I've worked through a number of the "real" Luther or "The Truth about Luther" webpages over the years, and I've found that most often those webpages do not either present the real Luther or truth about Luther. They're typically one-sided attempts to throw as much mud as possible by making Luther worse than he was.... sort of like...
Luther kicked a cat on his way to post the 95 Theses. I do realize though there's the opposite end of the spectrum that ignores Luther's sins and faults. That's not good history either.
As I trace back the comments here, I don't think the perspective mentioned by Theo1689 qualifies as "
revisionism" in the scope of actual studies on Luther's attitude towards the Jews. Theo1689 presented an acceptable response within the field of research. It's a typical response to point the obvious out that early on Luther was favorable towards the Jews (while societies during the 16th century typically were not) and then later Luther was not favorable towards the Jews. His later comments were against the Jewish religion, not Jews as human beings (Theo1689 cited Derek Michaud, I have no idea who that is, but it's a typical apologetic on this topic, not
revisionism). A good example of this apologetic is that in Luther's thought, if a Jew converted to Christianity, that person was not a
sub-human Christian. Luther did not write contemptuously against the Jews because of
biology, but because of
theology. I'd add also, I don't recall anyone contemporary with Luther actually taking his advice, in fact, some of Luther's contemporaries have been said to have been dismayed with his anti-Jewish writings. I find it interesting that Luther's comments about the Jews weren't an important topic till after World War II. Search the literature before that, and you will not find the same amount of writing about it.
Now here's where it does get a bit more confusing.... in determining what modern people should do with Luther's comments about the Jews and where actually
revisionism come in to play. If I recall, the term
antisemitism is from the 19th century, coined by a person who thought
semites were inferior to
Aryans. This distinction isn't in Luther's theology, so in a sense it is anachronistic to ask whether or not Luther was
antisemitic. But, words evolve in meaning.... Now the word
antisemitism broadly means anything against the Jews
in any sense. The debate over the last decade or so centers around whether the evolved use of the term is a significant step towards describing previous history or if it's setting up an anachronistic standard for evaluating previous history. Back about twenty years ago I was more along the lines of Luther being
anti-Jewish religion. Now, I'm more along the lines of seeing Luther's anti-Judaism as having detrimental effects on Jewish people. Simply stated, the actual
revisionism going on is being done by those now redefining words like
antisemitism, and I don't see that
revisionism as so bad.
Simply because Luther was wrong on his attitude toward the Jews does not necessarily mean he was wrong on the need for church reform, the proclamation of the gospel of justification by faith alone, or sola scriptura. Luther was not infallible. He said a number of things ranging on the scale of
brilliant to
typical to
ridiculous to
offensive. From my perspective, Luther's theology neither stands nor falls because of statements on the negative side of the scale. It's my opinion that Luther's attitude toward the Jews is part of Church history, and, to point a finger at Luther one needs to consistently point the fingers beyond Luther as well. This would be the consistent thing to do.
