Where I started my spiritual journey compared to where I am today is about as different as my current Twin Cities, MN, apartment is from Beaufort NC real estate. While the Twin Cities are OK in the summer, Beaufort is beautiful pretty much all year ’round.
In the same way, there’s a huge contrast to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod background I was raised in and the messianic Jewish congregation I currently fellowship with and am studying to become ordained in. Yet I never could have predicted how night-and-day the contrast would be.
Martin Luther, founder of all things Lutheran, would no doubt disapprove of my messianic identification. I’ve known for a long time that Luther has been antisemitic, but I never really appreciated just how deeply it ran until recently.
Luther’s 1543 hate-filled screed, On the Jews and Their Lies, is a shocker. Especially for an ex-Lutheran like myself. Here’s just a couple of the more notable excerpts.
From his introduction:
I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself. However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God’s word is absent he has an easy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong. May God help us. Amen.
That is tame, though, compared to the “solution” Luther recommends to cure the “Jewish problem.” I challenge readers to find significant differences between this and the writings of Adolph Hitler nearly 400 years later:
Accordingly, it must and dare not be considered a trifling matter but a most serious one to seek counsel against this and to save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death. My advice, as I said earlier, is:
First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire…
Second, that all their books– their prayer books, their Talmudic writings, also the entire Bible– be taken from them, not leaving them one leaf, and that these be preserved for those who may be converted…
Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country…
Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing. For we cannot with a good conscience listen to this or tolerate it…
There’s plenty more. And it pretty much seals in certainty that not only will I remain in the messianic movement the rest of my life, but I could never in good conscience attend a Lutheran church ever again.
