> Luther already believed that it's God alone who saves us from our sins, based solely on our faith. Our works - anything else we do - don't matter. He based this on the Bible
And yet the bible also says that if someone really has faith it will be apparent in their works (James 2:18). So works do matter.
Also, as a practical point: what do is what you are and what you are is what you do.
I wasn't expecting a sermon in my in-box. I'm a Catholic-educated atheist. I recognize the Protestant Reformation as an historical turning point, but don't believe In Protestant dogma any more than I do the Catholic version. There's a tendency in Whiggish history to equate Protestantism with personal liberty, when figures such as Calvin and the Puritans in the US could be just as fatally nasty to those they considered heretics as the Catholics were. Check the Philadelphia Nativist Riots for a lesson on the wisdom of state education that takes sides among denominations.
This was a lot more theology than in my usual posts, but here it's very relevant to the history!
You're right that it's easy to conflate Protestantism with personal liberty - for another counterexample closer to Luther, look at Prussia. But my argument is that the trend of universal education started from Protestantism. It wasn't a direct route in a lot of places, and it wasn't what we modern people would call a complete education - but it was much more of an education than before, and it started due to Protestantism.
Back in the age of the Roman Empire, they had a real problem with book forgeries. It was only possible to copy books by hand, someone copied Plato, disagreed with some idea, replaced it with an idea of his own. So the same book existed in many versions. Not good. So they invented a slow, painful method of filtering out these forgeries - at least some of them, it was clearly not an inerrable process. This was called canon, which meant in Ancient Greek "measurement". So Cicero, Aristotle etc. all had to be canonized this way.
Now the canonization of the Bible took some 1500 years, as the final Catholic version was presented at Trent. And no one claimed this process was error-free.
Besides there are translation issues. Diligite inimicos vestros means more like love your rivals than loving your real enemies (hostes).
This is why Catholics never claim the Bible is inerrable and the sole authority. It has to be surrounded by scholarship, provided by the Church Fathers and later scholars.
It elides a lot of issues to say the canonization of the Bible took through Trent. On the one hand, you're centering on Roman Catholics - most Eastern and Oriental Orthodox had decided long before Trent; some Protestants continued to dispute the Apocrypha after Trent. But more significantly, that's neglecting how much of the canon was clearly settled by the 300's AD. Rather, I'd say we have broad agreement early on; then a few disputed books in the 300's; then some more Old Testament apocrypha that was disputed again later.
Translation issues are a completely different matter; you're going to get them with any text in another language.
> Luther already believed that it's God alone who saves us from our sins, based solely on our faith. Our works - anything else we do - don't matter. He based this on the Bible
And yet the bible also says that if someone really has faith it will be apparent in their works (James 2:18). So works do matter.
Also, as a practical point: what do is what you are and what you are is what you do.
I wasn't expecting a sermon in my in-box. I'm a Catholic-educated atheist. I recognize the Protestant Reformation as an historical turning point, but don't believe In Protestant dogma any more than I do the Catholic version. There's a tendency in Whiggish history to equate Protestantism with personal liberty, when figures such as Calvin and the Puritans in the US could be just as fatally nasty to those they considered heretics as the Catholics were. Check the Philadelphia Nativist Riots for a lesson on the wisdom of state education that takes sides among denominations.
This was a lot more theology than in my usual posts, but here it's very relevant to the history!
You're right that it's easy to conflate Protestantism with personal liberty - for another counterexample closer to Luther, look at Prussia. But my argument is that the trend of universal education started from Protestantism. It wasn't a direct route in a lot of places, and it wasn't what we modern people would call a complete education - but it was much more of an education than before, and it started due to Protestantism.
Back in the age of the Roman Empire, they had a real problem with book forgeries. It was only possible to copy books by hand, someone copied Plato, disagreed with some idea, replaced it with an idea of his own. So the same book existed in many versions. Not good. So they invented a slow, painful method of filtering out these forgeries - at least some of them, it was clearly not an inerrable process. This was called canon, which meant in Ancient Greek "measurement". So Cicero, Aristotle etc. all had to be canonized this way.
Now the canonization of the Bible took some 1500 years, as the final Catholic version was presented at Trent. And no one claimed this process was error-free.
Besides there are translation issues. Diligite inimicos vestros means more like love your rivals than loving your real enemies (hostes).
This is why Catholics never claim the Bible is inerrable and the sole authority. It has to be surrounded by scholarship, provided by the Church Fathers and later scholars.
I do not understand why Protesants claim so.
It elides a lot of issues to say the canonization of the Bible took through Trent. On the one hand, you're centering on Roman Catholics - most Eastern and Oriental Orthodox had decided long before Trent; some Protestants continued to dispute the Apocrypha after Trent. But more significantly, that's neglecting how much of the canon was clearly settled by the 300's AD. Rather, I'd say we have broad agreement early on; then a few disputed books in the 300's; then some more Old Testament apocrypha that was disputed again later.
Translation issues are a completely different matter; you're going to get them with any text in another language.