ecclesiology. The first schisms among the Reformers occured over the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and also over church government, which remained magisterial and hierarchical, with an emphasis upon tradition and authority in subordination to Scripture. The Anabaptist persecution was brutal and vicious, surpassed only by the repression of the anarchistic peasant uprising, which was lead by so-called prophets of a new millenium order, such as Ziska the One-Eyed.
The Reformation continued to teach tithing, sabbath observance, and church membership, while rejecting sacderotalism and sacramental theology in soteriology and the sacraments. While the distinction may be a fine one, Luther retained many Catholic elements all of his life, and would hardly recognize a Southern Baptist Church as legitimate. It is well to remember that he was forced out of the Catholic Church, and did not leave voluntarily. Lutheranism was a state religion in Germany and Sweden and Norway until our own day and time.
In his own way, Luther was bitterly conservative. Baron Ledhin (of worthy memory) has documented Luther's roots in Manichean and chiliastic heresies in Eastern Europe, his anti-Semitism, and the resulting influence upon the Nazi Party, all the while recognizing that Luther had a valid spiritual experience of God. In fact, he has proven that the areas which voted for Hitler were apostate Lutheran areas, and not the Catholic strongholds, who voted staunchly Centrum. It was a curious combination of Lutheran apostasy and freethinking, combined with the leftover Catholic spirit of pilrimage towards the absolute (Leon Bloy) which produced the deadly virus of fascism, a revival of a secular pope, and the totem-worship of Teutonic rascism. The perfect storm, you might say. For a modern perspective that reaches the same conclusion from different angles, and shows how the papacy contributed to the problem, see
http://http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GF01Aa02.html.
Unless one imagines Luther as a puritan and a backwoods preacher, one cannot make sense out of his visit to Rome, prior to his conversion, which so disgusted and energized him. It was the Baroque painting and architecture encouraged by Pope Hadrian which struck him as so pagan and anti-Biblical. Oswald Spengler in his magisterial Der Untergang Des Abenlandes has shown the uncomfortable morphological parallels which exist between Luther in his reaction to the Gothic and Mohammed and his reaction to the Magian/Greek culture. Calvinists, like Muslims, are fundamentally fundamentalists. While I will leave to theologians the argument over the implications of this observation (which could, arguably, be either good or bad), I do insist upon it as a historical fact. Certainly, the Lutheran doctrine of passive obedience to the civil magistrate did not stand the Germans in good stead in 1939. Or at least, one might argue, the Calvinistic and Lutheran Staatlehr (Theory of Politics) needs more fleshing out than has hiterto occured. I would argue that Reconstructionists have fallen short of this, Theonomy notwithstanding, in that they have still not come to grips with the richness of history both secular or ecclesiastical, as this website will bear witness:
http://http://www.tourosynagogue.org/GWLetter1.php
Confusion continues to this day, and we are still mixed up. Should we be a theocracy? Is God our King? How far should we push toleration? What does toleration mean? Do we stone people to death for mowing lawns on the Sabbath? If we are a Christian nation, what does it mean to be Christian? The answers are being written in living history by actors who agree on very little, even in Reconstructionist circles.
All of this is to conclude that Lutheran piety is immensely interesting, and still relevant, very relevant, to the discussion we are having today over the separation of church and state at the federal level. His persecution of Anabaptism, the massacre at Munster, the subsequent history of Germany - all bear witness against him, despite his immense achievements in challenging the primacy of Rome and elucidation of imputed righteousness. The controversy around him is another reason to study and read the writings of Luther